Without data you’re just another person with an opinion.
Edwards Deming
This is a post in a series of posts that explore digital technologies that can be leveraged to amplify a business website 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.
A customer journey on a website starts with a landing page and hopefully ends with a form submission for more information resulting in a lead score. In order to optimise that journey for each visitor we need to measure and analyse the journey in order to better understand it and therefore have the decision-making tools to optimise that path. We cannot assume that one path fits all, as different visitors will be seeking different experiences and information.
The first step is to track our anonymous visitor and store the data. Where is the visitor coming from on the internet, what is their referral site? Most of the time these may be a search engine, but maybe they came from a shared social link, or they followed an online campaign. Sometimes, understanding where they are from in the world can play a role in the way they journey/search for information on your website. What page have they landed on first, which page are they opening next? Are they visiting with a mobile phone, tablet or desktop? What time of day is it in their locality? Are they bookmarking the page for further reference, or maybe sharing it online? Have they visited the site before, if so when, what page did they see on that visit? Have they registered for more information? Have you stored their details in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool?
From Website Visitor to Customer: Understanding the Journey
So many relevant pieces of data that can help to piece together a journey trend with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) analysis tool. Such a tool provides data analysis reports to understand your visitors and to segment them into similar groups in order to predict what a visitor will likely do.
For example, visitors who are coming to the website in their evening local time may be more inclined to spend time reading various pages on the site, and therefore presenting them with additional recommended pages related to the current landing page may be a better strategy to convince them to sign up for more information. On the other hand, someone visiting on a mobile phone during lunch hour may more likely be wanting to sign up for a demo or an offer on the first page they visit.
To test these different scenarios, a website can have multiple landing pages, or multiple recommended dynamic content on a given page, and the best content/page determined with A/B testing procedures, the result of which are stored in the CDP for analysis. A recent survey by HubSpot, a leading CRM service provider, shows up to 200% increase in lead generation when using dynamic content personalised to the visitor’s current interest.
Thus, a business website can be optimised for lead generation for a specific set of target visitors by collecting data and analysing the behaviour of these visitors in order to empirically determine the best design and content that will maximise lead conversions.
As the famous statistician Edward Deming once said, “Without data you’re just another person with an opinion”, measuring and understanding how visitors interact with your site is the objective key to unlocking its potential as a business tool.
Once you have a lead recorded in your CRM, your website can still play a leading role in converting that lead into a sale with intelligent automated marketing tools.