We feel very lucky to have selected SharpSpring over the many other marketing automation platforms available in the market. Adopting SharpSpring at an early stage was one of the most valuable investments a growing agency like ours could have made.

There are many reasons to love SharpSpring (so many that we even dedicated a blog post to this topic on our agency website). Apart from the many useful features (now even more useful since the introduction of the landing page builder!), the ability to set up accurate lead scoring has been working seamlessly and perfectly.

So what are the signs of a hot, high-quality lead, and how can you use SharpSpring to speed up the process and increase lead scoring accuracy?

1. They provided sensitive information

We set up an automated task to inform our sales team if a lead provides a contact number/company name (use ‘has the field’ as a filter). So as soon as someone fills out an ‘important’ field, our account manager will be notified to give this lead some special attention. This also helps save some time, since sales isn’t drowning in notifications about leads that aren’t actually ready to buy.

2. Their first contact method

We use SharpSpring to assign leads to campaigns based on their latest interactions with our brand. However, for leads that come in through anonymous campaigns to which SharpSpring can’t attribute them, we add an automated field to SharpSpring forms called ‘How did you hear about us?’ This helps us identify leads that are coming from our offline campaigns.

To give you an example: If you are hosting a webinar or distributing a radio ad, asking the ‘how did you hear about us’ question on your website can help you measure the effectiveness of your offline campaigns by showing you how many leads they generated. Why is this knowledge useful? Well, if you discover that a particular offline campaign is not giving you the leads you need, you can consider a budget reallocation.

3. Their digital body language

From website visits to email opens to the specific links clicked, your leads’ digital body language can be a strong indicator of their intention to buy. Visits to important pages such as a contact us page, FAQs or a pricing page are signs of a hot lead, and SharpSpring can notify you when these patterns occur.

It’s also worth attributing some more lead scores to social media button clicks and video views on your website. (You can do this by creating ‘trackable links’ in the Media Center.) Make use of lead score decay as well. For example, if a lead visits the careers page one or more times, this indicates he/she is probably not interested in your product or service. By setting up lead score decay for page visits and other activities like this, you can ensure that visitors’ lead scores will adjust to reflect their true engagement levels.

4. Their email behaviour

This one is an extension of item three. We use SharpSpring to help clients segment their databases and identify quality leads by sending out broadcast emails with content targeting specific demographics. For instance, we have one client with a website that provides health tips and recipes for parents with young children. Before using SharpSpring, the client had no idea about the demographics of its audience, even though it had already sent five newsletters to over 200 subscribers.

We helped the client segment its database by sending out emails with links to various articles that served specific demographic groups (e.g., parents with newborns, parents with toddlers, parents with teens, parents with autistic children, etc.). Once a lead clicked on a particular link, we could identify his/her demographic and interests, and we could also see which types of content worked best. We then set up dynamic list segmentation to automatically segment contacts going forward, and we use split test emails (i.e., A/B testing) to identify which content types, delivery times and images are attracting the most clicks.

5. They revisited your website

VisitorID daily reports help our agency and clients keep track of cold leads that return to the website. It’s critical to know who your contacts are and to track which ones are returning to your site. You can tell how engaged they are based on the pages they’re visiting, and you’ll know right away when it’s time to give them a call or send a re-activation email. 

Putting it all into action…

Our agency has used SharpSpring for around six months now, and it’s fair to say SharpSpring has helped us lift our game in providing quality digital marketing services, especially in lead generation and marketing automation. Learning SharpSpring as we’ve grown has helped us improve our own sales funnel and, more importantly, has enabled us to help our clients simplify their sales funnels and maximise their return on investment.

AUTHOR
Lindsey Sherman
AUTHOR
Tom Brownie
Tom has been in Marketing and Advertising coming up to ten years now, while working in a wide range of industries. He created The Natives Marketing to apply creative, strategy and digital marketing to businesses small and large to increase their sales through attracting, nurturing and converting more customers.
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