Contact Scoring

Contact Scoring

Contact Scoring is an effective way to manage and analyze your contacts, helping you discover quality contacts and giving you insights about their stage in the sales funnel. Contact scoring is all about giving scores to your email recipients based on their profile, and campaign responses. Using these scores, you can infer the progress of your potential contacts, and watch them become customers.
For example, contacts who engage with your content, website, and events are going to get higher scores than those who are only subscribed to your newsletter.
In this guide, we tell you how to set up contact scoring, and how contact scores are determined through campaign activities, contact information, and website activities.

The following instructions only apply to organization administrators.

Set up Contacts Scoring

As an organization admin, you can set up contact scoring for your organization by following these instructions:
  1. Log in to your Zoho Campaigns account.
  2. Select the Contacts tab from the navigation bar and click Contact Scoring. A welcome page will appear.
  3. Click Assign Scores Now to start the setup process.
Note: Contact scoring is available for all users under the subscription plan.

Qualifying Contacts Through Campaign Activities

Zoho Campaigns provides you with an array of campaign activities that can be used to score your contacts and discover their place in the sales pipeline. Any contacts with your target score can be considered marketing- and sales-qualified.

Open the Contacts and select Contact Scoring, then navigate to Campaign Activities in the Scoring Setup tab.

Here are all of the campaign activities your contacts may perform:

1.
Unique Open
Open the campaign just once
2.
Multiple Open
Open the campaign multiple times
3.
Unique Click
Click the attached links just once
4.
Multiple Click
Click the attached links multiple times
5.
Opt-in
Subscribes to your website
6.
Tell-a-friend
Refers a friend to your website
7.
Unique Reply
Replies to your email campaign
8.
Multiple Reply
Replied to your email campaigns multiple times.
9.
Positive Reply
Has sent a positive/productive reply to your email campaigns.

By default, each of the campaign activities specified will possess a score. You can edit the scores as you wish.

Edit scores

You can edit your scores any time you wish to change activity priorities. Contacts will start getting the new scores as soon as you've changed priorities.
To edit contact scores:
  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring then navigate to Campaign Activities in the Scoring Setup tab.
  2. Click the Edit Score icon on top of the score sheet.
  3. Use the right and left arrows on the score sheet to adjust scores based on priority.
    edit contact scores

For example, the unique open action has a score of 10 and your contact has a score of 10 from that. If you edit the score for unique open from 10 to 20, next time the contact opens a new campaign, they will be awarded with 20 more points and the new contact score will be 30.

Note:

Scores for multiple actions (i.e., multiple opens, multiple clicks) will be applied when the contact performs the same action for the third time. For example, the score assigned for a unique click is 10 points, while multiple clicks get 30 points. The first time a contact clicks a campaign, they'll get 10 points. This score remains the same on the second click, Then jumps 30 more points when they click for the third time for a total of 40 points. Further clicks do not give higher scores.

Disable Scoring

Score updates can be paused. Existing scores will remain the same until you enable scoring again.

To pause/resume scoring:

  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring then navigate to Campaign Activities in the Setup tab.
  2. Toggle the switch to Disable/Enable at the top of the score sheet.

Qualifying Contacts Through Their Field Information

Zoho Campaigns provides scoring for contacts based on their profile information. All you have to do here is specify the fields and their corresponding values, the contact should contain to earn the score assigned.
  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring, then navigate to Contact Field Information in the Scoring Setup tab.
  2. Click Configure.
  3. Fill in the required information
    • Name - A name that describe your criteria.
    • Assign score - This is the score that meeting your criteria will award.
    • Criteria - Define the scoring conditions that must be met by using the drop-down menus. You can define up to three conditions for each criteria.field-based-scoring

Contact Classification

Defining your contacts' stage in the sales funnel will help you understand their quality and determine when they will be sales-ready. Our contact scoring system lets you classify contacts into Most-engaged, Progressing, and Getting Started based on their scores.

