Collecting website visitor data provides unparalleled opportunities to reach out to your potential target audience. We know that 96% of visitors to your website are never likely return, so if your not gathering visitor data, then expect them to take their business elsewhere. In this article we demonstrate 10 reasons why you should collect website data.
- Have you heard of Reciprocal Marketing? If you collect visitor data then you open up a new world of attracting customers. Reciprocal marketing is where you align yourself with other organisations and promote one another’s offers and promotions to a shared audience. Without hard-core names, addresses, twitter followers etc, you have very little leverage when it comes to trying to convince another organisation to promote your services. You need to have a similar number of impressions for both parties to gain from the reciprocation.
- Remarketing. On average you need to communicate your business and offers to potential customers 5 times, until they are likely to make a purchase. If you are not collecting website visitor data, then your potential customers are simply purchasing elsewhere.
- Collecting website visitor data allows you to align your offers and promotions. Simple, but clever websites monitor visitor flow through the use of Google analytics or other software and develop specific content that reaches out to users based on where they are in the buyers journey. This alignment allows them to capture visitor data in full knowledge of where they fit within this journey. This then allows them to undertake bespoke remarketing, rather than generic remarketing communications. Related articles: How to turn a stranger into a customer and create landing pages that generate leads
- Feedback about Products and Services. Collecting data isn’t always about new customers, if you have content on your website such as user guides or product information, this appeals to existing customers. Website visitors think very differently to organisations and will often make recommendations to improving products and making suggestions towards new products or services. Collecting data on these pages really aides research and development.
- It will reduce your marketing costs. Collecting website data and using remarketing techniques is 61% cheaper per lead, than when you try and attract new customers via the use of traditional outbound marketing: Source Hubspot
More about Reciprocal Marketing
Data collection (email addresses, names etc) for the purpose of Reciprocal Marketing is as good as currency for marketers and forward thinking organisations. Reciprocal Marketing comes in many forms and disguises, but ultimately it’s about working with other like-minded organisations whom share a similar target audience. For example, let’s say you have a Police Recruitment business and you specialise in helping individuals join the Police service as Police Officers. You have a database of over 1000 customers and even more data from individuals interested in joining. Police Officers require specialist footwear which is NOT supplied as part of their uniform and they have to purchase these themselves. There are of course many types of footwear that they can purchase, but one in particular is manufactured by a company called Magnum. Now there are many suppliers of such boots, ranging from ScrewFix, Millets and PatrolStore. ScrewFix are probably unlikely to want to reciprocate any offers or promotions, because they are a very big company, they primarily sell DIY and construction products (rather than footwear) and the deal would be perhaps too one-sided because of their vast customer database. However, that doesn’t mean we should approach them. We would however, probably have more success with forging a reciprocal marketing partnership with Millets or the PatrolStore.
So, what tactics could we use to approach them? Well, the digital age means that many of the methods we can deploy cost very little. For example, the Police Recruitment firm have a website where they sell electronic downloads. These downloads comprise of automated emails that are sent to the customer on purchase. It would be very easy to include Magnum boot special offers or discounts into the email from Millets or the PatrolStore. In return, they would reciprocate Police Recruitment offers via their electronic interface or similar.
Reciprocal Marketing is not all about automated emails. There is plenty of scope to roll out communications via newsletters, all emails, print material and links on websites. The only thing I would say about links, is that if you do this, these are tactics that can easily be identified and duplicated by your competitors. Whereas, the other methods are more stealth like and less likely to be discovered.
A simple example of Reciprocal Marketing. Within my emails I promote the services of a product and advertising photographer which is reciprocated.
More about Remarketing
As we outlined in the very first paragraph in this article, 96% of visitors to your website are unlikely to return. Without data collection, you cannot remarket yourself to these visitors. You need to be capturing at the very minimum their email address, but how much data you can capture will depend on just how much leverage your offers and promotions give you. For example, if in exchange for their email address you are giving them some kind of electronic download that plugs a knowledge gap, this perhaps has less leverage than say a 50% off offer. Such an offer would allow you also to capture their name, contact phone number etc. The real point here is that your website must collect personal data if you are going to convert some of that 96% traffic into leads and customers. You cannot afford for such a huge amount of traffic to just go by the wayside, when in reality data collection and remarketing would make your business much more profitable.
More about Aligning Offers and Promotions
This topics goes hand in hand with Remarketing. We mentioned above the “buyers Journey” – there are many reasons why visitors would land on your website and despite popular belief, most are not ready to make a purchase on their first visit. Because of this, your website content and pages should be aligned with the various stages of the buyers journey. Your remarketing efforts will primarily focus on driving visitors to the next stage of their journey, until ultimately, they are in a position to make a purchase. The key is to continually move them through the journey, and one way to do this is to produce content that acts as a leverage, whereby they exchange their personal data for such content. If you collect personal data along the journey, this will enable you to align content, offers and promotions accordingly. For example if a visitor lands on your website and they have a specific problem that they are trying to resolve, they are very much in the information gathering stage, and would appreciate more information that would help them solve their issue. At this time, it perhaps would not be best to send them offers or reductions – they are not yet ready to buy. What would be better would be to provide them more information about how your product would solve their issues, or some kind of product comparison and why your product is better than others. This would then naturally lead onto price and promotions.
Feedback
This topic is relatively straightforward and should come as common sense to most. Feedback can come from two groups a) non customers and b) customers. Let’s deal with existing customers first. Having an area on your website dedicated to your existing customers will add value to your services or products. User guides and demonstrations are a real source of useful information for customers, plus it enables them to comment on product or service improvements. Collecting data at this point, will give you an insight into how many of your customers are using your products or services, and it will enable you to market new services or products in the future. Plus of course, you can implement a customer satisfaction survey and collect such data. This will give you the opportunity to address any issues.
Non customers will typically tell you more about their issues and this is very useful for research and development. Customers can sometimes find it difficult to find solutions to their problems, even if you think you have the easiest website in the world to navigate. Seeking their feedback will enable you to direct them to the right place.
Reduce Marketing Costs
Capturing website visitor data will reduce your marketing costs period… It’s far cheaper to implement an effective remarketing strategy than it is to deploy traditional marketing. I am not saying that you shouldn’t pursue traditional marketing methods, but without hesitation, we can tell you that by implementing data capture, this will open up a world of communications with leads and new customers. I strongly urge you to deploy such tactics because your competitors are and will continue to reap the rewards for doing so unless you change your approach (assuming you don’t capture data at this point).
What you should do now
If you are serious about having a great website, you should read my blog, it’s packed with ideas and suggestions to help improve your site.
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