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<p><em>Solution Recipes are tutorials to achieve specific objectives in Klaviyo. They can also help you master Klaviyo, learn new third-party technologies, and come up with creative ideas. They are written mainly for developers & technically-advanced users.</em></p>
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<p>Lead scoring is ranking prospects based on their likelihood to convert into paying customers. Assigning numerical values to specific behaviors, attributes, and engagement signals helps marketing and sales teams prioritize their efforts on the people most ready to buy.</p>
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<p><strong><em>Note:</em></strong><em>We do our best to make sure any code and API references are accurate and current when this is published, but you might need to update code and it’s always a best practice to leverage our</em><a><em>latest API versions</em></a><em>. If you have questions, feel free to hop over to our</em><a><em>Developer Community</em></a><em>.</em></p>
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<p>Similar to dynamic segmentation, lead scoring creates dynamic rankings that change as prospects interact with your brand. Someone who opens every email, visits your pricing page, and downloads a product guide, for example, gets a higher score than someone who signed up for your newsletter 6 months ago and hasn't engaged since.</p>
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<p>What you’ll learn</p>
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<p>Lead scoring is traditionally used for B2B companies, in which buyers are spending a lot more money for software or services. However, some B2C brands, especially those that sell higher-ticket items, such as furniture, can also use lead scoring.</p>
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<p>How to utilize flow webhooks in order to achieve customized lead scoring in Klaviyo.</p>
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<p>For those B2C brands, lead scoring helps you allocate marketing resources more thoughtfully. Identifying high-intent shoppers allows you to deliver personalized experiences that match their readiness to purchase. This approach helps make sure your most engaged prospects get the attention they deserve, and avoid investing resources into people who aren't ready to take the next step.</p>
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<p>Why it matters</p>
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<h2><strong>Why lead scoring matters</strong></h2>
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<p>First, let’s start with a functional definition of lead scoring. TechTarget <a>defines</a> lead scoring as:<em>a methodology used by sales and marketing departments to determine the worthiness of <a>leads</a>, or potential customers, by attaching values to them based on their behavior relating to their interest in products or services</em></p>
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<p>Consumers interact with brands across multiple touchpoints before making a purchase. They browse products, sign up for emails, engage on social media, and compare options over days or weeks. Measuring and ranking these interactions makes it possible to determine which prospects are close to buying and which are just casually browsing, then segment your marketing lists and personalize your messaging accordingly.</p>
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<p>Why might this be useful? As most marketers are aware, customizing one’s messaging based on the behavior of their potential customers can lead to higher conversion rates. In this context, it’s a common practice to modify communications to a potential purchaser based on what stage of the purchasing journey they’re currently in. For instance: Have they only just started browsing your site, or have they been actively engaged with your brand for weeks on end, and are imminently close to making a decision? If a prospect is just starting their buying quest, you may want to target them with informational content so that they can narrow their search, whereas if they’re on the precipice of buying, you may want to incentivize them with a time-bound offer.</p>
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<p>Lead scoring also helps by creating a unified view of prospect engagement. It takes signals from across the customer journey (like email opens, website visits, product views, and cart activity) and combines them into a single score that reflects purchase intent.</p>
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<p>Now that we’ve identified our goal of determining the purchasing stage of potential buyers, the question becomes how we can most accurately quantify this stage. This is where lead scoring can benefit us - say we’ve resolved that a prospective customer signing up for an email list, reading a blog post, visiting a product page, and beginning a checkout are all indicative of interest in purchasing. Rather than creating a <a>segment</a> for every possible permutation of the above in order to assign your profiles a stage in the purchasing funnel, an easier way to accomplish this is to simply assign lead-score points for the above actions, and add them to a user’s profile as they occur.</p>
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<p>Finally, every brand has limited marketing resources, and lead scoring also helps you direct those resources where they'll have the greatest impact. Brands that identify and prioritize their best prospects often run more efficient programs and start relationships on a stronger footing.</p>
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<p>This approach also allows you to weight certain actions more heavily than others. For example, if we think that viewing a blog article indicates a higher level of buying interest than signing up for a marketing newsletter, we can assign 3 points to the former, and 2 to the latter. When it finally comes time to target our users with distinctive messaging, we can divvy them up into tiers based on the number of points they have. For instance, 0-5 points might indicate mild/early interest, 5-10 points might indicate moderate interest, and 10+ points might indicate heavy buying interest.</p>
