You've Got A New Site Visitor, Now What?

The importance of driving new visitors to your website is no secret. Marketers spend countless hours creating campaigns to increase traffic and capture the potential business opportunities of new visitors. If managed correctly, website visitors have the power to increase sales, build brand awareness, and even determine the next product or service for your company. With the right tools in place and knowledge of how to access valuable data, new site visitors can become profitable customers.

According to Matt Belkin, Vice President of Business Development and Customer Strategy at Adobe, when it comes to your website, “Every visit represents an opportunity to persuade or convert a visitor to a customer.” The challenge is identifying what steps to take to accomplish this: knowing where you can learn about your visitors, what information about them is most useful, and how to utilize such. To find the answers to these questions and optimize new visitors to your site, consider the following three steps:

• Discover: Identifying your visitors and establishing a thorough understanding of who they are as individuals is a vital part of a building customer relationship.

  The first step to convert website visitors into profitable customers is to understand who is visiting your site. Learning about a visitor’s site DNA (visitor location, number of return visits, search term, etc.) sets up the basis of your communication strategy. You must know a little bit about them to successfully discover how to build a relationship. To identify site visitors, you can utilize a customer intelligence service such as Leadlander.com. These services examine visitors from a sales perspective to identify leads and prospects among your website traffic and allow you to focus on key visits. With this information you can then conduct your own research to discover more about your visitor’s identity. Examine their websites, analyze competitors, and develop a true understanding of their position in the marketplace to fully discover who they are as potential leads.

• Observe: Examining a new visitor’s behaviors on your website plays a vital role in understanding their needs and interest in your business.

  Analyzing how a user interacts with your website provides valuable insights into what they are seeking and ultimately where opportunity for profit may exist. Website analytics packages such as Google Analytics serve as a valuable resource for this information, understanding the behaviors of users on your website and clearly identifying first time visitors. Analytics allow you to see which pages a user visited and the time spent on each page, giving you a better idea as to which aspect of your business is of greatest interest. You can also track how a visitor came to your site, using the terms from keyword searches as a direct representation of what the user is specifically seeking.

• Engage: Connecting with your visitors though a personalized outreach strategy enhances communication.

  With a better understanding of your visitors and their online behaviors, the next step is to utilize this information in a targeted outreach strategy. The goal is to engage your visitors to purchase your products or services through the process of lead nurturing. Tailor communications to reflect the individual’s business needs and interests that you previously identified by observing online behaviors. This will personalize the content of your outreach to each individual user and improve probability of successful engagement and sale. A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool such as SalesForce.com helps to manage this process, using technology to organize, automate and coordinate business processes. These services track interactions with your visitors to keep up to date data and assist in implementing next steps.