Tag Archive for: Visitor Tracking

Benefits of Website Visitor Tracking

Benefits of Website Visitor TrackingOkay, so you put a chunk of code on your website that spits out a list of IPs and companies visiting your website. Yeah, what next? You’ve got to put that information to good use, and make it actionable, able to work for you. Let’s take a moment to really understand the benefits of website visitor tracking.

Sales and marketers will benefit from visitor tracking. For sales, don’t think visitor tracking is going to be the savior for your sales team and automatically identify easy-to-close deals. In fact, if you’re using the wrong solution, it could send you off on a wild goose chase. Make sure to pick a solution that gives you the best opportunity to identify people, not buildings. Keep in mind that visitor tracking technology is only a very preliminary step in the demand generation process and should be viewed as a complementary tool to your overall B2B sales process. Sales people can use it in three primary ways:

  1. As a tip. To get pointed in the right direction when companies visit their website.
  2. For sales insight. To know what interests a company/person has after visiting your website.
  3. To time follow up. Knowing when someone is on your website helps sales know exactly when to follow up.

Marketers will benefit from getting key insight into the results of their marketing efforts. For example, they’ll see the lead source of the visitor. Some companies track original lead source (from the very first visit) and some companies identify lead source of the visit. Marketers will also know which social channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are performing best, how Pay-Per-Click campaigns are performing, and how their outbound marketing drives business activity on their website. If you don’t understand the benefits of website visitor tracking after reading this, then watch this cool video on visitor tracking which might help.

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

  1. Why Visitor Tracking Technology Exists
  2. What is Website Visitor Tracking?
  3. How Visitor Tracking Works
  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?

20 Ways you can Use Visitor Tracking to “Spice Up” Sales and Marketing

20 Ways you can Use Visitor Tracking to “Spice Up” Sales and MarketingYou just bought a shiny new car, or website visitor tracking, which might be around the price of that new car (if you’re buying a Tata). Now that you’ve got some power under the hood, how can you use that power to infuse excitement into your organization and energize your sales and marketing efforts?

Here are some ways you can use visitor tracking to introduce exciting new opportunities across your organization. Note, some scenarios may not be possible based on vendor limitations.

  1. As a sales tool to excite your sales force, increasing employee satisfaction and decreasing turnover.
  2. To create unique filters for each sales person based on territory, so they see only activity relevant to them.
  3. To get more out of email marketing. Integrate your email campaigns (Mailchimp, Constant Contact, etc.) with visitor tracking to get a long-tail view of what happens after recipients click through.
  4. To find new leads. Identify companies you would have never known about. It won’t close the deal for you, but it will point you in the right direction.
  5. For sales efficiency. Sales people will know who to follow up with and when.
  6. For marketing ROI. Use it to measure results of your retargeting or PPC efforts.
  7. To build rich profiles that identify prospective buyer’s interests. For example, connecting anonymous visit activity to a web form submission where the person is identified.
  8. To know how to tailor a follow up discussion based on a person’s digital pattern across your website.
  9. To identify which partners or ads are referring the most visitors to your website.
  10. To identify which pages people commonly enter into or exit from.
  11. To track which documents are performing the best (most downloads, by who, etc.)
  12. To track which videos are performing the best (most views, by who, etc.)
  13. To help convert website visitors by gating videos and documents.
  14. To track 1:1 sales emails.
  15. To identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities for existing customers.
  16. To find key people who work at a company that visited your website.
  17. To share leads with your colleagues.
  18. To distribute leads to your colleagues.
  19. To import leads directly into your CRM.
  20. To enrich lead profiles with social information.

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

  1. Why Visitor Tracking Technology Exists
  2. What is Website Visitor Tracking?
  3. How Visitor Tracking Works
  4. Benefits of Website Visitor Tracking
  5. What Questions Should you Ask your Visitor Tracking Provider when Evaluating a Solution?

What Questions Should you Ask your Visitor Tracking Provider when Evaluating a Solution?