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<h2><strong>Benefits of lead scoring</strong></h2>
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<p>Level of sophistication</p>
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<p>Lead scoring offers practical advantages for marketing teams looking to work more efficiently and create more relevant experiences, including:</p>
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<p>Moderate</p>
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<ul><li><strong>Prioritized marketing efforts:</strong>Lead scoring highlights which prospects are showing the strongest buying signals, so your team can focus attention where and when it's most likely to make a difference.</li>
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<h2>Prerequisite</h2>
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<li><strong>More efficient resource allocation:</strong>Matching your marketing investment to prospect quality helps you avoid over-investing in low-intent contacts.</li>
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<p>Similar to our most recent <a>solution recipe</a>, this recipe builds upon <a><strong>Solution Recipe 10: Use webhooks in flows to send additional event and profile data into Klaviyo</strong></a>. I would highly suggest reading it, in order to familiarize yourself with using webhooks in flows to call Klaviyo’s APIs.</p>
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<li><strong>Improved personalization:</strong>Lead scores provide context for personalization. A high-scoring prospect might receive a direct offer, for example, while a lower-scoring contact gets educational content to build interest over time.</li>
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<p>Because this recipe uses webhook flow actions, you will need to enable <a>two-step authentication</a> on your Klaviyo account.</p>
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<li><strong>Better alignment between marketing and sales:</strong>Lead scoring creates a shared language for discussing prospect quality and helps sales efforts focus on the most qualified opportunities.</li>
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<h2>Instructions</h2>
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<li><strong>Quicker follow-ups and smoother handoffs:</strong>Identifying high-intent prospects early makes it easier to respond promptly and maintain momentum in the buying journey.</li>
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<h3>Step 1: Build a flow</h3>
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</ul><h2><strong>Key components of an effective lead scoring system</strong></h2>
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<p>This step might look different depending on whether you want to add points to a profile only on the first occurrence of an event, or on every occurrence of that event. Using a “Viewed Product” event as our example, setting up a flow under the first scenario would first require setting up a segment with the following definition, and then triggering your flow off of a profile joining that <a>segment</a>:</p>
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<p>Effective lead scoring relies on several core elements to create an accurate picture of prospect quality, including:</p>
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<p>For the second scenario, you could simply create a <a>metric-triggered</a> flow off of the “Viewed Product” event. Note that you’ll need to create one of these flows for every event that you want to add lead-score points for.</p>
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<ul><li><strong>Behavioral signals:</strong>Actions like email opens, link clicks, website visits, product page views, and cart additions indicate active interest and purchase intent.</li>
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<h3>Step 2: Add the webhook</h3>
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<li><strong>Demographic data:</strong>Attributes like location, age, and gender help determine whether a prospect fits your ideal customer profile.</li>
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<p>The webhook is actually quite simple in this case: You’re going to be sending a request to the <a>Identify API</a>, that takes the current number of lead-score points for the given user, and adds the amount they’ve earned for the action they’ve just completed. Here’s what that looks like as a JSON body:</p>
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<li><strong>Recency and frequency:</strong>Group customers by recency, frequency, and monetary value to identify your most valuable segments and those at risk of churning.</li>
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{ "token": "[public key]", "properties": { "$email": "{{ person.email }}", "Lead_Score": {{ person|lookup:'Lead_Score'|default:0|add:'2'}} } }<p>In the above, you can see that we’re looking up the “Lead_Score” profile property, but are defaulting to a total of “0” if the user moving through the flow doesn’t have that property. Afterwards, we simply add the amount of points we feel this particular action is worth (2 in this case), and update (or create) the “Lead_Score” property. Note that we’re able to either create <em>or </em>update a profile property due to the flexibility of Klaviyo’s <a>data model</a>.</p>
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<li><strong>Negative scoring:</strong>Not all actions indicate buying intent. Unsubscribes or extended inactivity can decrease a lead score and signal that someone isn't a good fit.</li>
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<h3>Step 3: Use lead scoring in your campaigns and flows</h3>
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<li><strong>Score thresholds:</strong>Defined cutoff points trigger specific actions, like moving a high-scoring lead into a targeted campaign or flagging them for personalized outreach.</li>
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<p>Once you’ve started tracking lead-score points, it’s relatively easy to start using them in campaigns and flows. Below is one example of how you can use lead scoring as part of a <a>browse-abandonment flow</a>, but the possibilities are endless. For example, if you’re using <a>Klaviyo for SMS</a> you may want to target your higher lead-score contacts with a text - since SMS is a higher-converting, but more expensive channel.</p>
