Tracking anonymous web visitors using marketing automation is very important to any organization that relies on the web as a means to provide information to prospects. I wrote a short piece last month about the value of anonymous visitor tracking. Let’s take a closer look at some of the ways you can leverage anonymous visitor data to help your sales team beat the competition and close deals.
Tracking down anonymous visitors isn’t difficult when you have the company name. You can apply a little bit of human intel and track down anonymous folks who visit your site. If you are a software company that sells solutions to IT operations folks, it’s probable that the visitors to your site that are looking at your software solutions are probably in the IT operations department. Sales and marketing folks can easily use the anonymous data to triangulate on a given organization’s buyers and work to establish personal communication with them. You may already have contacts in the IT operations department of that company, or you can easily acquire that information through a variety of sources.
Inside sales folks can be effective at tracking down the individuals who were the likely site visitors from specific organizations, and open a dialog with them. Marketing automation systems will usually provide the company name, location, and show you the content and pages that were viewed on the site.
Account-based marketing
Is an account heating up and coming closer to making a buying decision? You can determine account-based activity on an account using anonymous visitor data. Anonymous visitor data helps you gauge how many individuals from an organization have an interest in your product. Even after you’ve identified and engaged a few key individuals from an organization in the sales process, an increase in anonymous activity from other visitors at the same company shows that an entire team is checking you out. These may be finance and contracts people, peers within the same department or bosses and decision makers checking out your company. That may indicate an imminent buying decision to the savvy sales rep, and trigger an action on their part.
You can also use the stored anonymous data to beat your competitors to a prospect. When a prospect identifies themselves to you by filling out a form on a website, their previous anonymous data is automatically added into the prospect’s record. Past website visits and activity will be included in their prospect record. That past activity may well make that prospect a “hot” prospect from the very first moment that they self-identify, and you can instantly bumping them ahead of the lead flow.
How does it work?
Image two scenarios, each one has a form-fill on your website by a potential prospect.
In the first scenario, a site visitor fills out a form to download your latest whitepaper. The lead information is captured; the prospect is added to a nurturing campaign for the start of the long process of becoming a marketing qualified lead. They get a personalized thank-you-for-downloading the whitepaper, but the lead usually would usually just get put into queue and would probably not get an immediate phone call by sales.
But what if that person had already visited your site 10 or 20 times in the last year? Wouldn’t you want that prospect contacted immediately?
In the second scenario, when the prospect visits the site and fills out a form, the visitor’s prior anonymous record is added in with the new information. Those prior visits identify the prospect as someone who is worth contacting immediately. First engagement can have significant advantages. Armed with a full visit history, including the visits from when that prospect was anonymous, the sales person is able to engage in a useful call with the prospect right away.
Casual first-time visitors won’t get the call, but the hot prospects will. The prospect only gets the call if their prior visit history justifies it. It’s a much better use of your sales resources.
With anonymous visitor tracking, you can:
- Identify prospects that are active, but not ready to self-identify.
- Triangulate on those active anonymous visitors and contact them
- Look at account-based activity to see when interest level is increasing
- Identify and contact leads who justify immediate attention, rather than arbitrarily putting them in a long nurturing flow.
- Reach these prospects at the right time with greater insight into each prospect’s exact needs and their level of interest.
- Empower your marketing team to nurture leads with a deeper understanding of your potential customers.
There are many reasons why anonymous visitor data is valuable. You just need to put it to work for you.
The post The value in anonymous visitor tracking. Part two appeared first on Marketing Automation Blog | eTrigue.
