Lead scoring. You may have heard the term. Perhaps you’ve talked about it without knowing what it was even called. Fortunately, we’re here to bring you an introduction to lead scoring for credit unions.
Many credit unions measure the success of a marketing campaign solely with “home run” metrics. For example, we measure car loan promotions by the number of car loans booked. We judge credit card campaigns by the number of cards delivered.
While there is no question that win/loss metrics are important, there is a middle ground. Developing richer personalized information as you build member relationships offers valuable marketing insight. It may not immediately achieve sales, but down the line, it can provide a stronger understanding of what your members want—and how you can give that to them.
This technique of quantifying member behavior is called lead scoring. Let’s see how it can help your credit union.
What is Lead Scoring?
In typical marketing and sales environments, lead scoring is a system for ranking prospects and leads. The scores measure against a scale representing the perceived value each lead represents to the organization. Higher lead scores mean greater potential value.
Those resulting scores determine which leads the marketing and sales departments will engage, in order of priority. For example, leads with high scores are more likely to make a purchase soon. You can hand those leads off to regional salespersons to close the deal.
On the other hand, leads with low scores may be interested in purchasing, but they’re still learning about the product or service. Leads with lower scores are put in marketing “nurturing” campaigns to help them build interest.
How Credit Unions Can Quantify Engagement
For credit unions, lead scoring is a way to track and enhance the relationship between the credit union and the member. Most credit union missions include improving the financial well-being of their members in addition to “making sales.”
Credit unions can thus use lead scoring for many purposes:
- Tracking sales cycles
- Monitoring members’ financial journeys
- Evaluating the strength of their relationships with the credit union
Using marketing data and analyzing member actions, we develop a comprehensive ability to further serve the membership of our credit unions. By tracking and assigning values to a member’s online actions (or lack thereof), credit unions can better understand what each member wants or needs.
Good lead scoring means that credit unions can more accurately determine who wants what—and to what extent! It’s all about being relevant and tactful.
If a member looks at your credit card offerings (and literature about them) three times in one week, you’ll know they’re very interested. However, if they looked at credit cards once a few weeks ago, they’re probably not about to pull the trigger on anything.
Basically, lead scoring helps you make better marketing and sales decisions with your members. It also helps your credit union understand what your members need, when, and how you can help them get it.
How Does Lead Scoring Work?
Specific scoring methods are unique to each credit union, but the general idea is the same. As a member participates in email campaigns or browses marketing content, they accumulate points.
If they open an email, you add points to their lead score. If they read a blog, you add points to their lead score. If they visit a landing page, you add points. If they fill out a form… you get the idea.
A credit union might modify their scoring system to account for financial lifecycles, such as:
- A newly opened account
- Purchased a first car
- Applied for a mortgage
- Reached five years of membership
Anything that helps the credit union assess the member relationship might contribute to the lead score. It might also modify the way the credit union acts on that lead score.
Each action a member takes helps you understand what specific information you can offer them. Sure, having them close on a car loan is great, but what if they simply aren’t ready? If they’ve shown some level of interest, it’s better to put them in a nurturing campaign to let them develop desire.
Lead Scoring Examples in Action
Here is a simplified example of the car loan lead scoring:
Just by receiving the email (it didn’t bounce!), the member starts at a lead score of 25. In this example, the maximum score is 50, so we could have behavioral scores and associated next-step actions that look like this:
By providing intermediate actions and involving members in blogs, surveys, and other activities, credit unions provide better service. They also fulfill their mission of providing financial health information to members.
Credit unions can also monitor the follow-up campaigns and update their scores based on continued interactions.
You can see that we gradually build a web of quantified online interactions. The lead score is our key indicator for assessing the overall relationship.
Monitoring campaigns and customer interactions at this level of detail can be a lot of work. Still, it’s definitely worth the effort in the digital era. It can also be done automatically with marketing automation tools.
Think of this process as a way to improve customer engagement online. It’s like the way you might add a branch to be closer to your customers in the real world. Except that, in this case, you’re adding value and information to their lives through their phone or computer. The cost is less than branch operations and allows the member to engage with you at their convenience.
Digital engagement requires the same commitment to managing the data as credit unions have shown in managing branches. The new digital world that our members have become accustomed to leaves little choice!
Additional Reading
Lead scoring is a powerful tool on its own. However, it becomes astronomically more powerful in conjunction with other strategies.
For example, content marketing—or inbound marketing—provides a good deal of material with which to increase a member’s awareness, interest, and desire for a product or service. Each time a member reads another blog or infographic, their knowledge about the subject increases. And, so does their understanding and need for it. And, conveniently, so does their lead score.
Finally, content marketing and lead scoring really come to life with marketing automation. You can read more about how they all fit together here.
Follow the links below to read more about how to supercharge your credit union’s marketing strategies.
