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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Create a Score

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

3. You can develop engagement scores for your members, and then develop separate scores for your leads. Depending on which you're creating, click the Engagement tab or the Lead tab to continue.

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

6. Decide whether your scoring is based on message activity metrics or Target Groups, then select:

• Use Email Metrics and configure the metrics using the available sliders, or
• Use a Target Group and select a folder and Target Group from the dropdowns.

7. Click Update.

NOTE: If you're integrated with an AMS/CRM database, it's beneficial to use Target Groups as the basis for your scoring because you can track activities that your integrated database may not be tracking.

View your Scoring reports

1. Navigate to Contacts > Reports > Summary.

2. In the Engagement Scoring and Lead Scoring folders, you can run several reports to view metrics for 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 greater 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 (such as deliverability issues). This report is helpful for detecting problems that otherwise may not be noticed.

Scoring best practices

Over time, your bench-marking may change. Make sure that you're reflecting any of 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. Conversely, 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.