[…] you go into a bar and sit down, and the bartender puts a whiskey in front of you without having to ask what you want.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com CEO
Études is not confined to the past—we are passionate about the cutting edge designs shaping our world todaThis is a post in a series of posts that explore digital technologies that can be leveraged to amplify a business website’s capacity to generate leads. This series builds up the rationale for a business website to undergo its digital transformation in order to provide a user experience more conducive to generate a lead.y.
A business website can be digitally transformed to provide a unique experience for each visitor, not only for each visit, but also for visits by the same user under different circumstances. To achieve this level of personalisation it is crucial to collect a lot of data about users. It does not need to be data that can personally identify the user. A lot can be achieved with robust anonymous data that can reveal trends in behaviour and preferences that correlate directly with your target audience. Robust quality data is only available through robust data collection pipelines that are transparent to your business and not dependent on data aggregators.
Data from online tracking is categorised according to the data collecting party: 1st party data is collected by your own server and its connected services, it is a consequence of the users direct interaction with your online business or other customer touchpoints; 2nd party data is collected by your partner services, it is their 1st party data that you have agreed to share; 3rd party data is collected by data aggregators that collect datasets across a much wider audience, one which your users are only a subset, revealing broader trends which may be less relevant. There is an additional zero-party dataset, made of information that is generated by and belongs to the user, and is willingly shared to identify with your brand.
For a long time, many businesses have relied on 3rd party data to market their services and products to their target audience through the use of 3rd party cookies. However, with the phasing out of these cookies under increasing privacy concerns and user data-sharing fatigue, it is becoming increasingly important for businesses to collect and manage their own data each time a user visits and interacts with their website. Much of this data remains anonymous, but if it is systematically collected and organised such as in a Customer Data Platform (CDP) and analysed using smart algorithms, which increasingly makes use of Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence (AI), fine-grained segmentation of users can be leveraged to personalise the content a user sees on your website.
In addition, if your business site identifies customers and collects additional data in a Customer Relation Manager (CRM), returning customers (if they sign in or have accepted a tracking cookie), can have their digital experience enhanced by leveraging their historical interaction with your business. Although this applies more often to online retail businesses, it can also apply to lead-generating websites that may have several brands or services for customers to discover and experience. Furthermore, a customer’s journey recorded in your CDP can link to the CRM and their custom journey represented in your CRM dashboard. This can be extremely powerful if you have multiple touch-points for your customers. For example, a customer help-line, or interactive chat-bot may use this integrated information to seamlessly suggest a continuation of the customer’s journey as they interact with your business ecosystem.
Goals and lead scoring
Another powerful tool for grading your leads on your website is to define user behaviour goals. These can be as simple as viewing a page, clicking on a Call-To-Action button, registering their email address and so on or possibly based on a 1st party data point such as being referred to your site from an online campaign.
Each goal can be assigned a score such that users accumulated points becomes their lead-score. The lead score can then be updated into your CRM for that user’s profile making it an efficient way to prioritise leads for follow-on actions by your marketing team.