You might have Scoring in place, but as it is with everything in life, there is always room for improvement. You might feel satisfied that your website contacts (and their more advanced brothers called leads) are evaluated according to your unique requirements, but it could be even more advanced – let’s meet Marketing Automation!
Scoring in Kentico can be approached from many different angles. You might create just new scoring in the Scoring app, set up a list of scoring rules to value actions of your website contacts accordingly, and then just sit back and wait for Kentico to send you email notifications as soon as any of the contacts reaches the given scoring threshold.
Perhaps you just might be curious about your website visitors, and willing to learn more about their behavior on your website. In such case, the scoring could be used to quickly distinguish between different types of contacts (cold and hot leads) by filtering them according to their score in your particular scoring setup.
Maybe you have decided to crack on with your Persona research and would like to test your assumptions quickly through scoring.
Whatever your reasons, it is important to be aware of all scoring options available in Kentico 11. I am not going to cover the basics of the scoring setup in this article, as we have covered these already in our previous blog article. Instead, I would like to shed some light on advanced ways of combining the Scoring feature with the marketing automation processes through the clever use of Kentico macros.
Let’s consider the following scoring scenario:
You have created scoring in Kentico 11 that assigns scoring points to website visitors according to their actions on the website. You have defined three tiers that you would like to be able to distinguish in the scoring. Each of the three tiers (thresholds) represents a different stage of the contact: cold, warm, and hot lead. You would like to be informed via email as soon as any contact reaches one of these stages (tiers).
By default, you can define only one threshold per scoring in the Scoring app. Once reached by a contact, Kentico would send a notification email to the specified email address:
However, if you need to send email notifications when different thresholds are reached within the same scoring, you will need to connect the scoring to a marketing automation process.
You will need to define a marketing process in the Marketing Automation app, and then set up a trigger that triggers the process when a contact reaches a certain amount of points within the scoring (e.g., when 20 points have been reached by a contact):
Once the marketing automation process is triggered, you can use it to set a contact status to a different value, move or remove the contact from a contact group, and also to send a notification email to any chosen person:
So, returning to our scoring example, you would create three different marketing automation processes, each of them triggered at a different threshold of the score. One could be triggered at 20 points, second at 40 points, and the third at 60 points.
Each of the marketing automation processes would treat the contact differently and perhaps send a notification email to a different sales person. Possibilities are endless!
But what if the scoring contained a scoring rule that would allow assignment of a significant number of points to the contact, catapulting the contact right into the top tier (hot lead) category? In other words, what would happen if the contact got assigned 60 points, right away?
Well, then each of the three marketing automation processes would be triggered at the same time. As you can tell, this might not be an ideal solution, as we would like only the highest-ranking marketing automation process to be triggered (and keep the other two marketing automation processes asleep).
So, how could we solve this in Kentico 11? By using Kentico macros!
Basically, you would add an additional macro condition to triggers of the other two processes which you would like to limit.
In our case, we would like to limit the first automation process to be triggered only if the scoring is at least 20 but less than 40 points, and the trigger of the second marketing automation process to be triggered only if the scoring of the contact is at least 40 but less than 60 points.
The macro that we would use in the Additional condition field of the first trigger would be in the following format:
Contact.GetScore("CodeNameOfTheScoring") < 40
As you can see, the macro checks if the score of the contact for which the marketing automation process has been triggered is less than 40 points. The macro only needs a code name of the scoring that you would like to check. The Code name of the scoring can be found in the Scoring app on the Configuration tab of the relevant scoring.
As there is no macro rule that could be used right away, you need to use a macro rule named Satisfies macro condition to be able to enter macros mentioned above:
So, the trigger of the first marketing automation process would look like this:
Once again, it would be triggered only if the contact’s score was at least 20 points, but less than 40 points.
Here is how the trigger of the second marketing automation process would look like:
As you can see, the second marketing automation process will be triggered only if the contact’s score is at least 40 points, but less than 60 points.
And that is all! This is how you can limit your marketing automation processes triggered by scoring, so they don’t interfere among themselves. Each of them is going to be triggered only within a specified range of the contact’s score!
What is your current scoring setup for website visitors? Can you see yourself using a scoring combined with marketing automation processes? Let us know in the comments!