Lead scoring is an important way to get feedback about the growing or decreasing interest of your visitors and react to it.

What is lead scoring? Simply put, you give your contacts points when they interact with your offering, and subtract points when they stop interacting for an extended period of time. (The latter is also important and often neglected).

This way you always see in real time which are your most valuable leads. This gives your sales department the opportunity to focus on the contacts that have the highest probability of closing a deal. Or you can make special offers to your VIP contacts - fully automated.

You'll find a lot of articles online about the importance of developing a custom lead scoring model tailored to your marketing strategy.

You are advised to define

• what factors turn your visitors into potential customers
• what process your specific leads will take in their customer journey
• how many points you want to give them for each action along the way
• at which score threshold your lead should be considered a qualified sales-ready lead
• and in turn, for what behaviors you want to deduct points.

This advice is really good and you should definitely keep it in mind.

The problem is that with this general advice, it's really hard to get started with actual lead scoring.

So we're going to present you with a simple model that you can use to get started right away. It's based on ActiveCampaign's helpful suggestions and gives you all the numbers you need to get started. From here, you can gradually adapt the model to the needs of your company.

Step 1: Set a threshold for sales-ready leads

Your leads will accumulate points until they reach a certain point value. At a certain threshold, they're considered sales-ready leads: they have interacted with your brand enough that they're likely to make a purchase soon. These are the leads your sales team should focus on.

For the simple lead scoring model that we are recommending for you to start with, we will set a threshold of 100 points.

Step 2: Award points for specific actions

Now you can assign points for specific interactions. There are actions that can give points to each contact only once, and actions that can give points to the contact any number of times. For example, a one-time action can be a newsletter subscription, a repeatable action can be a visit to the website.