The secrets to getting customer data
Getting customer data – how many people visited your website last month? If your site is even moderately successful, the answer is probably in the thousands. However, traffic for traffic’s sake is worthless. In an ideal marketing world you need to capture the details of the people who visit your website so you can keep in touch with them in an email nurture campaign. It’s possible you’ll need to use remarketing to bring them back to your website if you’re not successful in getting their interest sufficiently the first time. Remarketing will give you another chance to capture their details. Want to know how you could do this on your website? Our free website review is the place to start.
Click here to request your free website review.
Start Simple – Do you have these forms?
Before we start talking about pop-ups, cart abandonment and other fancy ways of capturing data, let’s tackle the simplest one. I’ve got a question. How easy is it for a customer to contact you if they’ve actively decided that they want to? Are there data capture forms on every page, or at least a link? How many clicks does it take to get from your homepage to a data capture form?
If the only way to contact you is via an email address or phone number listed on an obscure ‘contact us’ page in the footer, then you have a big problem. In fact, you may as well put up a big ‘CLOSED’ sign.
At a minimum, have a visible link to a contact page above the fold on all of your principle pages. You don’t always need to twist people’s arms! Your website may do a great job of convincing people that your product or service is world changing. However, if it’s a total nightmare to contact you, they probably won’t bother. Attention spans have fallen by a third in the last five years alone to as little as 8 seconds. Busy people won’t waste time trying to find your email address or phone number.
Getting customer data before they leave
You don’t need to throw in the towel when someone decides to leave your website. One of the keys to getting customer data is showing the right offer at the right moment. You can use data capture pop-ups to do this. These clever little things can detect when a visitor is about to leave your website and present them with a prompt to enter their email address in return for an incentive.
The incentive could be absolutely anything that you think will encourage your prospects to give you their email address. You could offer a discount on your products or services; a free white paper or other download – or a chance to sample something new. You can run regular A/B tests to find out what works best and tweak what you do accordingly. The key is to make it useful and relevant to your audience so that they understand the What’s in it for Them.
This is just one of the ways you can capture contact information from people you’d otherwise never hear from again. You can also run abandonned cart campaigns when someone has shown real intent to purchase from you but hasn’t completed, and other clever data capture strategies. Contact one of our Digital Marketing Scientists to find out how.
Tracking Pixels – No email required
You tried your best. Even with all the pop-ups, contact forms and other gizmos you put in place, someone left your website before you could data capture them. The battle is lost right? Wrong! Use a tracking pixel and you can launch a remarketing campaign to bring your prospect back to your website so you can capture their data the second time round.
Both Facebook Ads and Google AdWords will let you show remarketing ads to people who’ve visited your website. You can also be much more targeted and show specific ads to people who visited certain pages, performed certain actions and stayed there for a certain amount of time. Again, this is the perfect opportunity to run A/B tests, find out what works and do more of it!
If you’re not capturing your customer’s data, your website isn’t doing its job. Our digital marketing experts would be happy to help you make changes to your website so it captures more data, more quickly. Request a free website review today to see how we could help.