What Questions Should you Ask your Visitor Tracking Provider when Evaluating a Solution?It’s always hard to interview vendors when you’re not really certain what questions to ask them. In this case, suppose you have a goal to acquire a website visitor tracking solution that helps identify businesses and people that visit your website. Below is a list of questions you can ask any visitor tracking provider to make sure you know what you’re getting. These questions will help probe for key differentiators and features that might help you make a better decision. What questions should you ask your visitor tracking provider? Here you go…

  1. Do you share data that we collect with our competitors or other companies?
  2. How do you identify people?
  3. What tools do you provide to find people at a visiting company if the person is anonymous?
  4. Can you show me what type of profiles you build over time on visitors?
  5. How can users create and share website traffic filters?
  6. Is your visitor tracking real-time or static?
  7. How do you integrate with 3rd party email marketing programs like Mailchimp?
  8. What are all the things you track?
  9. Should I be concerned about our privacy policy?
  10. What is your pricing and what variables are in your pricing?
  11. What type of support do you provide?
  12. How do you track web form submissions?
  13. How do I know the original lead source of a visitor and not the source of the visit itself?
  14. Do you have any integrations with email clients like Outlook or Google Mail?
  15. What makes you different from other providers?
  16. Do you use cookies for tracking?
  17. How is all of this data useful to our company as we collect information over time?

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

  1. Why Visitor Tracking Technology Exists
  2. What is Website Visitor Tracking?
  3. How Visitor Tracking Works
  4. Benefits of Website Visitor Tracking
  5. 20 Ways you can Use Visitor Tracking to “Spice Up” Sales and Marketing

5 Reasons Your Company Needs Website Visitor Tracking

5 Reasons that your Company Needs Website Visitor TrackingVisitor tracking gives salespeople the ability to monitor site visitors by name/company/location so that they can better identify prospects and their thoughts.   Progressive companies are beginning to understand that visitor tracking is the foundation for all digital marketing and sales efforts.

Here are 5 key signs that you should be using individual visitor tracking on your website:

1) You invest in SEO, PPC, or retargeting campaigns

These technologies draw people to the “door” that is your digital presence.  If you don’t have a way to “hear” who is at your door, and what they are thinking; it kills your ability to develop a relationship with each individual buyer.

Now consider how much you are spending for SEO/PPC/RC campaigns.  If you spend $5 per visitor, and only 1 in 40 site visitors identifies themselves; then you are paying almost $300 per lead.  A quality visitor tracking system will help you triple the effectiveness of turning your SEO/PPC/RC investment into leads that can close.  Our clients find that on average, their company gets 9X more bang for its buck when using visitor tracking with SEO/PPC/RC campaigns.

 2) If your company has a sales team

Why would you pay for a sales team, and not help their success?  Gone are the days of “pounding phones”.   The trends in digital marketing revolve around self-education and timing.   If you are able to identify WHO is investigating you, it allows you to intelligently approach potential customers AT THE RIGHT TIME.  Bottomline: visitor tracking helps you work smarter and more efficiently.

3) Your salespeople will go to a tradeshow or networking event in the next 12 months

Only a small percentage of your prospective clients are ready to buy at any given point in time.  You have two options.  You can use visitor tracking as a way to highlight when contacts are ready to talk or you can have your salespeople call everyone every two weeks and hope they stumble upon something good.  The latter is a very costly strategy, that will kill your reputation of potential buyers.

 4) You use email

It doesn’t matter if your email is coming from Gmail, Outlook, a CRM, a marketing automation platform, or a third party “email blaster” provider.   90% of your emails will never be responded to.  That doesn’t mean that they aren’t effective.  Instead, it means that your emails are simply planting seeds for future action in the minds of your prospects. You need visitor tracking to give your salespeople the necessary information to have a “green sales thumb”.  That means that they know:

  • When a prospect is interested
  • What they are interested in
  • Their potential concerns with approaching you.

 5) You have a website

Most companies see value in tools like Google Analytics that will tell you things like “ 155 people were on my website today”.  How does that help salespeople?   True sales value comes from giving your salespeople the name, company, location, and interests of the visitor.

 

How our Company Saved $9,618 on our Mailchimp Email Campaign – Get More out of Email Marketing

Get More out of Email Marketing

Get More out of Email MarketingOur company recently sent an email campaign the “old school way” to see how difficult and costly it would be compared to sending the email campaign and complement the strategy with Lead Liaison. We wanted to empathize with the 100s of thousands of companies that spend money on email marketing but aren’t equipped with the full software solution to turn their salespeople into “happy heroes”. Companies think they’re saving money by going with email service providers like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, when they end up spending way more than they anticipated in the end without having software that fosters sales efficiency. In this post we explain how to get more out of email marketing. Lets unfold what we did.

