Josh Pheneger
Senior Digital Strategist
On average, 97% of website visitors won't ever identify themselves. They won't fill out a contact form, call you, or give you any form of information.
Let's think about that in perspective. If you're a small business with a limited web presence (let's say you have 1,000 visitors to your website each month), you're missing out on 970 opportunities to engage with prospects. Even scarier, if you're a larger business with a steady flow of visitors, you could be missing out on tens- or hundreds of thousands of opportunities each month. Yikes.
So how do you take advantage of these missed opportunities? Using marketing automation, you can leverage the power of lead nurturing and website prospecting to convert more of these anonymous visitors into actual leads or customers.
What kind of numbers are we talking?
Let's just assume that right now you're converting 3% of your website visitors, either through contact forms, inquiries, calls, or any other methods.
- Even with a limited web presence (1,000 monthly visitors), improving your lead generation efforts by just 1% yields 10 new leads each month. Not bad.
- For companies with a more established web presence (10,000 monthly visitors), a 1% increase leads 100 new leads each month.
Why do people come to my website and leave?
Think about some of the more recent purchases that you've made (either at work or at home). If you're like most people today, your "shopping" experience likely included some of the following steps:
- Realization of a problem or opportunity ("My water heater broke.")
- Research of possible solutions ("Can I get it fixed? Do I need a new one?")
- Research of possible solution providers ("Who sells and installs water heaters?")
- Decision ("ABC Plumbing Co. seems like a great company. I'll call them.")
Like it or not, in the example above, the Plumbing Company may not be involved or aware until the final decision step. That's because more people are conducting the research in steps 1-3 before they contact a sales person or company. This research is happening on search engines, social media, online forums, reviews websites, etc.
Many of the 97% of visitors that you never hear from are performing their research on your site, then choosing another option for one reason or another.
Lead Nurturing: Moving visitors from "researchers" to leads
What we do know: Visitors are coming to your website looking for information and leaving without connecting with you. Lead nurturing lets you not only capture leads that are ready to buy but also leads that are still in the research stages. Let's look at an example:
Example: ABC Plumbing Co.
ABC Plumbing Co. sells and installs water heaters. Visitors are coming to their website to learn about their pricing, the types of water heaters that they offer, and what locations they service. Once they have that information, they leave and do the same research on ABC's competitors' sites, and also read reviews on Angie's List. ABC Plumbing has no way to capture these visitors unless they explicitly call for more information.
With Marketing Automation:
ABC Plumbing Co. develops a useful guide called "How to Choose a New Water Heater", and provides it for free to visitors to their site that fill out a simple form. Then the magic happens:
- An automated workflow automatically sends that visitor the useful guide, directly to their email, immediately after they submit the form
- Based on the visitor's activity on the website, they are assigned a lead score that helps sales people gauge the quality of the lead
- A salesperson is notified that a new lead has submitted the form, and can look at their profile (location, product needs, pages visited, etc.) to evaluate whether they should be contacted
- If the visitor isn't a good lead right now (maybe they're planning a remodel in 9 months), they can be added to another automated program that sends them additional content or new product announcements over the next couple of months
By setting up a simple marketing automation program, ABC Plumbing Co. can achieve the following:
- Convert more visitors into leads through content
- Prioritize leads and deliver them to relevant sales resources
- Nurture leads that aren't quite ready to purchase
Website Prospecting: Adding context to “anonymous” visitors
The above marketing automation strategy can considerably increase your ability to identify anonymous leads, but let's face it, not everyone is going to call, email, or even fill out a form. Many visitors will simply be browsing. So we need a strategy to provide some context for these "anonymous" visitors.
Enter "website prospecting." This tool (available through Aztek's marketing automation platform Act-On Software, *wink wink*), uses a fancy process called "Reverse IP Lookup" to attempt to identify the company or organization from which a visitor is coming.
If you've used an analytics platform (such as Google Analytics), you know how frustrating it can be looking at thousands of visitors and not knowing who they are. Being able to identify the company or organization for a large percentage of your anonymous visitors can be incredibly valuable for your sales team, who can leverage this information in prospecting and outbound sales efforts.
Better yet, within a marketing automation platform, when an anonymous visitor does "convert" (fill out a form, subscribe to email, open an email, etc.), all of their history is tied to their contact information, even if it has occurred in the past.
Conclusion: Taking advantage of the 97%
If you've already invested in digital marketing to drive traffic to your site and show up in search engines, the next step is to make sure you're capturing those visitors on your site. Leveraging marketing automation, you can start to focus on turning the 97% of visitors that you never hear from into engaged leads.
Not sure how to get started with marketing automation? Contact us to get started.
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