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</ul><h2><strong>How to build a lead scoring model</strong></h2>
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<h2>Final thoughts</h2>
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<p>Creating an effective lead scoring model requires understanding your customers and mapping their journey to purchase. Here's how to get started:</p>
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<p>Lead scoring can be a valuable tool, in terms of allowing you to both more accurately target your users, and visualize their intent to purchase. Although the types of Klaviyo customers most likely to benefit from lead scoring are those with a more sales-oriented or low-volume/high average ticket-price business, any marketer can benefit from the principles outlined above. That being said, effective lead scoring takes a lot of tinkering and iterating to get right, so feel free to use this guide more as a broad overview than a canonical resource. Happy scoring!</p>
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<h3><strong>Step 1: Define your ideal customer profile</strong></h3>
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<p>Start by identifying the characteristics of your best customers. Look at purchase history, engagement patterns, and demographic data to understand what high-value customers have in common. This becomes the benchmark against which you score new prospects.</p>
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<h3><strong>Step 2: Identify scoring criteria</strong></h3>
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<p>Determine which behaviors and attributes indicate purchase intent for your business. Common scoring criteria include:</p>
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<ul><li>Website activity: pages visited, time on site, return visits</li>
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<li>Form engagement: views, submission rates</li>
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<li>Email and SMS engagement: opens, clicks, replies</li>
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<li>Product interactions: views, wishlist additions, cart activity</li>
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<li>Social media interactions</li>
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</ul><h3><strong>Step 3: Assign point values</strong></h3>
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<p>Not all actions carry equal weight. Assign higher point values to behaviors that strongly correlate with conversion, like adding items to a cart or visiting your check-out page. Lower-value actions, like opening an email, still contribute to the overall score but indicate earlier-stage interest.</p>
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<h3><strong>Step 4: Set score thresholds and actions</strong></h3>
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<p>Define what happens when a lead reaches a certain score range. Consider these examples:</p>
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<ul><li><strong>0-25 points:</strong>new or low-engagement lead. Add to nurture sequence.</li>
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<li><strong>26-50 points:</strong>warming lead. Increase email frequency with relevant content.</li>
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<li><strong>51-75 points:</strong>engaged lead. Trigger targeted product recommendations.</li>
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<li><strong>76+ points:</strong>hot lead. Send a personalized offer or high-priority campaign.</li>
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</ul><h3><strong>Step 5: Test and refine</strong></h3>
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<p>The most effective lead scoring models evolve as you learn more about your customers. Monitor how well your scores reflect actual buying readiness through conversion tracking and adjust point values and thresholds based on real engagement patterns.</p>
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<h2><strong>Lead scoring best practices</strong></h2>
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<p>Follow these guidelines to get the most from your lead scoring efforts:</p>
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<ul><li><strong>Start simple.</strong>Begin with a basic model using 5-10 scoring criteria, then add complexity as you learn what predicts conversion for your business.</li>
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<li><strong>Weight actions appropriately.</strong>Give higher scores to behaviors that directly indicate purchase intent, like cart additions or check-out page visits, vs. more passive engagement like email opens.</li>
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<li><strong>Include decay factors.</strong>Reduce scores over time for inactive leads. A prospect who was highly engaged 6 months ago but hasn't interacted since shouldn't maintain a high score.</li>
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<li><strong>Segment by score ranges.</strong>Create distinct segments for different score levels and tailor your messaging strategy to each group's readiness to buy.</li>
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<li><strong>Review and adjust regularly.</strong>Analyze which scores actually lead to productive relationships and refine your model based on real data, not assumptions.</li>
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<li><strong>Combine with<a>predictive analytics</a>.</strong>Pair lead scoring with predictive tools that forecast customer lifetime value, churn risk, and expected order dates for more precise targeting.</li>
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</ul><p>Lead scoring helps you prioritize and engage prospects, turning scattered engagement data into clear signals that support more timely, relevant outreach.</p>
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<p>Ready to focus your marketing on the leads most likely to convert?<a>Get started</a>with Klaviyo today.</p>
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