Monday, 20 August 2012
Beyond Basic Stats: 7 Ways to Track Visitors
Having good visitor intelligence will allow you to market to your customers and optimize your website on a completely different level than before. Most people never look beyond the surface with their visitor intelligence. Sure, they’ll use Google Analytics to figure out their bounce rates and their time on site – But rarely do they go beyond that.
A world class business on the other hand goes far, far beyond the basic stats. They want to really get inside their customers’ heads and figure out what makes them tick. Why are some customers more valuable than others? Why do some customers choose you, while others go to your competitors?
Here are 7 ways you can use visitor intelligence in your marketing efforts.
1) K.I.S.S
The first thing you should remember about visitor intelligence is to “Keep it Short & Simple!” (KISS.)
A lot of companies make their visitor intelligence far, far too complex. You don’t need to track 20 different stats for every visitor or every marketing campaign.
Figure out your most important stats and keep a close eye on those. Use other stats to improve your overall processes, but stop watching them once you’ve gotten what you need.
2) Analyzing Your Lead Followup
How is your lead followup system performing? What percentage of people who come into your funnel ultimately end up buying?
One thing every dedicated marketer should absolutely do is spend some time analyzing his or her lead followup system. Where do your customers drop off? What aspects of the system are working and what aspects aren’t?
3) Analyzing On-Site Customer Behavior
Use tools like CrazyEgg to learn about how your customers behave when they’re on your website. Use software that allows you to take videos of customers browsing your website. Or better yet, have real customers come in physically and use your site.
Watch them, then ask them questions about what they liked and didn’t like about using your site.
Analyze your customers’ on-site behavior to really get a sense for what they like and don’t like.
4) Replicate Previous Marketing Successes
Go through your past marketing campaigns and examine the ones that succeeded particularly well. What was it that made them stand out? Why did those campaigns succeed while others failed?
Take the winning elements from those campaigns and rinse and repeat. Make sure you change other things, so it doesn’t look like you’re just doing the same thing over and over again.
5) Implement Customer Scoring
Once you have a large amount of past customer behavior data, you can implement what’s called customer scoring. That means based on what you know about how your customers behave, you can assign your customers a score. That score is how likely they are to buy future products.
For example, you might assign customers who’ve never bought a product a low score. But if they’ve given you their phone number, they get a slightly higher score. If they’ve been opening your emails for 6 months, they get a much higher score. If they’ve bought a low end product, their score is increased as well.
You can then dedicate more marketing efforts to higher scoring customers. For example, you might do direct mail and phone campaigns to customers who score above a certain threshold, as the ROI will generally be more than worth it.
6) Understand Your Customers’ Real Desires
What is it really that your customers are buying when they come to your website? What is it that they want that they’re getting when they come to your site?
Try to get deep in your customers’ psyche. Don’t just look at your site as keywords; instead look at them as desires that you’re helping realize. Figure out these desires and you’ll be able to better market to your customers.
7) Move Beyond Basic Keyword Research
Once you know what your customers really want and what makes them tick, you’ll be able to move beyond just creating content around keywords. Instead, you’ll be able to create content and products based on what people truly want. That’s what’ll get you tons of press, buzz and shares.
Using keywords is a good platform to start with in the beginning. In the long run however, you want to move towards truly understanding your customers and providing solutions that others want to help spread in their communities.
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