In this exercise, we sent out an email to 17,000 contacts. Although Lead Liaison has a powerful email marketing component to the platform, we wanted to act like most businesses and signed up for Mailchimp. The campaign was a huge success and cultivated the average click-throughs (2.2%) in the software and web application industry. That’s 374 people that clicked at least one link in our email campaign. Now, most businesses would send that list of click-throughs to their sales team and ask them to follow up. Let’s look at the investment required to properly follow up with these 374 “leads”:

  1. 374 people clicked a link.
  2. Consider an average time of 20 minutes for each rep to research the lead, contact them, add reminders in their CRM, follow up, etc. It’s probably more, but we’ll be conservative here.
  3. 374 people x 20 minutes = 7,480 minutes = 125 hours spent chasing these leads.
  4. We all know salespeople are the most expensive resource in a company. The average fully burdened cost of a software salesperson is $175,000 per year. $175,000 / 2,080 business hours in a year = $84 per hour.
  5. 125 hours x $84 per hour = $10,500 spent following up with these leads.

Yep, that’s right…a typical company would spend over $10,000 on their email campaign. These companies might be looking for some cost savings as a Mailchimp subscription at this contact level is $150 for the month; however, they end up spending a lot more in operational costs. It’s important to look at the total cost of the campaign, from the price of the software to deliver the campaign through the follow up. The problem with this type of traditional approach to email marketing is that the marketing person has to invest more time (and ultimately the company’s money), extracting data from Mailchimp, parsing data to determine which reps should get each lead, and delivering data to them. Now, let’s look at how we saved 92% of that investment, or $9,618, by using Lead Liaison for sales efficiency.

Instead of following up with everyone that clicked a link in an email, we used Lead Liaison to take care of all our tracking, lead qualification and lead distribution. It took us 20 minutes to set things up before sending our campaign through Mailchimp. We spent 5 minutes adding a tracking token to the end of each of our links inside the Mailchimp Campaign. Then we spent 15 minutes setting up a Workflow that ran for two weeks following the launch of our email campaign. In our Workflow we told the system to look for:

  • new leads from email marketing with
  • website activity after the date we launched the campaign
  • with a lead score more than 30

With these rules we could automatically distribute warm leads to our sales team, based on territory, round robin, or sales rep performance. The lead is then automatically synced into our CRM and the salesperson gets a task reminder to follow up. The sales team is a lot happier as they’re focusing on qualified leads and don’t have to bother with data entry. Lets look at the numbers:

  1. 21 hot leads were generated that met the above criteria
  2. The reps were able to spend more quality time (30 minutes per lead) on each prospect as they knew their prep and research would be more meaningful with higher quality leads. Reps used Lead Liaison to see what the person looked at after they clicked the link in the email and how many other times they visited our website. Reps could see all kinds of digital behavior like when they played our video explainer, visited our pricing page, and more.
  3. 21 hot leads x 30 minutes per lead = 10.5 hours spent chasing hot leads
  4. At $84 per hour, that’s $882.
  5. Compared to $10,500 for the “traditional” approach to following up to an email campaign, our company saved 92%, or $9,618, had a happier sales and marketing team, kept all the data in the system, and saved time not having to export or lose data.

That’s a pretty compelling ROI. Even if we didn’t invest the 15 minutes setting up the Workflow in Lead Liaison, we could have used our visitor tracking solution for the period of our campaign, filter out Known Leads (people with an email) with an Original Lead Source of Email Marketing, and sort by Lead Score. The website visitor tracking view displays businesses visiting our website in real-time and tracks activity across all our marketing channels. We could have easily clicked the “Hits” column to see what pages people viewed during their visit and how many times they visited our website since the campaign ran.

website visitor traffic

We hope you try a modern approach to email marketing and connect email to web using Lead Liaison to get more out of email marketing.

Disappointed with LeadLander®?

Disappointed with LeadLanderAre you disappointed with LeadLander®? LeadLander® sells its product with a simple premise: throw some tracking code on your website and wait for the magic to happen.

Then you wait….and wait….and where is all of this magic?