For example, contacts who actively engage in reading blogs or request a demo for certain products will score higher and become a most-engaged contact. Contacts who only download your newsletters will earn comparatively lower scores and will be classified as progressing contacts.

Now that you're all set with contact scoring, follow these steps to define score conditions for most-engagedprogressing, and getting started.

  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring.
  2. You can see the Contact Classification section at the top.
  3. Click Edit icon at the top-right of the section. A popup will appear.
  4. In the pop-up, enter the score limit for most-engaged and progressing contacts.
  5. You can classify your contacts based on their total score OR their scores in a particular time frame.contact classification

Negative Scoring

You can choose to assign negative scores to your contacts when they perform any action in your emails that you consider as negative. Using this, whenever a contact makes any specific negative response that you've set, the assigned score will be subtracted from the overall score. To setup negative scoring:
  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring then navigate to Campaign Activities in the Scoring Setup tab.
  2. Enable the toggle at the top-right. Only then the negative scoring setup will be enabled.

  3. Click the Edit Score icon on top of the score sheet.

  4. Use the right arrows on the score sheet to assign negative scores.

  5. The least value that you can assign is -50. 

Custom Rules

A custom scoring system is specially designed for activities you feel should have more significance in contact evaluation. The setup process lets you define criteria(rules) for contact activities and your contacts will be assigned with points when they meet those criteria. You can assign both positive and negative scores for the conditions that you set in custom scoring.

For example, if you want to send a marketing campaign about your new product launch and prefer to score your contacts' higher clicking and performing actions on a specific URL, this is where custom rule comes into the picture. Custom rule lets you set criteria particular to the desired URL and assign scores to contacts.

To setup custom rule:
  1. In the scoring page, you can find Custom Rules below the scoring setup.
  2. Click Create Custom Rule.

  3. Enter the criteria name, the score to be assigned, and the condition.
  4. Click Save.
Note:
  1. The custom rule that you setup will be applied to all the email campaigns that you create. However, you can disable the custom rule for individual campaign at the time of their creation in the campaign's review page.
  2. Apart from the custom rules, you can assign negative scores to contact only when they either unsubscribe from your newsletters or they make a negative reply to your email.
  3. You need to enable Reply Tracking for your campaigns, only then you'll be able to track the negative replies to your emails.

Reset Scoring

Before you reset your contact scores, make sure that you won't need them anymore. Once you reset these scores, your contacts will start from zero again.

To reset contact scores:

  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring.
  2. Click the Reset button on the top-right corner of the page.
  3. Read the terms and check the I Agree checkbox.
  4. Click Reset Now button to reset the scores.
  5. If you want to start the scoring process to after the reset, click Enable Scoring.reset scoring
Note:

After the reset, assigned scores on the score sheet will remain the same but your contacts' scores will set back to zero.

Reset History

It is possible to see the entire reset history for your organization. This option will show you when a reset has been done, who did it, and any noted reasons for the reset.

To view reset history:

  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring.
  2. Find the Reset section next to the score sheet.
  3. Click Reset History button from the drop down.

The following information apply to both organization administrators and users.

How can I see my contacts' scores?

Learn about your contacts with score updates. Contacts scores are calculated by summing up all the scores a contact has earned for their activities. This helps you prioritize contacts and focus your attention on the most active contacts.

  1. Navigate through to any of the contact list views.
  2. Select a contact email address.
  3. You will get to the smart view of the contact information. You can view the contact score on the right.
You can also know the contact's score from the detailed view:
  1. Navigate through to any of the contact list views.
  2. Select a contact email address.
  3. You will get to the smart view of the contact information.
  4. Click Expand.
  5. There are two viewing modes in the top-right corner - Specifics and Activities.
  6. To view the contact score, switch to Activities and check the contact score to the right of the contact's name.

View Reports

You can also view your contact' performance with the help of scoring reports.

