The advent of the Internet has forged many new ways to help you acquire the customers you want as well as keep their attention trained on you. Analyzing what your customer does on your website can help you determine what you can do to improve their experience and your customer acquisition process, as well as learn what captures their attention the best. As part of our ongoing series of posts about online tools (part one can be viewed here) that you can use to improve your sales, we take a look at some marketing tools that will improve the way you acquire new customers.
Lucky Orange (http://luckyorange.com)
Web analytics is hugely important for anyone involved with optimizing their company’s web experience and who want to increase the likelihood of visitors coming to their site. If your company relies very much on people visiting the official website to view or order products, then it is a great idea to make use of the large amounts of information that the people who already visit can provide you now to influence people in the future.
Enter Lucky Orange. Similar to Google’s Web Analytics, it takes monitoring behaviours one step further. The more familiar features are the listing of essential keywords, seeing what countries visited, viewing the top landing pages visited and counting unique visitors. In terms of new value it can add, it displays heat maps of the most popular and least popular areas of your site, provides the means for recording how visitors interact with your site, live chatting software that interacts with the customer while they are browsing as well as visitor polls to gather opinions and statistics.
How can this help you with sales? Market research is essential for knowing who your target audience is. And when you know who your target audience is you can cater to their specific needs and sell more effectively as you know what they will respond to based on behaviours and demographics. Surveys will aid you in getting a more personal, straightforward reason for a visitor’s browsing, and with the live chat feature you can guide the visitor through the site and towards a product or service you think they will like. If you know their movements in real time you can see whether interaction with the site is satisfactory for getting them to the relevant areas and what the visitor is interested in finding.
SessionCam (http://www.sessioncam.com)
SessionCam is a site that also offers a way in which to monitor the traffic that comes to your website via heat maps and session replays. The heat map gives you a visual representation of what your customers do on the site for the majority of the time they spend there. These will show you whether they are spending too much time on one part and maybe not enough on the other parts of the site. It can give you an indication of whether people are finding the breadcrumbs you are leaving to the places you deem most important to selling your product or service.
There are essentially four different types of heat maps that SessionCam provides. There is the click activity that will help you see if the positioning of your links is effective enough. Scroll heat maps offer a view of how far your user is scrolling to see whether they are reaching all of the places on your site that you want them to reach. If a user is not scrolling far enough down they may not see all of the important pieces of information. Another one displays mouse movement to indicate where the user is looking as most people will place their mouse in the position that their eye is also resting. This will aid you in placing content in the best position to catch someone’s eye. Lastly, they provide is the consideration heat map. This heat map takes into consideration the user’s screen size and resolution, and then focuses on vertical and horizontal scrolling to determine what areas are viewed most.
The session replays are a great addition to the heat maps and they work in conjunction with each other. The session replay helps you record the clicks, mouse movements, form entries and scrolling of users that visit your website. The session replay will play it back to you in the same speed of the user and it will help you see how much time a person takes on a particular component to see whether they might struggle with a particular area more than the others. It also records the amount of visitors that come to your website.
Mixpanel (https://mixpanel.com/)
Many people turn to Google Analytics when looking to analyse their website traffic but it is often not known that there are other services available that can do the same if not better. Mixpanel is one of these available services and focuses its attention more sharply on specifics rather than general applications of data.
Analytics usually focus on issues such as the amount of page views one gets during a particular time period but this does not tell you whether people are engaged with your website and its content or not. To avoid giving general advice for specific issues, Mixpanel uses particular questions about your website and its users to determine the data you need (this process is called segmentation). For example, you can ask through what platform (like Twitter or Facebook) your users share more of your content or which Google Ads campaign is giving you the most paying customers.
Mixpanel also allows you to see on which website pages your customers drop off. Then one can experiment using “funnels”. You type in a variable and their analytics get the data. An example would be asking how many users that arrive from an advert will end up booking a room. Another feature called retention, will show you how many times a person returns to your app and uses it on a regular basis and not only how many have downloaded or uninstalled the app.
This process also includes viewing people who have similar activity profiles together, following them to see what their reactions are via an individualized activity feed and then being allowed to ask their feedback on new or existing products and services in a personal message. Another part of this targeting system is the revenue feature which enables you to determine the value of each customer and their potential future value to your business.
This tool also allows you to notify customers that their free trial is ending or to message them when they have not visited the site in a while to ask what will make them return to your site. Also, it has an internal email service that allows you to send push notifications or mass emails to customers. It can do this via any device that the customer is using.
In summary, all of these things tools allow you to be more engaged with your customer, understanding their needs better and so improve your service and the products you are marketing to them.
