Have you ever heard the saying: “You’re fishing in the wrong pond”?
If so, then we assume you know where we’re going with this.
As an eCommerce entrepreneur, time is always of the essence.
From building relationships with suppliers to navigating supply chain challenges, you have your work cut out for you.
So, when it comes to sales, you don’t have time to waste.
If you’ve been looking to boost your website’s chance of success but haven’t mastered the art of sales, we’re here to help.
Enter: Lead scoring — and the pursuit of sales and marketing alignment.
Let’s take a closer look at what lead scoring is, the benefits of using it, and how to use it to increase your eCommerce website’s chance of success.
Ready for the details?
Let’s take a look.
What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring calculates the probability of how likely a prospect is to convert.
Knowing when or what triggers your customers to buy can help you precisely define the specifics of your relationship with them so you can perfect your outreach strategy and boost your website’s conversion potential.
If you struggle to interpret data, or simply don’t have the time to, you can take the information from your lead scoring calculation and let ELT processes convert the data for you to create valuable sales insights.
Alternatively, you can opt for a sales CRM which can help you automate your lead scoring processes — an especially useful tool for planning highly targeted and segmented campaigns.
For instance, you can lump prospects that are close to buying into a “hot leads” audience segment and create campaigns to help nurture them to conversion.
Some ideas of campaigns that may help move them closer to conversion include:
- Sending them a discount code or BOGO offer
- Sending them a bonus offer
- Highlighting a timed promo that’s too good to pass up (i.e., 65% off everything site-wide)
- Sharing your brand story and tugging on emotion
- Sharing social proof, customer stories, and/or case studies
Using Reverse ETL, your data teams can sync lead scores from your data warehouse to the growth team’s production database, creating personalized experiences for users in real-time.
Benefits of lead scoring in eCommerce
Now that we’ve cleared the air on what lead scoring actually is, let’s take a look at three key benefits you can enjoy when you use lead scoring in eCommerce.
Aligns your marketing and sales processes
Aligning your marketing and sales processes is key to driving a high revenue operations system.
But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it?
Fortunately, with lead scoring, you can further pinpoint your target audience’s needs and chance of converting so you can fine-tune and align your sales and marketing processes with ease.
Informs your marketing campaigns
And speaking of marketing and sales alignment, there’s nothing like crafting marketing campaigns that speak directly to your target customer.
With lead scoring, you have access to pertinent information you can use to curate campaigns tailored to your target audience.
Whether it’s solving a pain point, capitalizing on a trend, or helping your prospects feel seen and heard, lead scoring can help you brainstorm the right copywriting, images, and value statements so you can craft high-converting and hyper-personalized campaigns.
Helps you make the best use of your sales outreach efforts
Putting your precious time and effort into sales outreach without seeing significant success is every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare — especially when you have sales reps that aren’t seeing progress either.
Having a lead scoring system in place helps you and your team stay focused on the prospects that matter most.
Not every lead is going to turn into a sale, and that’s okay. Giving your team the opportunity to focus more on prospects that look more promising can not only help boost conversions, but can also help increase employee morale.
How to increase your eCommerce website’s chance of success with lead scoring
When creating your lead scoring strategy, you’ll need to decide which parameters to include and what makes your leads highly qualified.
To do that, you’ll take a look at which user behaviors are more likely to trigger purchases.
While this will depend on your buyer personas, product, and sales funnel, it makes sense to start with demographics (or firmographics if you’re a B2B eCommerce brand) and user behavior first.
For D2C eCommerce brands, that may include data, such as location, age, gender, and annual salary.
And for B2B eCommerce brands, that may include ownership framework, industry-type, number of employees, and annual revenue.
For instance, if you’re a D2C eCommerce brand that sells luxury goods, you may give leads with annual salaries of $100k+ a higher lead score than prospects that make $55 to $75k a year.
Or, if you’re a brand that targets Baby Boomers, you might give them a higher lead score than you would Gen Zers or Millennials.
As far as where your prospects are in the funnel, you’ll need to look at your site’s user behavior to pull that information.
Examples of data you can use to track user behavior and funnel stages include:
- Shopping behavior and patterns
- Abandoned carts
- Previous buyer history
- Product search history
- Newsletter signups
- Complaint history
- Testimonials and reviews
- Blog readership and engagement history
- Product categories
- Number of visits (especially to look at product pages)
- Specific page visits (i.e., product pages or checkout pages)
- Social media follows directly from your site
To streamline the entire process, consider getting your hands on a lead scoring tool, such as ActiveCampaign, Sendinblue, or GetResponse.
Wrap up
The most successful eCommerce entrepreneurs know that focusing on the prospects with the highest chance of converting is vital to aligning sales and marketing efforts.
That’s why lead scoring is pivotal to growing your website.
If you’ve been looking for ways to make your website more profitable, we hope today’s article has given you the tips you need to revamp your sales process through lead scoring.
Ready to increase your eCommerce site’s chance at success?
Author Bio:
Ioana is a freelance content writer and SEO strategist for B2B and B2C brands specializing in Business, Digital Marketing, SaaS, Tech, and Mental Health. Born in Transylvania, raised in Texas, and transplanted to Barcelona and Mexico, Ioana’s most recent move has taken her to windy Oklahoma City.
