Automation drives the new-age sales process. It relieves sales reps from repeatable tasks and allows them to focus their energies and time on strategy and follow-ups with the most promising leads. ActiveCampaign sales CRM is a shining example. It automates contact management, lead scoring, deals and pipeline monitoring, and task tracking, keeping the sales process moving smoothly.

What is ActiveCampaign Lead Scoring and How Does it Work? 

A lead-scoring software scores leads automatically. ActiveCampaign does this and more. It triggers email notifications to your sales team when a lead's score starts adding up. Your salespeople lose no time following up with deals more likely to convert.

When a contact reaches a particular score, automation kicks in, and the contact receives the information they need or an offer that can influence their decision. You can assign scores to each lead or an overall deal within ActiveCampaign's contact scoring feature. You can adjust your ActiveCampaign lead scoring system based on various actions, such as email opens, link clicks within an email, a visit to a pricing page, a webinar sign-up, and more.

ActiveCampaign is also an email marketing, marketing automation, and store marketing and automation tool.

Steps to Set Up ActiveCampaign Lead Scoring

Here is the step-by-step process to set up lead scoring in ActiveCampaign:

As a first, determine the actions that indicate an engaged contact, for example, subscribing to email updates, registering for an event, downloading a resource, requesting a consultation, and others.

Also, determine the smaller actions, which, when aggregated, show an engaged contact. For example, opening an email, clicking a link, or visiting the pricing page or another URL more than once.

Step 1: Assign lead scores

Access lead scoring on the upper left-hand corner of “Contacts” page.

You can create separate scores for characteristics and engagement. Common qualifiers include demographic qualifiers like age, sex, ethnicity, location, and others B2C companies and firmographics like company size, revenue, location, and other attributes for B2B ones.

Assign a point value representing the specific attribute's importance in terms of sales-readiness. Some examples of behavioral qualifiers are submitting a form, downloading a whitepaper, or attending a webinar.

The default numerical value is to add 10 points, but you can set any number. Negative lead scoring is also available to subtract points for unfavorable attributes. You could have other scores for email interaction and site tracking using ActiveCampaign’s Site Tracking feature.

Step 2: Create automation workflows

You can create any number of rules based on contact fields, including custom fields, leads’ behaviors, and website behaviors.

• Set up automations that adjust a lead’s score or increase their score after they engage with a particular campaign.
• Create triggers that start automations. For example, the trigger “Submits a form” begins an automation when a contact submits any form or specific forms and the lead score increases.

Step 3: Leads are automatically distributed

The tool automatically prioritizes leads with a higher score thanks to sales automation. Create an automation that automatically distributes leads once they cross a threshold score or sends an email inviting the lead to participate in a product demo or sales consultation as a final deal closing step.

Test the lead scoring model you've created

You can tweak the tool to ensure qualified, high-quality leads convert to expectations. Here are some adjustments you can make:

• Review the rules or data points to confirm that they are qualifying factors. For example, signing up for a webinar may not be as important as attending a webinar. Changing the qualifier from 'sign up' to 'attend' or including an additional qualifier can yield a more accurate scoring system. So, adjust a contact's score accordingly.
• Review the point values for each rule. For example, you can reduce the number of points assigned to a lead who has visited a product page if you later deem this to be only a minor behavioral qualifier.

Four Tips to Get the Most Out of ActiveCampaign Lead Scoring 

Here are some tips on capturing the best leads along the customer journey using ActiveCampaign.

Set score thresholds

Prospects will be qualified if they fall within a range of scores. You can set different scoring thresholds for marketing and email campaigns. For example, your marketing team may deem a lead as qualified if they engage with your social media posts. However, the lead will need to interact with more of your emails before being considered for your email marketing program.

Designate threshold points

Set a threshold level to determine lead quality. For example, if you're targeting small businesses with annual revenues below $600K, you can make the threshold to qualify for $2000. To gauge customers' interest in your product, set a threshold score before a lead is scored based on the lead's behaviors and habits.

Establish lead scoring rules

Here's an example framework:

1. Prospect = 10 points
2. Lead = 50 points
3. Marketing qualified lead (MQL) = 75 points
4. Sales qualified lead (SQL) = 100 points

Award every free offer 10 points. When a contact downloads your free offer, they become a prospect.

Award a contact form 50 points. When a contact fills out your contact form, they convert to a lead.

Award a meeting to discuss your product 75 points. When a contact schedules a meeting, they become an MQL.

Award the meeting attendance 100 points. When a contact attends a meeting to understand your product better, they become an SQL.

Set up point decay

Point decay refers to subtracting points from your lead score over time. If a contact has not been in touch for a while, their points score will drop. The point decay rate should take into account your sales cycle length.

Four Key Limitations of Using ActiveCampaign Lead Scoring 

ActiveCampaign is a top-value lead scoring tool. However, there are certain limitations when it comes to its lead scoring capabilties.

Here are a few:

• Doesn’t have native lead scoring data: ActiveCampaign doesn’t automatically receive client data (in-app actions - product usage) for analysis. Instead, it relies on you entering the data manually or through a third-party customer data platform.

• Limited analytics: ActiveCampaign’s lead scoring tool uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to help you prioritize lead attributes and get a score. That’s pretty much it.

• Customization is complex: Changing your lead scoring model can be complex since customized lead scoring relies on in-built formulas to generate scores.

• No predictive lead scoring in ActiveCampaign

But what if we told you there’s a tool that could easily join hands with your ActiveCampaign and set it free of its drawbacks?

Score Big on Your Leads with Toplyne

Toplyne is a data scientist for your sales and marketing teams that works in the background to surface high-intent pipeline of product-qualified leads in your existing CRM.

Not sure what product qualified leads are? Here’s a detailed guide.

By identifying the right leads, this tool also helps you increase your win rate and also improves your NRR (net revenue retention) by boosting upselling and cross-sell opportunities.

How?

Toplyne easily integrates with your existing sales stack, including ActiveCampaign, and lets you use product usage insights from a customer data platform like Amplitude, Mixpanel, etc., to target the right cohorts of users.

This means you employ all the capabilities of ActiveCampaign but, at the same time, use Toplyne to go after the right leads with zero change management. A Win-Win!

Here’s how companies like Canva and Vercel generate sales pipeline from their self-serve funnel using Toplyne:

• Step 1/7: Create monetization playbooks to surface conversion and expansion opportunities (leads most likely to convert to paying customers, and teams most likely to grow into larger teams)

• Step 2/7: Choose the right leads to target – users (individual users) or accounts (a group of users with an organization).

• Step 3/7: Select the frequency at which you would want leads synced in your GTM apps.

• Step 4/7: Define how many leads you want by either the number of leads or your expected win rate, depending on your sales capacity and GTM strategy.

• Step 5/7: Build custom segments - Build custom segments based on And/Or logic at the deepest level of sub-properties within your product analytics.

• Step 6/7: Validate your GTM strategy - Hold back some users as a control group to test your GTM strategy.

• Step 7/7: Sync your product qualified pipeline into your GTM destinations - CRMs, sales & marketing execution tools, and customer engagement platforms.