The reality is that you need a strategy with any visitor tracking product that you use.  Your strategy should include four basic questions and include capabilities to achieve the answers to these questions:

  1. How do you draw active/interested buyers of your product to your site?
  2. Can your program filter buyers based on their likelihood of buying at any given time?
  3. Does your strategy allow you to distinguish between which products/services that an individual buyer is most likely to be interested in?
  4. Once a buyer is identified, what happens next in your sales process? Does your technology support execution of this strategy?

We used the solution for about two years. We started to call it LostLander. It sent us off on a wild goose chase the majority of the time. We ended up spending more money than we did without it. Instead of turning into a revenue driver, it was a cost center. – Lance Boyd, Former VP of Sales at Arxan Technologies.

The good news is that a few simple strategies are likely to raise your sales results, and help you maximize the value of many of the sales and marketing efforts that you are presently engaged in.   If you are interested in a free consultation on marketing strategies; I highly recommend contacting us and asking for a free 30 minute consultation.

Disclaimers:

  • (1) Lead Liaison is not affiliated in any way with LeadLander®, does not provide LeadLander®’s services, and does not own the LeadLander® Service Mark. Lead Liaison provides its own unique visitor tracking solution as shown here.
  • Reference our Blog Disclaimer.

Is Visitor Tracking Violating Your Privacy Statement?

Visitor Tracking Could Violate Your Privacy Statement

Visitor Tracking Could Violate Your Privacy StatementDo you have a privacy statement?  If so, you might be violating it with many visitor tracking programs. It’s important to ask your self, is visitor tracking violating your privacy statement? Make sure you know what you’re getting into and who you’re dealing with.

Here is how it works.  Company A has a strong marketing effort.   They get 1,000,000 people to “opt-in” by submitting a form.  Visitor ID Company drops a cookie on the machine as part of the transaction, and tracks the behaviors of that party including visits so that it can create a better experience between Company A and the visitor.

Nothing wrong so far.

The trouble begins when Visitor ID Company wants to attract Company B.  They offer Company B a 7 or 14 day trial and use Company A’s database to correlate unique visitor IPs to their database.   Some have even been known to throw in “sample data” from a competitor’s traffic to show what could be achieved while the trial period is in progress.

Here are the problems:

  • Company A has just helped its competitor
  • Company A has breached its moral and legal obligations (in some cases) to its clients to protect their relationship
  • Company B is wasting sales time pursuing fake leads or bad data entered by company A
  • Visitor ID Company has mislead a prospect into buying results that are a representation of what could happen… under the guise that it just happened.

Long story short, you have just breached your customer’s data by working with a visitor tracking solution that shares data.   The good news is that there are a limited number of companies that DO NOT share data.   Those companies actually pull superior data for your sales team in the long term; because they don’t add the other company’s garbage (such as false records).

The downside, is that during a “trial” the company that is using gray-hat techniques will often seem to be a superior/easier to use solution.    So, be careful when conducting your trial and make sure that the vendors you look at are willing to sign a privacy policy that matches the ones you give to your prospects and customers.

GPS Tracking for your Website

GPS Tracking for your WebsiteTracking teenagers is similar to tracking for your website.

Having children is a wonderful thing. As kids get older we create stronger bonds with them, and they become more precious than ever day by day. Then they become teenagers. They start to do whatever they want, or at least thing they can do. They begin driving and hanging out with the wrong crowd. How do parents control such rebellious behavior? You can’t. But at least you have options to monitor their behavior and when you see something that’s serious, you intervene. That one option is to track your kids. Nowadays you can buy magnetic vehicle tracking devices that you stick to the bottom of your car. Then you hop onto the companies software interface and monitor where the car is going. It’s all done via GPS and cell towers to monitor where the vehicle is going and at time it’s at different places. In this case, if you see your 17 year old at a bar at 11PM, you’ll know to have that conversation with him/her; otherwise, let them be a teenager.

The concept of the GPS tracking device can also be applied to business. Companies like us, Lead Liaison, smacks a GPS tracking device underneath the chassis of your company’s website. Every time you have a visitor, we’ll track their activity, their online behavior, to help you look for key events that indicate a call to action. Different from solutions like Google Analytics, website visitor tracking identifies businesses, not just internet service providers, that come to your site. Visitor tracking can also help you convert visitors into identified people. Kind of like scanning someone’s drivers license. When a visitor clicks a link in an email, watches a video, downloads a document, submits a form, etc. your visitor tracking solution grabs the persons email address and adds it to their profile. When the visitor comes back, the sales person gets a Buy Signal, indicating buying interest.

