Lead Liaison

Why Your Website Needs to Be More Engaging to Convert

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Engage your Website VisitorsDid you know that you only have about 15 seconds to get the attention of your website visitors? According to Chartbeat, that’s how much time you have to capture their attention, so make it count. Further data from Chartbeat shows that most people do not read web content the way we think. Adding to the difficulty in capturing the attention of visitors is the fact that there is now more content available online than ever before. Google receives more than 4 million search queries every 60 seconds. As if that was not enough to concern a marketer, consumers are now reviewing more and more information prior to making a purchasing decision. In fact, 85 percent of consumers turn to trusted online sources for information to assist with buying decisions. On average, consumers will actually engage with almost a dozen pieces of content before they actually make a purchase. If your website needs to be more engaging then start to look at ways to personalize website content and convert your visitors.

More Difficult Than Ever for Marketers to Stand Out from the Crowd Online

Although the vast amount of content available online may make it easier for consumers to review products and services, it has also served to make it much more difficult for brands to stand out from the crowd. It is no longer enough to simply regurgitate facts. Your brand must ensure that your content is as engaging as possible, which means addressing the wants and needs of your audience while simultaneously empathizing with them. Doing so will allow you to increase your level of audience involvement, while also converting more people. Today, your prospects expect your brand to express interest in them by extending ongoing interaction, both via social media as well as your website. If you deprive visitors of this opportunity, you are also likely losing out to the competition and sacrificing the opportunity for your business to build important relationships with your prospects.

Engaging Your Prospects to Convert Them into Customers

Among the most common mistakes that many marketers make today is plastering their website with one-way content. This can come across as anti-social and serve to drive away customers before you even have the chance to convert them into paying customers.

One of the best ways to quickly grab the attention of a prospect is to personalize your content to that particular visitor. It’s also important to make communication as relevant as possible. In other words, you need to ensure your content is visitor specific. A couple of ways this can be accomplished is by using the visitor’s name or even inserting the city or state in which they live to catch their attention.

It’s also important to ensure your website content has a unique voice. This helps your visitors know what to expect from your content while also helping to reassure them, which is an important step toward building trust and converting visitors.

While your brand may have more competition online, learning how to engage your customers with personalized content can help you increase your conversion rate and bottom line.

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Lead Liaison

Getting the Most from Website Visitor Tracking

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Getting the Most from Website Visitor TrackingWebsite visitor tracking offers an incredible wealth of insight. In fact, it can be one of the most powerful tools available in your arsenal when it comes to identifying and qualifying sales leads. Even so, you need to make sure you are getting the most from your website visitor tracking or you could be losing money.

First, make sure you are using all of the capabilities of your website visitor tracking. Remember, you can do much more than simply track page views. Website visitor tracking software can provide you with an incredible wealth of information about what your visitors are doing while they are on your site, including the pages they visit, what they did on those pages, and how long they stayed on those pages. If you want to know what your visitors are interested in the most and what is triggering their actions, this is the way to do it. Professional-grade visitor tracking can track document downloads, video watching activity, social media interaction, original lead source, 1:1 sales email engagement, and much more.

Website visitor tracking can also be incredibly beneficial for determining what is motivating your leads. Motivation is vital in terms of lead qualification. You must be able to determine whether a lead is simply interested, or whether he or she may be ready to make a purchase. Furthermore, you need to determine whether your lead is able to make the purchase. Website visitor tracking can provide you with the information you need to make this type of evaluation.

Remember, website visitor tracking will only deliver what you put into it. If you are not making use of the information generated, you will not see any improvement in lead qualification, follow up, or sales conversions. By taking the time to evaluate the information generated by your visitor tracking software, you will gain the opportunity to glean as much information as possible about your leads, eliminate those leads that may not be qualified, and learn precisely the right time to follow up with leads in the buying cycle. As a result, you can gain an incredibly strong edge over the competition while simultaneously meeting the needs of each individual customer.

For more posts from this series see:

  1. Uncovering lost opportunities with website visitor tracking
  2. Getting the most from website visitor tracking
  3. Going beyond page views and gaining insight into online activity
  4. Actionable data from tracking visitors
  5. Understanding when to follow up, the importance of tracking
  6. Using website visitor tracking over time to build higher quality leads
Lead Liaison

Using Website Visitor Tracking Over Time to Build More Sales Leads

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Using Website Visitor Tracking Over Time to Build More Sales LeadsAll businesses want the strongest leads possible. After all, the stronger your leads, the more conversions you have, and the better your bottom line. While you cannot exactly create strong leads from thin air, there are some things you can do to grow stronger sales leads over time. One of them is to implement website visitor tracking.

