3 ActiveCampaign Lead Scoring Best Practices To Get Better Data

ActiveCampaign is an incredibly popular SaaS tool for lead generation. They’re an automation-driven platform, with specialized solutions in everything ranging from email marketing to service and support. 

With all of these solutions, it’s no surprise they can collect a significant amount of data. And with the ActiveCampaign lead scoring tool, brands can leverage that data fairly accurately to identify and prioritize different leads and contacts so they know who to follow up with and when. This can be a crucial part of revenue acceleration. 

In this post, we’re going to take a look at ActiveCampaign’s lead scoring tool and three tips for how exactly you can get the most out of it. We’ll also take a look at the limitations their tool has, why they matter, and why you should consider using Breadcrumbs as an alternative instead. 

What is ActiveCampaign’s Lead Scoring Tool & What Can It Do? 

ActiveCampaign is an automation-heavy marketing, sales, and CRM tool all in one. It comes with an abundance of features, one of which is a native lead scoring tool.

This tool is a feature of ActiveCampaign’s CRM, and it allows brands to manually set different rules to assign points and scores to different contacts. You can enter scores based on whether you’re talking about actions regarding a contract or a deal. 

You can get fairly specific, assigning custom values to individual actions like subscribing to your newsletter. These actions aren’t cumulative, because the only rules that ActiveCampaign allows to contribute to the engagement score are actions people only take once, like subscribing, downloading something, or attending an event. 

You can set points to expire at a certain time. You could, for example, have the points removed from the score two months after they first subscribed. There is no gradual decay, which is more realistic, but you do make sure that your data is relatively up to date by adding appropriate expiration dates. 

3 Tips And Tricks For Using Lead Scoring In ActiveCampaign

Want to get the most out of your ActiveCampaign lead scoring? Of course, you do! 

These are our three best tips to get accurate and actionable data from the lead scoring tool in ActiveCampaign. 

1. Think About Engagement Actions People Only Take Once

We already know that ActiveCampaign’s lead scoring tool is only tracking actions that leads or contacts will take once.

It’s important to think about what those actions would be and to choose wisely for your scoring prospects. These could be signing up for a specific webinar, downloading an individual case study, subscribing to a newsletter, or opening a certain email. 

Whatever those actions are, think about how valuable they are in showing true engagement. Someone who subscribes to your newsletter and opens that initial welcome email, for example, may be slightly more high intent than someone who downloads an industry report whitepaper and just wants the data (though this isn’t always the case). Choose the appropriate scores for each action.  

2. Decrease Contact’s Score Overtime 

Lead value decreases over time, especially if they aren’t continuing to engage, so the last thing you want is a static lead scoring system that completely fails to take time of actions into account.

Someone who subscribed to your newsletter today but hasn’t converted yet is much more likely to do so than someone who subscribed last year but never converted. 

As a result, you want to decrease a contact’s score over time.

While ActiveCampaign doesn’t use a true time-decay model that slowly decreases a customer’s score for particular actions as time goes on, they do let you set an automation rule to decrease their score after a certain amount of time. This is like an expiration date; after one month (or three months, or whatever you choose), the score someone received for a specific action will be removed from their account. 

3. Use Scoring Categories if You Have Multiple Products or Services 

Let’s say that your product is a SaaS invoicing software tool that’s a monthly or annual subscription. That’s your primary offer. But you also have a branched-off services sector, which includes tax preparation from accountants and a service for financial advice for business owners.

Some customers are only going to want the invoicing software because they already have an accountant or they do their taxes themselves. They wouldn’t be a fit for cross-selling (or leading with) these services. 

Not every customer who comes your way will be a good fit for both, and contact scoring will be more effective if you’re able to show your sales team which customers are the best fit for either. 

As a result, if you do have multiple products and/or services, make sure you’re using scoring categories to separate out your scores. 

Someone who signs up for a free trial of your invoicing software, for example, might get 10 points for the SaaS tool and maybe three points for your services. But if they check yes that they’re interested in learning more about financial services at sign-up, they get an extra 5 points for the services but lose 10 points if they say no. You can have different actions in the same customer funnel rank differently based on how customers proceed. 

The 4 Benefits of Using Breadcrumbs Instead of ActiveCampaign Lead Scoring

ActiveCampaign’s lead scoring tool is a fairly solid lead scoring tool compared to many others out there, but we’d still recommend using Breadcrumbs instead. 

