Prospects are the people your marketing targets. Someone who signs up for a newsletter becomes a Prospect so future campaigns can reach them.
Prospects are grouped into lists, and those lists drive Journeys and email campaigns. Where both Insightly Marketing and Insightly CRM are in use, Prospects can be related to a Contact or a Lead, and the CRM Connector can create a Prospect for every Lead or Contact automatically.
Two independent measures apply to every Prospect. A score measures intent and interest from what they do. A grade measures how closely they match your ideal client profile. They answer different questions and are configured separately.
On this page:
- The Prospect record
- Creating a Prospect
- Prospect actions
- Contact preferences and opt-outs
- Suppressing a Prospect
- Converting a Prospect
- Prospect sunsetting
- Prospect scoring
- Prospect profiles and grading
The Prospect record
Details holds contact information, scores, contact preferences and opt-out state.
Related holds lists, emails, related tickets and field history.
Timeline holds tracked activity:
- Browsing session, measuring engagement during a website visit.
- Email opens, clicks, deliveries and bounces, each hyperlinked through to the email record.
- Score adjustment, showing increases and decreases. Where a default and an additional scoring model both apply, both changes appear.
- Geographic location of where an action was performed.
- Form handler submissions, with the submitted data, hyperlinked to the form handler record.
- Zoom webinars registered for or attended. The Visitor Integration Activity Report gives the full attendance picture.
- Spam, where Insightly has identified spam activity.
- YouTube video engagement, capturing play, pause and end events on landing pages and tracked websites, with the title linking to the video.
Where a Prospect is linked to a Lead or Contact, the Timeline also shows related Opportunity information from the CRM.
ℹ️ Opens and clicks Insightly believes come from bots are filtered out and do not appear in the Timeline.
UTM touchpoints
The UTM Touchpoints related grid tracks content and social campaign performance. It can be added to Prospect, Lead and Contact records through page layouts, and is on Prospect records by default for new Marketing accounts. Existing accounts can reset the default Prospect page layout to pick it up.
Default fields: Visit ID (hyperlinked to a Website Visitor Report), Touchpoint Date, Referrer Source, Referrer Medium, UTM Network, UTM Medium, UTM Source, UTM Term, UTM Content, and GCLID.
Read-only API endpoints retrieve these touchpoints per Prospect, returning marketing visits newest first.
Creating a Prospect
From the Prospect object. Go to Prospects, click New Prospect, and complete the Add New Prospect popup. Email is the only required field, though filling in more is better. If custom scoring models exist, one can be applied in the Prospect Scoring section; otherwise the default model applies automatically. Save opens the new record; Save & New reloads the popup for another.
From the CRM Connector. Enabling Automatically Create Prospects in Insightly Marketing if they are Created as Leads or Contacts in Insightly CRM creates the matching Prospect whenever a Lead or Contact is created in the CRM.
ℹ️ With that connector setting on, information is agnostic between the two products. Updating a Contact in the CRM updates the corresponding Prospect automatically.
Prospect actions
Edit, clone and delete are reached either from the three-dot menu in the list view or from the Actions dropdown inside an open record.
Edit. Keeping records current is what keeps Prospects segmented into the right lists and graded correctly.
Clone. Creates a new Prospect with the same details, which is the quick path when adding several people from one company.
Delete. Confirmed through the Delete Prospect popup.
Contact preferences and opt-outs
⚠️ Respecting an unsubscribe or opt-out is a GDPR obligation. See also the CAN-SPAM and GDPR note on the Emails page.
Five fields on the Details tab manage this. They can be set manually or triggered by Prospect actions through Finish Actions.
| Field | Effect |
|---|---|
| Do Not Email | Suppresses all email to that address, even if the Prospect is on an active list. |
| Do Not Call | Records that the Prospect has asked not to be phoned. |
| Do Not Sync | The Prospect is not updated during a sync. |
| Opted Out | Effect depends on how it was triggered. See below. |
⚠️ Do Not Email can be set by the system, not just by a person. A hard bounce, or seven soft bounces, sets it automatically.
Opted Out behaves differently depending on origin
This is the part worth reading carefully, because the same field means three different things.
- Set manually. The Prospect receives no further emails at all.
- Unsubscribed from a Journey email, where the Journey’s Unsubscribe Applies To field is set to Prospect Record. The Prospect receives no further emails at all.
- Unsubscribed from an email campaign sent to a list. The Prospect is unsubscribed from that list only and continues receiving email for every other list they are on.
