Mastering HubSpot Lead Scoring: Engaging Active Contacts, Not Newbies

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 website designers near me or anyone 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 jumped in with excellent advice, all pointing to the need to qualify contacts before applying inactivity scores. The core idea is simple: don't score someone for inactivity if they haven't had a fair chance to be active.

1. Using Fit Criteria and Create Date

One expert suggested leveraging HubSpot's 'fit score criteria' instead of purely engagement criteria for inactivity. For instance, you could use a criterion like "Last marketing email open date is more than 90 days ago." But crucially, this needs to be combined with other properties.

Another respondent emphasized adding criteria to ensure you're only scoring contacts who actually qualify. This means filtering by:

• Create Date: Ensure the contact was created more than X days ago (e.g., 90 days).
• Email Send-Related Property: Check if they've received a certain number of "Marketing emails delivered." This ensures they've actually been sent emails to engage with.

These two properties together create a powerful filter, making sure your inactivity score only applies to contacts who have been in your system and received communications for long enough to show engagement (or lack thereof).

2. Score Decay and Inclusion Lists

A top contributor brought up two other powerful HubSpot features:

• Score Decay: If you want to give points for opening an email and then have those points gradually decrease over time if no further engagement occurs, 'Score Decay' is your friend. It's built for this kind of dynamic scoring.
• Score Inclusion Lists: You can define specific lists of contacts that should (or shouldn't) be part of your scoring model. This offers another layer of control to ensure new contacts are excluded from negative scoring until they meet your engagement window criteria.

Refining Your Email Engagement Score Model

After receiving initial feedback, the original poster refined their scoring model. While they removed frequency-based negative categories, the overall structure aimed to reward positive engagement (opens, clicks, form submissions) and subtract for negative actions (unsubscribes) or inactivity (no opens/clicks). Here are some visual examples of their refined criteria:

The goals for this score were clear: (1) identify contacts for re-engagement campaigns, and (2) mark very low-scoring contacts as inactive for list hygiene. This is vital for maintaining good sender reputation and ensuring your messages reach engaged prospects, whether you're selling digital products or offering services like e-commerce website designers near me.

Simpler Paths and Advanced Considerations

While building a custom score is powerful, some experts suggested simpler alternatives. HubSpot's native properties like "Sends since last engagement" or a combination of "Last marketing email..." properties (open date, click date) can be used directly in segments for similar purposes. These can be incredibly efficient if your primary goal is just segmentation for re-engagement or removal, without needing a numerical score.

Another valuable piece of advice was to treat bounces, unsubscribes, and similar negative reasons differently. Instead of just subtracting points, consider moving these contacts to an active segment that serves as an exclusion list for your email campaigns. Your score could then subtract points based on membership in such an exclusion list, making your overall strategy more robust.

ESHOPMAN Team Comment

We absolutely agree with the community's emphasis on qualifying contacts before applying negative inactivity scores. Penalizing new leads is a rookie mistake that can skew your data and lead to missed opportunities. Leveraging HubSpot's native properties like 'Create Date' and 'Marketing emails delivered' in conjunction with custom scores or even just smart segments is the most effective approach. For e-commerce businesses, accurate engagement scoring is non-negotiable for targeted campaigns and maintaining a healthy customer database.

Ultimately, the best approach depends on your specific goals and HubSpot subscription level. If you need granular reporting and dynamic scoring, a custom score with proper qualification criteria is excellent. If simpler segmentation is enough, leveraging native properties in lists might be more efficient. Either way, the key is to ensure your engagement scores accurately reflect true engagement, not just a lack of opportunity.

Keep those leads engaged, and your HubSpot portal clean!