4 reasons you should know your website visitors

There is price. And then there is value. No one will pay the price for your product or service unless they see value in it. So, how do you stand out among competitors and add value to your business?

The first step would be to listen to your prospects and understand their needs. Let’s say you own a shop and a customer enters. What do you do? You let them browse, and if they’re looking for something specific, you can step in and assist them. Based on what they are doing in the shop, it’s easy to ascertain whether they are window-shopping or looking for a product, or if something has caught their attention. You can then make a sales pitch accordingly by showing them the range of your offerings, elaborating on features of a particular product or offering them a discount.

But what if the store is online? How do you study your prospects and customers then? How do you add value to their experience? This is where a website-visitor insights platform comes in. It’s not the same as website analysis, albeit a subset of it. While website analysis gives you data on where the traffic is coming from and which page has the most hits, visitor insights will give you information on the individuals who come to your site.

Here’s how you can use that data:

1. Find out what they’re interested in: Like in a shop, when a person visits your website for the first time, they can be looking for a particular product or just browsing. A real-time visitor insights platform will tell you which page visitors are viewing, what page they move on to and how long they stay on each page. Keeping a track of their movement through your website will give you a fair idea as to what they’re interested in.

You can serve links of your relevant offerings to the first-time visitors and see if something catches their eye. It’s a great opportunity to upsell or cross-sell, as you can direct visitors towards related products. You can also integrate the website-visitor insights platform with your ​CRM and store the new visitors as leads.

2. Identify issues: If a person is a repeat visitor—the software will tell you when and how many times they have visited before. You can see the history of their movements and identify possible reasons for not making a purchase. If a person keeps looking at the features page of a certain product, maybe they have some questions related to it. If they browse through different models of the same product, maybe they can do with some assistance on which will be the best buy for them. If they keep stopping at the pricing page, maybe they’re looking for a discount.

3. Make them feel special: Everyone likes personalized service. One way of making your visitors feel special is to customize content based on their browsing history. Shop Direct, for example, offers a unique customized landing page for each of its visitors. It can serve up to 1.2 million versions of the website. ESPN, too, recently revamped its website to deliver a more personalized experience to its visitors.

You can also use your prospect’s browsing data to offer them custom deals. For instance, if the person is interested in more than one product, you can offer them a personalized package deal.

4. Targeted marketing: Know where your visitors are coming from. You can find out not just their geographical location, but also how they came to be on your page—were they directed here by a blog, or a Tweet, or a Facebook post? Or did they Google something that led them to your page? Is a significant percentage coming from a particular country or region?

How do you use this insight? Say, a lot of your visitors are from a region where the first language is not English. You could invest in hiring a salesperson fluent in that language. If a person comes to your website from Twitter, you can ask them to tweet about you and spread the word among their followers, or if Twitter is sending a lot of traffic your way, you may add a Twitter widget to your website—one that encourages visitors to tweet about your product. Targeted marketing will help you improve sales conversions.

Of course, just tagging your visitors is not enough. While a website-visitor insights platform can help you follow your visitors around the online shop, you’ll need a platform to connect and engage with them. Zoho SalesIQ offers you both. Stay tuned for our next post on real-time lead scoring, and in the meantime, give Zoho SalesIQ a try.