You might be surprised to find that website visitor tracking is actually able to improve over time. This happens as behavioral patterns become more apparent as the software evaluates more and more sales leads. As a result, it becomes easier to identify relevant buying triggers. The key to making this work, however, is consistently following and analyzing the paths that recently converted leads have taken.

Building a Comprehensive Lead Profile

Website visitor tracking also gives you the ability to develop a comprehensive lead profile. This type of profile covers all of the demographic and behavioral characteristics that a qualified lead is likely to display throughout the entire buying process. Imagine how valuable that type of information would be. Not only does this information make it easier to connect with leads, it also increases the chances of converting more leads and the more leads you are able to convert, the more your revenues grow.

Ensuring You Do Not Miss Any Leads or Opportunities

By implementing website visitor tracking software, you gain the ability to capture every single lead on your website and ensure that you do not lose any. In addition, you can determine precisely which stage in the buying process a lead may be in at any given time. This makes it much easier to respond quickly to interested leads while also determining the best time to follow up with leads that may not be quite ready to be contacted yet. This is precisely why it is important to ensure you have a reliable website visitor tracking system in place. The stronger your leads, the more you will be able to understand what drives sales. Ultimately, you will be better able to respond to the needs of your customers.

For more posts from this series see:

  1. Uncovering lost opportunities with website visitor tracking
  2. Getting the most from website visitor tracking
  3. Going beyond page views and gaining insight into online activity
  4. Actionable data from tracking visitors
  5. Understanding when to follow up, the importance of tracking
  6. Using website visitor tracking over time to build higher quality leads
Lead Liaison

Understanding When to trigger Lead Follow Up

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Understanding when to Trigger Lead Follow UpDo you know the right time to follow up with leads? It can be tricky to know the best time. If you follow up too soon, before a lead is actually ready, you run the risk of losing them. Conversely, if you wait too late to follow up, you also run the risk of losing them, albeit to the competition. While it is a bit of a balancing act, lead follow up can be best accomplished when you have the most relevant information available. The best way to obtain that information is with website visitor tracking.

One of the most important benefits of website visitor tracking is that it gives you the opportunity to determine exactly where your lead is in their specific stage within the buying process. It is absolutely vital that you monitor each lead’s online activity. Website visitor tracking gives you incredible insight into exactly where a lead is in the buying process. A variety of triggers, such as visiting your site’s contact page can prove to be a strong indicator that your lead is nearing the end of the buying process. This is information that you will not have available if you do not have website visitor tracking implemented. If you should happen to miss that particular trigger, you could also easily lose the opportunity to reach out and follow up with your lead. That could result in a lost sale. Naturally, losing a sale is something you never want to happen.

Some leads take a little time to warm up and are not immediately ready for follow up. Yet, other leads are ready, willing, and able to make a purchase right away. When that is the case, you also need to know about it. Website visitor tracking is incredibly effective for identifying interested buyers. If the online behavior and characteristics of a lead indicate that the lead is ready to make a purchase right away, you can take immediate action and ensure you do not lose that opportunity.

With website visitor tracking, you know precisely when to implement lead follow up so that you are always in touch with visitors at precisely the right time.

For more posts from this series see:

  1. Uncovering lost opportunities with website visitor tracking
  2. Getting the most from website visitor tracking
  3. Going beyond page views and gaining insight into online activity
  4. Actionable data from tracking visitors
  5. Understanding when to follow up, the importance of tracking
  6. Using website visitor tracking over time to build higher quality leads
Lead Liaison

Building Referral Programs using Marketing Automation

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Building a Referral Program using Marketing AutomationThe dynamics of buying and selling are complex. Buyers have a hard time making a purchase if they don’t have much to go off of. For example, no reviews to look at, no other customers to talk to. Sellers have it just as rough too. Closing deals is not easy, especially if you’re starting a relationship from scratch. It’s much harder to convince prospective buyers to make a purchase if they’ve never heard of your company or solution before.

As a buyer myself, I think about the recent experience we’re going through with a house renovation. We’ve got a three car garage and the third by in our garage is about to be converted to a mother-in-law suite. We thought that would be better than the attic ;-). I couldn’t tackle the project by myself, so we needed a general contractor to do the job. We contacted five general contractors. We found all five off of the Good Contractors List, on our own, with no references. Unfortunately, we didn’t know anybody that recently used a general contractor or went through a similar renovation project. If we did, and someone said – hey, try these guys out, they were great and we had a wonderful experience, you bet your bottom dollar they’d be our first call. Doing all the outreach and going through the process with these five contractors is painful and time consuming. When it comes down to it, people get lazy about all that research and most people will take the short route, which is the referral from someone else.

