Lead scoring is an automatic dynamic scoring system that uses point values to provide insight into the engagement level of your contacts. The more a contact engages with your assets, the higher the point value they’ll have — giving a clear signal to your sales team that they’re highly interested in what you’re offering. In this article, you’ll learn how to set up your own lead scoring system in Ontraport.

Lead scoring is available for users with Ontraport Plus accounts and above.

Getting Started With Lead Scoring

Before you set up your lead scoring system in Ontraport, it’s important to understand the logic behind the values. There are two different types of information you can use to assign scores to contacts:

Explicit information is data about your contacts, such as their job title, city of residence, or business type that you have stored in contact records. You can assign point values based on factors that typically indicate qualified leads for your product. For example, if you know people with executive-level job titles are more likely to buy your product, you might give 10 points to anyone who is a CEO.

Behavioral information is the actions people take within your marketing — clicks on your web pages, form fill outs, purchases, email opens, text responses. Ontraport uses these actions as “Scoring Conditions” that you will assign a value to. For example, you can award 3 points to a prospect for clicking a link in an email you sent out, 10 for visiting your pricing page, or 20 for purchasing a membership to your website.

Setting Up Lead Scoring

  • Go to  the contacts collection → Settings → the lead scoring selection option.
  • Create Contact Scoring Conditions by clicking the orange add button.
  • Select a condition from the dropdown menu which appears.
  • Assign a point value (score) to the condition.
  • Set the score degradation, a percentage value of how much a contact’s accumulated score should go down in one day.
  • Click the blue save button.

Using Lead Scoring

Once lead scoring is set up, you can:

  1. Sort your contact list by lead score so you can easily see your leads with the highest scores and take action.
  2. Add contacts to different automation maps based on their lead score. For example, you may want to send specific offers or follow-up messaging to those with high lead scores. To add these contacts to an automation map, create triggers or goals based on the “Score is Updated” or “Score is [X Number]” conditions.

How lead score percentages and numbers are calculated

It’s important to understand the difference between the lead score percentage vs. the raw lead score.

You may notice the percentage shows up next to each contact’s lead score in your contact list. The purpose of the percentage is to give you the relative importance of that contact’s score.

The score percentage is based on the median score. The contact with the highest score gets 100%, the median score gets 50% and the rest of the scores between the median and the top are weighted to reflect that smaller range of values. A similar calculation is used for scores below the median but still above 0.

The raw lead score number is rounded to a whole number, but behind the scenes the real lead score number is a decimal value, and the percentage is calculated using this real number. This means you may see contacts with the same numerical lead score but with slightly different percentages.

Using Manual Lead Scoring

If you would like to add the ability to manually add to the lead scoring in your account, you can do it with two numeric fields and a little math. Your team can use the field “Manual Lead Score” to manually adjust the lead score based upon customer interactions, and “Adjusted Lead Score” can be used as a guide to see who needs to be reached out to.

  • Create two numeric fields: “Manual Lead Score” and “Adjusted Lead Score.”
  • Go to Contacts → Automations → new automation → Start from scratch.
  • Name your automation map “Manual Lead Score.”
  • Click plus icon → + Add Trigger A Field is Updated → Select “Manual Lead Score.”
    1. In settings, change “If Contact is already on map, then…” to → “Move here when triggered.”
    2. Click Done.
  • Click what happens next icon → add Update Contact → Click Update Contact.
    1. Click Insert Merge Field and select Manual Lead Score.
    2. Add “+” after [Manual Lead Score].
    3. Click Insert Merge Field and select Score.
    4. Click done.

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  • Add an ends to all “What Happens Next?” elements → click publish → Save and Publish.
Pro tips
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Tip #1. Setting up score degradation will lower scores based on inactivity each day so that they reflect real-time engagement and reward recent activity.

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Tip #2. Ontraport doesn’t degrade scores that are based on contact field values (explicit information). That’s because the CEO is probably still the CEO five months from now, so that score should remain. But activity (behavioral information) scores do degrade; that’s any score that comes from something like a webpage visit, a link click or email open.