Mastering HubSpot Email Engagement Scoring: A Guide for E-commerce Success

Hey there, ESHOPMAN readers! As experts deeply embedded in the HubSpot ecosystem and the world of e-commerce, we often see common challenges pop up in the HubSpot Community that resonate with so many of you. One recent discussion caught our eye, focusing on a crucial aspect of nurturing leads: building an email engagement score that truly reflects a contact's activity, without penalizing new prospects.

It’s a classic scenario: you want to identify contacts who are truly disengaged, maybe to run a re-engagement campaign or clean up your lists. But how do you do that without giving a brand-new lead a negative score just because they haven't had a chance to open your emails yet? Let's dive into the insights shared by the community and distill the best practices for your HubSpot portal.

The Challenge: Scoring Inactivity Without Penalizing New Leads

The original poster in the HubSpot Community thread laid out a common dilemma. They wanted to build an email engagement score that would subtract points if a contact hadn't opened or clicked an email in 90 days. Sounds logical, right? The hitch was, this negative score was being applied to brand new contacts who had just been added, giving them a false negative engagement score before they even had a chance to engage. This is a critical issue for any business, especially for e-commerce operators trying to nurture new inbound leads without immediately labeling them 'cold'.

Here’s a snapshot of what they were seeing:

The Community's Smart Solutions: Qualifying Contacts First

Several community members quickly jumped in with valuable advice, emphasizing the importance of adding specific criteria to ensure only qualified contacts are scored. The core idea is to prevent your scoring model from penalizing contacts who haven't had a fair chance to engage.

Leveraging HubSpot's Scoring Flexibility

One expert suggested using "fit score criteria" rather than solely engagement criteria. This approach allows you to define conditions that a contact must meet before certain scoring rules apply. For instance, a rule like "Last marketing email open date is more than 90 days ago" would only apply to contacts who have actually received and had the opportunity to open emails.

Another helpful tip was to filter by "Create Date" alongside an email send-related property like "Marketing emails delivered". This combination ensures that only contacts who have been in your system for a sufficient period (e.g., 90 days) AND have actually received at least one marketing email are subject to inactivity scoring. This is a fundamental step in building an effective lead scoring model that accurately reflects engagement for your e-commerce storefront.

Further insights from the community highlighted advanced HubSpot features:

• Score Decay: This powerful feature automatically reduces a contact's score over time if they become inactive, providing a dynamic and self-adjusting engagement score.
• Score Inclusion Lists: You can create specific lists of contacts to include or exclude from your scoring model, giving you granular control over who gets scored and how. This is particularly useful for segmenting new leads from long-term contacts.

Defining Your Email Engagement Goals

Before diving into the technical setup, it's crucial to define the purpose of your email engagement score. The original poster clarified their goals:

1. To sort contacts by email score for targeted re-engagement campaigns.
2. To identify contacts with a very low score (-50 to -100) as inactive, eventually removing them from all mailings for better list hygiene.

These are excellent, actionable goals that any e-commerce business can benefit from. Whether you're focused on building ecommerce website with elementor or optimizing an existing HubSpot-powered storefront, an accurate engagement score is a cornerstone of effective customer relationship management.

Building a Robust Email Engagement Scoring Model in HubSpot

Let's outline a comprehensive approach to setting up your email engagement score in HubSpot, incorporating the community's best practices and ESHOPMAN's e-commerce expertise.

Step 1: Define Positive Engagement Actions

Assign points for actions that indicate interest and engagement. For e-commerce, these might include:

• Marketing Email Opened: +5 points
• Marketing Email Clicked: +10 points
• Form Submission: +15 points (e.g., newsletter signup, product inquiry)
• Website Page View (specific pages like product pages, cart): +3 points
• Product Added to Cart: +20 points

Step 2: Define Negative Engagement (Inactivity)

This is where the original poster faced their challenge. The key is to apply these negative points only to qualified contacts.

• No Marketing Email Opened in 90 Days: -15 points
• No Marketing Email Clicked in 90 Days: -15 points
• Unsubscribed from All Emails: -50 points (or move to an exclusion list)
• Hard Bounce: -100 points (or remove from list/mark as invalid)

Step 3: Implement Crucial Qualification Filters

To prevent new contacts from being unfairly penalized, add these conditions to your negative scoring rules:

IF Contact Property: "Create Date" is more than 90 days ago
AND Contact Property: "Marketing emails delivered" is greater than 0
AND Contact Property: "Last marketing email send date" is known

By applying these filters, your "no open/click in 90 days" rule will only affect contacts who have been in your system long enough and have actually received emails to engage with. This ensures your score truly reflects disengagement, not just newness.

Step 4: Leverage Score Decay for Dynamic Scoring

HubSpot's score decay feature is perfect for automatically reducing points for ongoing inactivity. Instead of creating multiple "no engagement in X days" rules, you can set up a decay rule that reduces the score by a certain amount (e.g., 5 points) every 30 days if there's no email engagement. This keeps your score current without manual adjustments.

Step 5: Utilize Inclusion/Exclusion Lists and Other Properties

As a community member suggested, consider creating an active segment for your email campaigns that automatically excludes contacts who have unsubscribed or hard bounced. Your score could then use list membership as an event criterion to subtract points or simply prevent scoring altogether.

For a truly holistic view, especially for an e-commerce business, consider incorporating non-email engagement properties:

• Recent conversion date: Indicates a purchase or other key action.
• Last seen: Tracks website activity.
• Page views: Shows interest in your products or content.
• Product views: Direct indicator of shopping interest.

This comprehensive approach ensures your engagement score goes beyond just email, reflecting a contact's full interaction with your brand. For businesses seeking the best online shop creator experience, integrating these insights from your storefront (like those provided by ESHOPMAN) directly into HubSpot is invaluable.

Why a Custom Score is Powerful for E-commerce

While HubSpot offers native properties like "Sends since last engagement," a custom email engagement score provides more granular control and reporting capabilities, as the original poster noted. For e-commerce businesses, the ability to define specific point values for various actions and inactions allows for a highly tailored approach to:

• Targeted Re-engagement: Easily identify contacts on the cusp of disengagement and enroll them in specific workflows.
• List Hygiene: Automate the process of identifying and segmenting truly inactive contacts, improving email deliverability and reducing costs.
• Personalized Campaigns: Use engagement scores to segment contacts for highly personalized product recommendations or offers, boosting conversion rates.
• Sales Handoff: Provide sales teams with a clear indicator of a contact's email interest before outreach.

For those looking for a robust free PrestaShop alternative, HubSpot's comprehensive marketing automation capabilities, combined with a well-structured engagement score, offer unparalleled power for growth and customer retention.

Conclusion

Building an effective email engagement score in HubSpot is a powerful strategy for any e-commerce business looking to optimize its marketing efforts and maintain a healthy contact database. By carefully defining positive and negative engagement, implementing crucial qualification filters, and leveraging HubSpot's advanced features like score decay, you can create a dynamic scoring model that accurately reflects your contacts' interest without penalizing new leads.

At ESHOPMAN, we understand the intricacies of integrating your e-commerce operations with HubSpot to drive maximum value. Implementing smart engagement scoring is just one way to ensure your storefront and marketing efforts are perfectly aligned. Ready to take your HubSpot e-commerce strategy to the next level? Explore how ESHOPMAN can enhance your built-in storefront today!