⚠️ A list-level unsubscribe does not stop your other campaigns. Someone who unsubscribes from one campaign keeps receiving mail from every other list containing them. If the intent is to stop contacting them entirely, that has to be handled separately, which is what suppression lists are for.
ℹ️ Unsubscribing through a Journey email marks the Prospect Opted Out, not Do Not Email.
⚠️ Opting out is sticky across list membership. A Prospect who opted out of a list, was removed from it, and is later added back retains the opt-out. Re-adding them does not reset it.
The best practice is to treat a suppression list as the reliable capture of everyone who does not want marketing communications.
Suppressing a Prospect
Add the Prospect to a static or dynamic list, then name that list in the Suppression Lists field when creating an email. Nobody on it receives that email.
Dynamic lists with filter criteria make this systematic. The source’s worked examples:
| To avoid | Dynamic list rule |
|---|---|
| Emailing Prospects you did not create | Filter by Created by User, Operator Not Equal To, Value your name |
| Emailing a Prospect too often | Filter by Email, Operator Less Than, Value 3 days |
| Emailing a particular geography | Filter by Country, Operator Equal To, Value Australia |
Converting a Prospect
Available where both Marketing and CRM are in use.
To a Lead, from the record. Open the Prospect, click Actions, select Convert to Lead, then enter Lead Status, Lead Owner, Lead Assignment and Lead Source, and click Save.
To a Lead, through a Journey. Add the Convert to Lead action step at the appropriate point in a Journey.
To a Contact, from the record. Open the Prospect, click Actions, select Convert to Contact, choose the Assign Contact Owner, and click Save.
To a Contact, through a Finish Action. See How to Use Finish Actions.
Prospect sunsetting
Sunsetting removes Prospects who have stopped engaging after a defined period, shifting from database-size marketing to engagement-driven marketing.
Two reasons it pays. Marketing is priced per Prospect, so unengaged records cost money. And continuing to mail uninterested people produces skewed engagement metrics, more spam complaints, and a higher chance of the sending IP being blacklisted.
Open and click rates identify candidates. Prospect Reports and Email Reports are where that data lives.
Prospect scoring
A score measures intent and interest, built from points assigned to each action a Prospect takes with your marketing assets. Scores move over time as behaviour changes, and a higher score indicates a Prospect more likely to move forward.
Scoring models let you track engagement both cumulatively and per product or business unit, which matters for a company selling more than one thing. The source’s example: a hardware company selling hammers and mallets, where downloading a hammer datasheet worth 10 points raises both the overall score and the hammer-specific score.
Scoring pairs with Finish Actions or Journey actions to move a Prospect to Sales automatically once they cross a threshold, with no manual step.
Plan limits
| Plan | Models | Rules |
|---|---|---|
| Plus | Default model only; additional models cannot be created | Up to 13 rules on the default model |
| Professional | Four additional models | Up to 15 rules per model |
| Enterprise | Nine additional models | Up to 15 rules per model |
The default model’s name and details cannot be edited on any plan.
Behaviour worth knowing before you configure it
⚠️ Only the very first email open or click counts toward a score. Repeat opens and clicks of the same email do not accumulate points.
⚠️ Setting a score, rather than adjusting it, is only possible on the degradation rule, and only to zero. Every other rule adds or subtracts.
Score updates are triggered by the action that caused them, and some actions take a while to be reflected.
Where a CRM Lead is linked to a Prospect, a read-only custom field called Score is created and mapped onto the Lead record. A System Administrator has to add it to the Lead Page Layout for anyone to see it.
⚠️ The Score field maps to Leads only. It cannot be mapped to Contacts, so a Prospect linked to a Contact has no visible score in the CRM.
Scoring model rules run in addition to any Finish Actions that adjust scores. Both execute.
The default scoring model
Every Prospect gets a score from the default model. It allows only one rule per action type, so Email Click can be added once and no more.
Edit it by clicking its name, then use Add Rule, the pen icon to edit, and the trashcan icon to delete.
ℹ️ Reset to Default, from the three-dot menu on the model, deletes every existing rule and restores the originals. There is no partial reset.
