The Secret to Successful Lead Scoring – A guest post from our friends at Experian

A lot of companies do a good job at generating leads, but the problem is that most new leads aren’t necessarily ready to buy or interact with your business in that way. In fact, a study by IDG revealed that 61 percent of marketers say that generating high-quality leads was their biggest B2B lead generation challenge. So what then?

Enter data enrichment. By “enriching,” or making your customer data more robust, you can better gauge whether or not the leads entering your database are qualified to move forward, resulting in increased conversion and engagement, a more satisfied customer and a better understanding of where to direct your marketing efforts.

Here’s why a data enrichment service is the secret to identifying high-quality leads:

Reason #1: It enables effective lead follow-up

How many man-hours, not to mention headaches, have resulted from spending time following up on leads that weren’t as good a fit as they first appeared to be?

A data enrichment service allows you to augment customer records with any missing data points to fill in gaps and provide you with a clearer understanding of which leads would be a better investment of your time and energy. By knowing additional data points about a particular lead, you can better prioritize and manage the way you follow-up with them.

A basic example would be appending an individual’s job title. Whether or not that job title is of a certain level can determine how an account representative prioritizes them, enabling them to either dedicate time to a more suitable lead or disregard that lead entirely. Adding to contact information as well as other unknown details, such as addresses, allows you to decide if that lead is a fit for your product or service.

Some examples of other data points that help with more effective lead follow-up are:

• Job titles
• Age
• Areas of residency
• Marital status
• Presence of children in a household
• Whether someone owns or rents
• If an individual is a business owner

Reason #2: Enriched data allows you to personalize your marketing

Today’s buying process has placed all the purchasing power in the hands of the consumer. Shoppers can do their own research online about a product or service before ever having to speak to a sales person. What this means for businesses is the increasing pressure to stand out against competitors in order to gain and retain the attention of the consumer.

By enriching your data, you’re able to gain better customer intelligence and use that information to tailor messages, campaigns and offers that really matter to your target market. More timely, relevant offers will help bring you to the forefront the next time a customer is considering a purchase.

Here are some things you can greatly enhance with data enrichment services:

• Landing pages
• Email campaigns
• Lead scoring
• Lead magnets

For instance, imagine that Christmas is right around the corner and as a high-end retailer, you’re looking for a consumer profile that is the most suited for the, let’s say, fur coat you want to promote. The ideal customer should make above a certain income and be within a walkable distance from an in-store location for your marketing campaigns—and dollars—to have the most impact. That level of granularity into your customer, however, can only be attained through data enrichment.

Reason #3: Lead Scoring is not just about explicit data

Both explicit (i.e. demographic criteria, such as company size, location, industry, etc.) and implicit (i.e. web behaviors, such as email click-throughs, number of visits to your website and types of content downloaded) lead scoring tactics are critical for determining high-quality leads. Robust data enrichment services will allow you to capture both demographic and behavior data.

Here’s what that looks like from a lead scoring perspective. If you have an enrichment service, you can capture IP addresses or other unique identifiers to uncover an anonymous lead’s implicit data, such as company name, industry and location that would otherwise be unknown to you. Being privy to this information allows you to filter out lower-quality leads from higher-quality leads, allowing you to better allocate budget and learn about which customer profile to focus your marketing on.

Data enrichment services provide better insight into individuals at the point of interaction. Businesses who leverage data enrichment can help marketers learn about their target audience’s behaviors, interests, channel receptivity, credit worthiness, propensity to buy and many more attributes. Nowadays it’s not just a matter of having the most products or campaigns—it’s about having the right products and campaigns. The more you know, the better, and data enrichment will get you there.

Ed note: Thank you to Shirley Zhao of Experian for her insight on successful lead scoring.  Experian is one of the many data enhancement providers that is available on the ActiveProspect platform.