Inevitably, you're going to need to measure how your subscribers are engaging with your organization's messaging. You might start by reviewing a mailing activity report or the Mailing Summary report, and while these are great and logical starting points, there's even more you can do.

You can use Scoring to obtain calibrated measurements about how your subscribers are really doing. What's great about this feature is you can start off simple and then evolve your approach over time. The more you learn, the more you can refine the Scoring mechanism.

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Define scoring criteria

Before we begin, a little context. While using the Scoring feature itself is very straight forward, the more challenging aspect of the process is what criteria you want to use to develop your score. To get started quickly, you may just want to use some standard mailing activity metrics, like opens and clicks. That's a great start!

If you want to take it to the next level, you can use Target Groups that represent the behaviors you're basing your grade on. For example, if length of membership, number of committees served on, and total dues paid is how you rate a subscriber, then create the appropriate Target Groups with that field criteria. You'll then have to add in the value, per field, to get the appropriate weighting. For example, an "A" score may require 10 years, 5 committees, and >$1,000 dues but a "C" requires 3 years, 1 committee, and >$500 in dues.

1. Navigate to Marketing Automation > Scoring.
2. Click Edit for each letter grade.

3. Understand whether your score is based on mailing activity metrics or Target Groups. Then, select either Use Email Metrics or Use a Target Group.

4. Complete the fields in the section and click Update.

If you use an integrated database, basing your scoring off of Target Groups can help greatly when you want to score subscribers on things that the system may not be tracking for you that your integrated database is.

You can develop engagement scores for your members or clients, and separate scores for leads or prospects.

View your scoring data

1. Navigate to Subscribers > Search.
2. Click Reports to view various reports that make use of the scoring metrics you've created.

By persona

If you've created personas, you can look at the Engagement or Lead scoring By Persona. The scoring grid provides a great visual representation of how each persona is performing based on the metric you set. The darker the green square the larger the number of people in that grade for that persona.

By email client

When you look at the scoring by Email Client, you can spot any email clients that seem to be under performing. If there are under performing email clients, you may want to do more testing to see if there is an issue with that particular client (e.g., deliverability issues). The point is, you can take some cues from this information to detect problems that otherwise might not be noticed.

Scoring best practice

While setting Scoring metrics take a little time and thought initially, they help you assess if they are interacting in the way you had hoped.

Revisit & reconsider scoring metrics

From time to time, revisit your Scoring metrics to ensure they're still providing the best over-all picture of your subscriber base.

Over time, your Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional) bench-marking may update and change. Make sure that you're reflecting those changes with your scoring metrics (if you based scoring criteria off of opens and clicks). Also, be mindful of your scoring reports. If most of your subscribers are under-performing, you may need to relax the criteria on which you are scoring them to make it more realistic. In turn, if you see everyone scoring with an "A" letter grade, you may want to make your scoring criteria more aggressive. Identify new areas for your subscribers to improve in how they interact with you, and build scoring metrics that will realistically measure that.