Learn more about how you can attach a GPS tracking device to your website. 

Are You Generating Helpful Visitor Profile Data?

Are You Generating Helpful Visitor Profile Data?Small to large businesses are constantly trying to figure out how to market to their target users, often ignoring the visitor profile data that’s in their backend or marketing automation system.  The focus of many of our blogs has been to define a target audience right away. Businesses frequently build a target audience profile based on what they expect of their users or what they’d like to see, rather than using data that could help make better decisions overall.

New businesses certainly require a grand floor analysis to better determine target audience but businesses that have been around for a while are often operating with the same target audience expectations used from the start. Keep this in mind – if unused data exists, any business could be missing opportunities and data collection efforts could be going to waste.

Understanding the Visitor Profile

Some important demographics to fish out of the mix when analyzing business data include things like:

  • Time of day visitors land on your website
  • Visitor gender
  • Income level
  • Keywords used to find you

In addition to these items, there are frequently overlooked pieces of visitor information that can help businesses better target users. Mobile, operating system and browser are available pieces of data that businesses often ignore. Bottom line, if half or more visitors are viewing a website or content on mobile, businesses need to ensure mobile users have the best viewing and purchasing experience possible. In many instances, operating without a mobile friendly website is an invitation to lost sales.

Breaking it Down

Visitor profile information isn’t useful without a strategy to deploy once that info is obtained. Key players in an organization who should be privy to this strategy might include a head of marketing, sales manager and folks in executive level operating roles.

A team leader should be assigned to be in charge of gathering the data and proposing how to move forward – very likely someone in a marketing role. This person should work closely over time with marketing automation staff to ensure data is being collected properly. A good marketing automation company will also suggest how the data may correlate into a high-level strategy that can be carried out across organizational departments.

If you’re not getting the data, the sales or you want to look into marketing automation to make your overall process easier, talk to Lead Liaison. We’re here to help you figure out how buy signals, high-level data, visitor profile data and better analytics can increase your bottom line.

Five Ways of Using Visitor Tracking to Increase Visitor Engagement

Five Ways of Using Visitor Tracking to Increase Visitor EngagementHave you ever thought of using visitor tracking to increase visitor engagement? You can have numerous visitors to your site, but unless you’re doing the right visitor tracking you may be missing some terrific data. It’s best to tempt visitors to dive deeper into the website. Tracking visitor engagement starts with a hit on your website while the engagement process begins once visitors start to use your site. Following are five ways you can engage visitors for a better web experience all around.

Provide Links to Internal Content and Pages

Prominently displaying links to other related products and pages retain visitor engagement, take them “down the rabbit hole of your site” so to speak and will urge them to search and keep coming back for more content.

Minimize Site and Page Load Durations

Most internet users tend to leave if a site or page fails to load in three seconds. Since most outstanding search engines such as Google understand this, you may find yourself falling further behind in search rankings for pages that load sluggishly. It is good to have a high-load speed for your site so you don’t lose visitors or SEO ranking in general.

Make the Website Simple

For business sites, the more difficulties a client faces, the less likely they are to purchase your products and services. Your site should have a simple menu design and language. All unnecessary form fields should be detached to simplify the lead collection experience from start to finish.

Have Features that Promote Direct Interaction

Features such as product analyses and blog comments allow the customers to ask questions and leave something others can read about the site or products. Ensure that the features are used well and all queries get a reply.

Analyze the Visitor Flow

Search engines have features that help monitor visitor actions. Monitoring includes information such as the first page visited, whether further pages are looked at, buttons clicked or actions taken on the site, etc. If your preferred visitor flow is not followed, you should review the page layout and content and create clearer calls to action.

Visitor tracking through engagements is vital to any site. Engagement helps keep visitors onsite for extended period of time so they can learn more about your content. Long durations on a site influence a visitor’s return rate. A higher return rate keeps customers engaged with your products and services and may eventually result in a sale.

For more information on how visitor tracking can directly benefit you, talk to us! At Lead Liaison.com, we’re here to bring more quality web traffic to your site and to help you use visitor tracking to increase leads and sales.