  1. Navigate through to any of the contact list views.
  2. Select a contact email address.
  3. You will get to the smart view of the contact information.
  4. Click Expand
  5. There are two viewing modes in the top-right corner - Specifics and Activities
  6. Switch to Activities and scroll down to find the Contact Timeline to find the scores, activities, and the time scoring took place.
Insights into contact scoring are extremely valuable for your organization, allowing you to watch your contacts' growth based on normal activities like opens, clicks, etc. Some businesses will want a scoring system based on some special activities. To facilitate this, Zoho Campaigns provides a custom scoring system for campaign activities.

Segmenting Contacts Based on Scores

You can segment your contacts based on their scores, scoring period and other criteria such as country, first name, last name, etc. You can also view reports of the segmented contacts with respect to mailing lists and countries.

Create a Score-based View

  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring.
  2. Select the Score-based View tab.
  3. Click Create View button.
  4. Fill in the required information:
      • Name - a name that describes your view.
      • Score - This is the score based on which contacts are segmented.
      • Scoring period- Define a scoring period from which contacts are to be included in the segment, e.g., last 15 days, last month.
      • Criteria - Define the scoring criteria that must be met by using the drop-down menus. You can define up to two criteria.
      • Mailing list- Select mailing lists from which the contacts are to be included in the segment.

        score based view creation

  5. Click Save.

Email Notifications for Score-based View

You can get notified on the summary of your score-based view periodically via emails. All you have to do is set up the frequency to receive the email notification.

  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring.
  2. Select the Score-based View tab.
  3. Select the score-based view for which you want to set up email notification.
  4. Navigate to the Email Notification section and click Set notification frequency now.
  5. Specify the time and users who should receive email notification for this view.
  6. Click Save.
    score based view notiifcation

Edit frequency

You can modify the frequency of email notification to your convenience. Follow the below steps:

  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring.
  2. Select the Score-based View tab.
  3. Select the score-based view for which you want to edit the email notification frequency.
  4. Navigate to the Email Notification section and click the Edit icon.edit email frequency
Disable Email notification
  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring.
  2. Select the Score-based View tab.
  3. Select the score-based view for which you want to disable the email notification.
  4. Navigate to the Email Notification section and turn the toggle switch off.
  5. Click Go Ahead in the popup that follows.disable email notification
Note: If the criteria specified for the score-based view is a definite period, you will not receive email notification periodically. Rather, you can download the summary as a PDF or receive a one-time email.

View Reports

You can view reports of the score-based view based on mailing lists and countries.

  1. Open the Contacts tab and select Contact Scoring.
  2. Select the Score-based View tab.
  3. Select a view.
  4. You will be able to see the summary of the view and contacts under the view based on the mailing lists and country.

Scoring Contacts Through Workflow

Zoho Campaigns' workflow automation enables you to categorize contacts based on their behavior and information, then assign scores accordingly. To assign scores,

  1. Go to the Automation tab from Navigation bar and select Workflow.
  2. Click Create Workflow.
  3. Select a workflow you want to create.
  4. Fill in the required information.
    • Name - Enter a name to your workflow
    • Mailing List - Select the mailing list you want to run the workflow for.
    • Select condition - Choose a condition the contact should meet to enter the workflow.
    • Perform action- Select Add score from the dropdown option.
  5. Click Activate Now.
    score based workflow

Push Contact Scores to Zoho CRM

With different ways to score your contacts, we will now see how you shall push those scores into Zoho CRM. Follow the below steps:

  1. Go to Contacts tab from the Navigation bar and select All Contacts.
  2. Click the Sync tab and navigate to Zoho CRM syncs.
  3. Go to Active Syncs
    crm active syncs
  4. Navigate to Settings tab.
  5. Click the Edit icon in the Campaigns to CRM Settings.
  6. Navigate to the section Push contact score to Zoho CRM and turn on the toggle switch.
  7. Choose a CRM module to update contact scores and select an integer field to map the contact score with.push score to CRM