Building referral programs for your business using marketing automation is easy. It’s something every company should do, especially since:

  1. People are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend – Nielsen
  2. 65% of new business comes from referrals – New York Times
  3. The LifeTime Value of a new referral customer is 16% higher – Wharton School of Business

You can see why it makes a lot of business sense to set up a good referral system. Here’s a four step plan to take to build your referral program with marketing automation:

1) Engage Customers

Engage customers through email and/or direct mail campaigns created and delivered with your marketing automation system. Your marketing automation system should have an easy way for you to segment your database to target customers only. This is one way to go back into your database and get a touch point out to existing customers. For new customers, set up a trigger-based automation to have your marketing automation system detect new customers, then fire off the email or direct mail message asking them for referrals. You might want to consider timing your referral request for about 3 to 6 months after they’ve become a customer.

2) Provide a Landing Page

When your referral request goes out you’ll want to send your customer to your purpose-built landing page. Once the landing page is submitted by your customer, you’ll be able to track who is making the referral using this landing page and form built with your marketing automation system. Moreover, when the form is submitted you’ll send an introductory email created with your marketing automation system to the person being referred introducing your company.

3) Trigger Incentives

The web form submission serves as the “trigger” for other actions. When the trigger happens an email or postcard is automatically sent to the referral with a concise and beneficial call to action: “try us”, “free trial”, or gift card. Your marketing automation system can match the appropriate incentive with the referral’s demographics (role, job title, etc.) if needed, setting the table for more precise and relevant communication. Tracking kicks in and the referral’s interaction with your company is monitored. Based on engagement, provide the new prospect with the appropriate level of nurturing.

4) Nurture

Using automation, nurture people that were referred but did not respond so that your business remains top of mind when service is needed. Nurturing is a great way to automate touch points and systemize the referral process.

We hope you enjoyed this guide on building referral programs using marketing automation.

Download this free brochure on Building a Referral Program using Lead Liaison and stick it up on your wall! It will help you stay on track with setting up your referral program.

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Lead Liaison

Why Visitor Tracking Technology Exists

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Why Visitor Tracking Technology ExistsYou’ve heard of website visitor tracking, by why does it exist? Let’s answer that very point, why visitor tracking technology exists, in this post. Would you put your home on the market, put a sign in your yard, list your house on a bunch of real estate websites, and then have an open house without the realtor there to see who showed up? No way! You’d be wasting your time and your realtor’s advertising dollars. You could hope that someone calls you up, or you could be proactive, and identify visitors along with their interests as they walk in the door to look around.

Similarly, in the business world, companies spend tons of money on outbound marketing. Retargeting, pay-per-click, blog content, marketing collateral, and more. Unfortunately, 98% of a company’s website traffic is hidden. The other 2% fill out a form. Without visitor tracking technology, the vast majority of website activity goes undetected, resulting in lost opportunity and a shortage of valuable insight to help your sales team – there’s no agent (realtor) at the front door of your business, your website. Effectively, what happens on your website is a complete mystery until you begin identifying and tracking people and businesses.

Analytic solutions help with website performance; whereas website visitor tracking is largely a tool for sales people. Businesses would be remiss not to spend $3,000 to $8,000 per year on a good website visitor tracking solution to help identify crucial website activity.

For more insight into visitor tracking check out the other posts in this series:

  1. What is Website Visitor Tracking?
  2. How Visitor Tracking Works
  3. Benefits of Website Visitor Tracking
  4. 20 Ways you can Use Visitor Tracking to “Spice Up” Sales and Marketing
  5. What Questions Should you Ask your Visitor Tracking Provider when Evaluating a Solution?
Lead Liaison

The Anatomy of the Perfect Blog Post

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Twenty years ago, few people could have predicted the power and reach of the internet. Ten years ago, few would have dreamed that social media platforms would continue to evolve and develop. Ten years from now, who knows what the Internet and social media will look like. But the reality of today’s business connection with customers includes the Internet and social media, and in all likelihood that includes a blog of some kind. While who posts, what they post, and how often they post may vary from business to business, what doesn’t vary is what it takes to put together a successful blog post.

That content includes several key components that are crucial to helping deliver your business’s information and message. From element to element—headline, intro, subhead, copy, to name just a few—there are ways that users tend to interact and information that stands out or gets lost. Constraints include length and keywords as well as time that it will take a user to get through the information. Because you’re competing not only with other businesses but other types of information on the internet, following guidelines for text as well as visual elements is important. This useful information can help you fine tune your marketing efforts online to enable a strong, positive interaction with current and potential clients.

Matt Banner expounded on the idea of writing the perfect blog post in his article, How to Write a Blog Post with Perfection: The Only Step-by-Step Guide You Need.

The graphic below breaks down each section of a blog post and provides tips on how to optimize it. Creating a share-worthy post is easy with this guide.

Click To Enlarge

Anatomy of a Blog Post

Via Salesforce