A number of interesting questions were asked at the webinar on ‘Lead Engagement Index – The New Trend in Town’ conducted by Prashant Singh, CCO of LeadSquared. Those of you who missed the webinar, here’s a summary of some of the questions asked during that session. You could also listen to the webinar recording on ‘Lead Engagement Index – The New Trend in Town’ here.
Webinar FAQs:
Question 1
Apart from sending emails & SMS (text messages) what else can we do to engage leads?
It depends on the business. There are several ways of engaging leads. Within email and SMS also, there are advanced used cases of doing drip marketing. For example, you can set up a series of email campaigns (nurturing campaigns), automated emails, and automated SMS based on time or certain events that happen. Those are the standard ways. Apart from that you can invite leads to events like workshops, webinars, counselling sessions, in context of education companies particularly. You can also share case studies, whitepapers, recorded videos, etc.
Question 2
Could you please show an example how well we can set the score to for optimized use of lead engagement index?
First of all, you need to define the activity score. Fundamentally if you have leads in your system, whether it is LeadSquared or any other system, activities are happening on the leads. These activities could be inbound activities where the lead is actually initiating the activity. It could be outbound like calling the lead or giving a demo to lead. However, not all activities are as important.
Ideally you would want to give a different weightage to each of these activities and that’s where this particular setting around activity scoring helps in LeadSquared. It enables you to define the score of each of the activities that may happen in the lead life-cycle. So you can define the scores of email activities, web activities, phone call activities, etc. This is the starting point – to define the score. For example, for opening an email, you might want to give a score of 1 while for clicking the link on an email, you might want to give a score of 10. Similarly, for a phone call, you might want to give a score of 5, but for a demo you might want to give a score of 20 because a demo may take the lead deeper into your sales funnel than just a phone call.
Thus, define the scores of these activities. Once it is done, then, within the engagement score, there are three parameters.
1. To capture the recency effect – what is the time frame in which I am going to consider the activity for the activity to make an impact on the engagement score.
2. Lead Stage – Your leads might be in several stages but all of those stages may not be important in context of the engagement because you might be running engagement activities only the score of leads in certain stages.
3. The third is – choosing the actual activities. There might be hundreds of activities that you do on the lead but all of them may not be engaging activities. Therefore, define which are the activities that actually translate to engagement.
Question 3
What constitutes engagement for a lead?
Engagement means a meaningful activity that has happened in a recent time frame on a lead which is in an active lead stage. If you have thousands of leads in the system, meaningful activities may not have taken place with all of them in the recent past. If you are nurturing your leads, keeping them engaged with email campaigns, then the people who have opened your email campaigns or clicked on links from the email campaigns in the recent past and if those leads are in active lead stage, then that means they are engaged. Engagement is always in the context of recency. For example, you may have leads in the system for the past one year but somebody who was dormant earlier may suddenly become engaged and further move down in the marketing funnel and become a customer. Hence, you need to figure out which are the top leads and how should you act/respond in that week, month or in the next few days.
Question 4
If the first email sent is opened by the prospect but the next two are not, then is that not considered to be engaged?
It would depend on the parameters that you have defined. Here we have considered past 30 days as the time line when the lead’s activities would matter for engagement. Hence, if the first email link was clicked, and the second was not, but overall if the sum of all the engagement activities is high enough, your lead would be considered engaged.
Question 5
What is the ideal time and day to achieve maximum engagement?
I’m presuming this is in context of email campaigns. Based on our experience, our customers send email campaigns to India and other geographies. Specifically in India, we have seen that when you send promotional emails, the ‘open’ and ‘click’ rates are higher if the campaigns are sent on Wednesdays or Thursdays (second half), typically between 2-4pm.
Question 6
With each interaction with the lead, the lead may move forward or backward in your marketing funnel. How can I manage that?
This can be managed with lead stages. Typically lead stages are sequential. In the content of real estate, it may start from ‘Inquiry’ and then it may end up as a ‘Buyer’. Between Inquiry and Buyer, there may be several intermediate lead stages and a lead may move back and forth depending upon the kind of intermediate activity that has happened.
Within the LeadSquared system, you can always change the stage based on what has happened. Your lead engagement in that particular stage will start reflecting once you do that.
Question 7
Should we already have a targeted database or can we link this to the website?
If you are referring to leads in LeadSquared, you can import the leads from your database and also capture leads from your website. Leads can be captured from both the sources and once you start running your campaigns, you will have access to engagement index on the leads from all sources, whether it is coming from the database or the website.
