Inevitably, you're going to need to measure how your contacts 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 contacts are really doing. The best part 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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Scoring overview

Before we begin, a little context. While using the Scoring feature itself is simple, 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 first, like opens and clicks.

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 contact, 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.

Create a Score

1. Access the Admin interface.
2. Navigate to Engagement > Scoring.

3. You can develop engagement scores for your members or clients, and separate scores for leads or prospects. Depending on the audience, click the Engagement tab or Lead tab before continuing.

4. For Step 1, you can either run scoring against ALL of your contacts or click Edit to select a specific Target Group.
5. For Step 2, click Edit for each letter grade.

6. Define whether your score is based on message activity metrics or Target Groups. Then, select either Use Email Metrics or Use a Target Group.

1. If basing on email metrics, configure the metrics using the available sliders.
2. If basing on Target Groups, select the desired Target Group from the available menus.

7. If you use an integrated database, basing your scoring off of Target Groups can help greatly when you want to score contacts on things that Communications Professional may not be tracking for you that your integrated database is.
8. Click Update.

View your scoring data

1. From the Admin interface, navigate to Contacts > Reports > Summary.

2. In both the Engagement Scoring and Lead Scoring folders, you can run several reports to view metrics for both your engagement and lead scoring.

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 any are, you may want to do more testing to see if there is an issue with that particular client (e.g., deliverability issues, etc.). This report is helpful for detecting problems that may not be noticed otherwise.