Fine tune your admissions process with lead scoring

Once your admissions processes are already established, the focus shifts from worrying about getting enough leads into your funnel, to figuring out who's really interested in submitting an application.

This is where lead scoring comes in, it's a way of labelling leads based on how 'hot' of a lead they are, or in other words, how likely they are to complete the admissions process and apply to a school. 

This blog includes:

• What is lead scoring?
• Which attributes you should be scoring
• You may need more than one lead scoring system
• Using HubSpot CRM to lead score

What is lead scoring?

The best way to understand lead scoring is with a simple example; if a lead ticks a lot of boxes regarding what you consider a promising lead to be, e.g. have downloaded your prospectus, signed up to an open event, and viewed the application page on your website multiple times, then in this instance where's there's three attributes, you'd score a lead 3 if they've ticked all 3 of those boxes. This would then indicate to your admissions team that there's a high chance of this lead converting, and actions can be taken as a result. 

This is a very simple example, in reality there are a lot more attributes that indicate the likelihood of a deal closing. Lead scoring is often done on a 0 - 100 scale, and assigning points to leads often comes down to individual organisations and what they value as indications of a lead moving along the pipeline.

Determining which attributes justify higher points and lower points is most easily done by assessing how your previous prospects turned into enrolments, and how prospects did not turn into enrolments. Once you've assessed the historical data on both sides, you can decide which attributes should be worth more points, and which should be worth less. 

So, which attributes should you be looking out for in your historical data?

Which attributes you should be scoring

There are six main attributes that you'll want to look into in order to give a lead a well-justified score.

Demographic information

Your school might have a specific radius/location whereby leads tend to close more often, which would justify higher point scoring. Conversely, leads that might be outside of your ideal location would score lower points. Granted, a lead outside of your ideal location may be planning on moving, commuting or maybe the child's parent(s) work in that same location so they can get to the school easily - but as far as the lead point scoring system is concerned, this lead has a lower chance of closing due to this. The lead scoring system is an indication, not a black and white scale of if a lead will close or not.

For example, if a prospect's postcode contains X, Y or Z (those within your school's ideal radius) +2 points, if a prospect's postcode contains A, B or C (those in your school's secondary radius, further away where travel is more of an issue) + 1 point , if a prospect's postcode is D, E or F (those out of area) -1 point.

Attaining this information is probably best captured in online forms on your school website.

Online behaviour

Online behaviour, as mentioned in the example at the start of this blog, is a great way of scoring a lead. You should look historically at leads that have closed, and see which pages of your website they visited, how many times they visited those pages, check what resources they downloaded and check how many resources they downloaded in total. These resources may include: school prospectus, an extra-curricular activities offer booklet, and/or a school trips offer.

Analysing what previous applicants downloaded/visited is equally as important as how many resources they downloaded/pages they visited. A lead that has visited high value pages (such as an application process page) a few times might score the same as a lead that has visited lower value pages 20 times, for example. 

Some leads may have appeared to be promising, but over time have visited your website less and have stopped downloading resources. In this instance, you should deduct points from leads that haven't engaged with your website after a set amount of time - and this set amount of time should be selected based on your individual organisation's typical sales cycle 

Email engagement

Email marketing is an incredibly powerful tool, and is equally powerful when it comes to lead scoring. An opt-in (albeit a good indication of a marketing qualified lead) doesn't always suggest someone is interested in applying to your school. Drilling deeper into open and clickthrough rates, however, gives a much better indication of that leads intent. 

Again, look historically to get a good idea of what open and clickthrough rates justify a high score, and remember that higher-value emails (such as open day invites) should warrant higher lead scoring when it comes to a lead's interactions. 

Social engagement

Social engagement is also a great way of lead scoring. Look at how many times they clicked through on your social posts, how often they're interacting (likes and comments) and again, give higher lead scoring to click-throughs and interactions with higher-value posts.

Personas

The prerequisite to setting up persona based lead scoring is setting up your personas, if you haven't done so already you can read how to set up personas for education here (this blog also has some example personas for you to work from).

If leads coming in appear to match your set personas, you'll have an indication of that lead's customer journey and purchase intent based off your personas.

Spam detection

Spam indication is a good way of filtering out leads by deducting points. Let's say a lead fills out a form to download a prospectus on one of your landing pages (usually a good indication), but their responses include a random array of letters as opposed to real answers. This would indicate they just want the free resource and don't actually have any intention of actually applying to your organisation - and therefore deducting points is justified. 

You may need more than one lead scoring system

You may decide to have different lead scoring systems for the different sites of your school:

- Nursery
Perhaps applicants who want to sign their child up for more nursery sessions get more points than those who sign up for only one morning a week. 

- Preparatory
If a prospective applicant has siblings in a higher school site - Senior or Sixth Form - this would be a strong indication that this child will stay with the school throughout their education. 

- Senior
As before, if a prospective applicant has siblings in Sixth Form this would be a strong indication that this child will stay with the school through to further education. 

- Sixth Form
More points may be attributed based on a prospects predicted GCSE results.

- Boarding
Full time boarding prospects will be worth more financially than flexi-boarders and as such can be attribute more points.

- Scholarships
You may want to have a separate lead scoring system for scholarship assessment, for example if a student has passed certain music practical and theory tests to a higher level, then this justifies higher lead scoring for scholarship offers. 

Aside from the different sites of your school, you may want to split your lead scoring into fit vs interest. Fit being more demographic based points (age, sex, location), and interest being engagement levels. If both of these attributes are important to your organisation, it might be worth having a fit score and an engagement score.

Using HubSpot CRM to lead score

Creating a lead scoring system in HubSpot is really simple - Please bear in mind that HubSpot lead scoring is only available to those that have professional or enterprise accounts. 

You'll first need to head to settings > properties, and search for 'HubSpot Score'. Once you've clicked the property name, you'll be taken to a side bar where you can add criteria for positive and negative points, see the image below for reference.

Clicking 'Add criteria' will, if you hadn't already guessed, allow you to add the criteria that then justifies a score. You'll also be able to set how many points that criteria is worth, or how many points that criteria will deduct. From this window you'll also be able to test your score criteria with any contact of your choice. 

You can read full instructions on how to set up lead scoring in HubSpot here.

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All schools are different and will require bespoke lead scoring systems; if you you feel you may need assistance in setting up lead scoring for your education organisation just click the button below to book some time with one of our HubSpot agency UK experts.