Rules and scopes
A rule decides when points are added or subtracted. Scope decides whether it fires on a specific asset or on any activity of that type.
| Rule | Scope |
|---|---|
| Prospect Opened Email | All emails, one email, or all emails in a folder. Suspected bot opens do not affect the score. |
| Prospect Clicked Email | All emails, one email, or all emails in a folder. Suspected bot clicks do not affect the score. |
| Prospect Form Handler Submit | All forms, one form, or all forms in a folder. |
| Prospect Landing Page Visit | Any landing page, one landing page, or a landing page in a folder. |
| Prospect Landing Page Form Submission | Fires when a form handler embedded in a landing page is submitted. Any landing page form, one form, or a landing page in a folder. |
| Opportunity Created | Any Opportunity created. A linked CRM Lead converted to an Opportunity counts. |
| Opportunity Lost | Any Opportunity marked Lost, including one created through the rule above. |
| Prospect Viewed Webpage | Any webpage or a specific URL. |
| Prospect Visited Website | A specific website registered through domain management. |
| Prospect Played YouTube Video | Any video or a specific one by YouTube video ID. |
| Prospect Clicked Redirect Link | Any redirect link, one link, or any in a folder. |
| Prospect Clicked Hosted File | Any hosted file, one file, or any in a folder. |
| Prospect Registered Zoom Webinar | Any webinar or one by Zoom Webinar ID. Only appears with the Zoom integration. |
| Prospect Attended Zoom Webinar | Any webinar or one by Zoom Webinar ID. Only appears with the Zoom integration. |
| Prospect Last Activity Older than X Days Ago | Checks the Timeline for days since last activity. Over the threshold, the score is set to zero. |
| Prospect Custom Event | Selects a custom event you have created. |
Creating a scoring model
- Click the user profile in the upper right and select System Settings.
- Under Feature Settings, select Prospect Scoring.
- Click Add Model.
- Enter the Scoring Model Name. The Prospect Score Field Label auto-populates from it and can be edited.
- Click Create Scoring Model.
- Open the new model by clicking its name and click Add Rule.
- In Rule Definition, select the rule type and scope, then define the score adjustment.
Prospect profiles and grading
Where scoring measures behaviour, grading measures fit. A profile defines an Ideal Client Profile, and the grade says how closely a Prospect matches it, from A+ down to F.
Available on Professional and Enterprise.
Every Prospect must have a profile and a grade. Accounts ship with a Default profile assigned automatically on creation. It has no rules until you add them, and its name cannot be edited although its default grade can.
Assigning a profile applies its default grade first, then calculates the rules to reach the final grade.
ℹ️ Grade changes appear within five minutes of an edit. Adding, modifying or deleting a rule recalculates every assigned Prospect from the profile’s default grade upward.
⚠️ The Grade field is read-only. It can only be calculated from the assigned profile’s rules, never set directly.
Creating a profile
- Click the user profile, select System Settings, and under Feature Settings select Prospect Profiles.
- Click Add Profiles.
- Enter a unique name and the default score, then click Save.
- Click Add Rule.
- Name the rule and click Add Filter Row under Rules Criteria to define the parameters.
- Set the Grade Adjustment.
- Click Save Rule.
Grade Adjustment offers three options:
- Increment Profile Grade, by 1/3, 2/3 or a full grade.
- Decrement Profile Grade, by the same amounts.
- Set Profile Grade, applying a specific grade.
⚠️ Multiple increment or decrement rules are AND, not OR. Where several rules would increment the grade, it only increases if the Prospect meets every one of their criteria. The same applies to decrements. A Prospect matching two of three rules gets no adjustment at all.
Worked examples
| Goal | Rules |
|---|---|
| Raise the grade for Prospects in the United States working in manufacturing | Rule 1: Field Country, Operator Equals, Value United States, Grade Adjustment Increment Profile Grade. Rule 2: Field Industry, Operator Equals, Value Manufacturing, Grade Adjustment Increment Profile Grade. |
| Grade on company size | Rule 1: Field Employee Count, Operator Greater than, Value 50, Grade Adjustment Set Profile Grade. |
Assigning, editing and deleting profiles
Assign. Open the Prospect record, click the pen icon beside the Profile field in the Prospect Scoring section, select the profile, and click the blue checkmark.
Edit. Under System Settings > Feature Settings > Prospect Profiles, open the profile. The Edit button in the upper right changes name and default grade. Rules are edited with the pen icon, deleted with the trashcan icon, and added with Add Rule.
Delete. From the three-dot menu on the profile, select Delete This Prospect Profile.
⚠️ Deleting a profile reassigns every Prospect on it to Default and recalculates their grades. Grades built up under the deleted profile’s rules are gone.