Breadcrumbs is a dedicated lead scoring and contact scoring tool, and our entire focus is on using a co-dynamic approach to getting you the most accurate right-now scores for every contact on your list. 

And good news: If you’re already using ActiveCampaign as a marketing tool, we can actually sync up with ActiveCampaign to source the data you have there and utilize it for our lead scoring models. 

There are four reasons why we’d recommend using Breadcrumbs instead of ActiveCampaign. Let’s look at each.

1. Dedicated Dashboarding & Analytics Just for Lead Scoring 

With most other lead scoring tools that come as secondary bonus features to marketing tools with other focuses, you’re going to get a few features to calculate a lead score and a single score next to a contact’s name. It gives you some information, but not a ton.

We wanted to do things differently. We have a dedicated dashboard and extremely detailed analytics. You can see what your customers overall are doing and what they’re doing on an individual level. What factors led them to get the score that they have? Which actions have they taken, and what “fit” characteristics do they have that show that they’re a good profile fit for your company?

This is invaluable and highly actionable data that your team can use to reach out with relevant offers at the exact right time. 

2. Get a Historical View into Lead Scoring Trends 

It’s great to see your lead scores as they are right now in this exact moment of time. Of course, that’s useful.

But it’s also useful to see contact scoring trends over time for your business so you can assess progress, look for potential ways to optimize the customer journey, and even potentially identify or troubleshoot signals of decreasing engagement or conversions.

You may see, for example, that fewer customers are qualifying through engagement after you scaled back a content marketing effort; this would be a sign that your content was effective at driving high-value leads or otherwise having a positive impact on bringing the right people to your site.

And if you paused marketing on LinkedIn Ads and saw a drop off in users with high fit scores, that could be a sign to reinvest in that particular platform. 

Having a birds-eye view of how lead scoring trends have shifted over time within your business can give you so much information to work with, but most tools won’t give you this. Breadcrumbs does. 

3. Take Recency & Frequency Into Account 

One significant improvement we’ve made to lead scoring here at Breadcrumbs is that we don’t just calculate when a user took an action OR how often they take a specific action. We look at both.

Most tools only look at one, and this is a significant disadvantage. It’s easy to see why. 

Say a customer recently opened an email from your brand in the last week. That’s a recency bonus: they were engaged now. This is good, but they’ve only opened one email out of five, meaning the frequency of that action is low, so they’re not heavily invested.

On the flip side, maybe a customer opened ten emails in a row from your brand… but that was five months ago. They’ve stopped opening your emails. You don’t want that customer to have a sky-high score for that initial engagement when it’s clearly no longer relevant. 

Both factors matter a great deal in activity scoring, and our activity scoring factors in frequency and has a time-decay model. Someone who downloaded a report yesterday is going to have a higher activity score than someone who downloaded a report last year. And someone who regularly subscribes to your webinars will have a significantly higher score than someone who just signed up for one. 

This time decay isn’t all or nothing like ActiveCampaign’s; there’s a slow decline over time that you can customize based on your business’s customer journey. 

This is something that ActiveCampaign can’t offer you but that Breadcrumbs can. 

4. There’s a Co-Dynamic Lead Scoring Approach 

Right out of the box, Breadcrumbs automatically gives you a co-dynamic approach that factors in both activity and fit to provide an alphanumeric score.

ActiveCampaign only has a single score with only a number to tell you what a contact’s score is.

What we mean when we say we have a co-dynamic approach is that we look at two different categories to assess how “hot” of an opportunity a single contact is for you. 

We look at fit (which assesses the profile of the company) and activity (which examines what actions a specific user has taken) and give you an alphanumeric score ranging from A1 to D4. 

And all of this takes frequency and time decay into account, so you’re never behind the curve and can see exactly who your most valuable leads are in real-time.

Final Thoughts 

ActiveCampaign has a decent lead-scoring tool, especially compared to many of their competitors that also offer it as a secondary bonus feature to their core offering.

Here at Breadcrumbs, though, we live and breathe contact scoring. We source high-quality data and only use the data points that actually matter to your business. We’ve got fully customizable model templates for everything from cross-selling and upselling to lead nurturing, and our co-dynamic approach will give you the most accurate information to act on for any of these actions.

If you’re going to invest time into a lead scoring system, it only makes sense to use the best of the best.

Ready to dive into the best lead-scoring software on the market? Book your free demo with Breadcrumbs today.