Delivering consistent, personalised messaging and content that your prospective visitors find useful and engaging helps you connect with them and turn them into a loyal customer.
You’ve done your research. Convinced your small business needed a better web presence, you’ve brought in the experts and had a great-looking website developed. However, you’re still yet to see an uptick in sales from your online activity. Why?
First, you need to be looking at the bigger picture. Guiding your visitor through the sales funnel is about engaging each customer with a consistently good website experience. Keeping your visitors coming back for more means you can keep your business growing.
1. Email marketing = raised awareness
Email marketing gives you the ability to reach a larger audience and establish that first contact with them. By clever use of segmentation, you can offer your visitors content they actually want to read based on their demographics and website behaviour. For example, if you have a large group of visitors that have all shown an interest in outdoor pursuits, offer them a guide to unusual places of beauty for the active nature lover. Using email marketing, after your visitors have downloaded your free guide, you can send them an email suggesting products that complement the guide and make them aware of the products your website offers that they are interested in.
2. Engage further with social media
Facebook, Twitter and other popular social media pages are places to initiate awareness of your products. Offer visitors to your Facebook page interesting articles, how-tos or tips that can help them in their online and offline worlds. And when they click the post, take them to your web page to learn who they are so you can add them to your contacts and send them behaviour-related content. By applying analytics, you can monitor the number of page views, downloads, referrals and more, to build a more complete visitor profile to refine further the content you send them.
3. A/B test to optimise campaigns
Using A/B Testing to prepare multiple variants of the same page with different layouts, text and graphics gives you a clearer indication of which versions create higher conversion rates. Sending two different variants to two smaller control groups means you can compare the performances of both and see which one yields more conversions before making the winner available to all of your visitors. A/B testing helps you take the guesswork out of creating successful campaigns.
4. Apply personalisation at the consideration stage
Now that you have built a profile of your visitor based on the information they are searching for and their page-browsing history on your site, it’s time to start personalising the content they see to tailor it to their needs. Using personas to provide visitors with personalised content to meet their demands in the first three stages of the sales funnel, you can present them offers that are tailor-made to their needs.
5. The human touch with marketing automation
Using marketing automation to develop new leads and create greater demand for your products or services lets you implement automated marketing activities not needing human resources, such as distributing your message across multiple channels. By delivering consistent, personalised messaging and content that your prospective visitors find useful and engaging, it helps you and your visitors and customers stay connected.
These smart techniques allow you to improve your website’s user experience, boost visitor numbers, increase your ROI and expand your business.
Duncan Hendy, Content Strategy Manager, Kentico Software
