What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is ranking prospects based on their likelihood to convert into paying customers. Assigning numerical values to specific behaviors, attributes, and engagement signals helps marketing and sales teams prioritize their efforts on the people most ready to buy.
Similar to dynamic segmentation, lead scoring creates dynamic rankings that change as prospects interact with your brand. Someone who opens every email, visits your pricing page, and downloads a product guide, for example, gets a higher score than someone who signed up for your newsletter 6 months ago and hasn't engaged since.
Lead scoring is traditionally used for B2B companies, in which buyers are spending a lot more money for software or services. However, some B2C brands, especially those that sell higher-ticket items, such as furniture, can also use lead scoring.
For those B2C brands, lead scoring helps you allocate marketing resources more thoughtfully. Identifying high-intent shoppers allows you to deliver personalized experiences that match their readiness to purchase. This approach helps make sure your most engaged prospects get the attention they deserve, and avoid investing resources into people who aren't ready to take the next step.
Why lead scoring matters
Consumers interact with brands across multiple touchpoints before making a purchase. They browse products, sign up for emails, engage on social media, and compare options over days or weeks. Measuring and ranking these interactions makes it possible to determine which prospects are close to buying and which are just casually browsing, then segment your marketing lists and personalize your messaging accordingly.
Lead scoring also helps by creating a unified view of prospect engagement. It takes signals from across the customer journey (like email opens, website visits, product views, and cart activity) and combines them into a single score that reflects purchase intent.
Finally, every brand has limited marketing resources, and lead scoring also helps you direct those resources where they'll have the greatest impact. Brands that identify and prioritize their best prospects often run more efficient programs and start relationships on a stronger footing.
Benefits of lead scoring
Lead scoring offers practical advantages for marketing teams looking to work more efficiently and create more relevant experiences, including:
- Prioritized marketing efforts: Lead scoring highlights which prospects are showing the strongest buying signals, so your team can focus attention where and when it's most likely to make a difference.
- More efficient resource allocation: Matching your marketing investment to prospect quality helps you avoid over-investing in low-intent contacts.
- Improved personalization: Lead scores provide context for personalization. A high-scoring prospect might receive a direct offer, for example, while a lower-scoring contact gets educational content to build interest over time.
- Better alignment between marketing and sales: Lead scoring creates a shared language for discussing prospect quality and helps sales efforts focus on the most qualified opportunities.
- Quicker follow-ups and smoother handoffs: Identifying high-intent prospects early makes it easier to respond promptly and maintain momentum in the buying journey.
Key components of an effective lead scoring system
Effective lead scoring relies on several core elements to create an accurate picture of prospect quality, including:
- Behavioral signals: Actions like email opens, link clicks, website visits, product page views, and cart additions indicate active interest and purchase intent.
- Demographic data: Attributes like location, age, and gender help determine whether a prospect fits your ideal customer profile.
- Recency and frequency: Group customers by recency, frequency, and monetary value to identify your most valuable segments and those at risk of churning.
- Negative scoring: Not all actions indicate buying intent. Unsubscribes or extended inactivity can decrease a lead score and signal that someone isn't a good fit.
- Score thresholds: Defined cutoff points trigger specific actions, like moving a high-scoring lead into a targeted campaign or flagging them for personalized outreach.
How to build a lead scoring model
Creating an effective lead scoring model requires understanding your customers and mapping their journey to purchase. Here's how to get started:
Step 1: Define your ideal customer profile
Start by identifying the characteristics of your best customers. Look at purchase history, engagement patterns, and demographic data to understand what high-value customers have in common. This becomes the benchmark against which you score new prospects.
Step 2: Identify scoring criteria
Determine which behaviors and attributes indicate purchase intent for your business. Common scoring criteria include:
- Website activity: pages visited, time on site, return visits
- Form engagement: views, submission rates
- Email and SMS engagement: opens, clicks, replies
- Product interactions: views, wishlist additions, cart activity
- Social media interactions
Step 3: Assign point values
Not all actions carry equal weight. Assign higher point values to behaviors that strongly correlate with conversion, like adding items to a cart or visiting your check-out page. Lower-value actions, like opening an email, still contribute to the overall score but indicate earlier-stage interest.
Step 4: Set score thresholds and actions
Define what happens when a lead reaches a certain score range. Consider these examples:
- 0–25 points: new or low-engagement lead. Add to nurture sequence.
- 26–50 points: warming lead. Increase email frequency with relevant content.
- 51–75 points: engaged lead. Trigger targeted product recommendations.
- 76+ points: hot lead. Send a personalized offer or high-priority campaign.
Step 5: Test and refine
The most effective lead scoring models evolve as you learn more about your customers. Monitor how well your scores reflect actual buying readiness through conversion tracking and adjust point values and thresholds based on real engagement patterns.
Lead scoring best practices
Follow these guidelines to get the most from your lead scoring efforts:
- Start simple. Begin with a basic model using 5–10 scoring criteria, then add complexity as you learn what predicts conversion for your business.
- Weight actions appropriately. Give higher scores to behaviors that directly indicate purchase intent, like cart additions or check-out page visits, vs. more passive engagement like email opens.
- Include decay factors. Reduce scores over time for inactive leads. A prospect who was highly engaged 6 months ago but hasn't interacted since shouldn't maintain a high score.
- Segment by score ranges. Create distinct segments for different score levels and tailor your messaging strategy to each group's readiness to buy.
- Review and adjust regularly. Analyze which scores actually lead to productive relationships and refine your model based on real data, not assumptions.
- Combine with predictive analytics. Pair lead scoring with predictive tools that forecast customer lifetime value, churn risk, and expected order dates for more precise targeting.
Lead scoring helps you prioritize and engage prospects, turning scattered engagement data into clear signals that support more timely, relevant outreach.
Ready to focus your marketing on the leads most likely to convert? Get started with Klaviyo today.