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How to Identify Anonymous Website Visitors (And Convert Them into Actionable Sales Leads)

One of our users—a service agency we’ll call “TrendSetters”—has the same problem most companies do—identifying good sales leads from its website. After using Leadfeeder to audit the quality of traffic visiting its website, TrendSetters wanted to dig into sorting the contacts. They were looking for two things: Contact information (name, title, email address, phone number) for the companies they considered hot prospects. The online activity of each visitor to identify viable sales leads. In this article, we’re going to explain how TrendSetters identifies anonymous website visitors and takes action on the data they gather from Leadfeeder. (Note: Want to see who’s visiting your website—even if they don’t fill out a form? Try Leadfeeder for free.) How to Identify Anonymous Website Leads Contacts who request information or other forms requiring contact details are “qualified” leads. These people want to hear from a sales rep. They’re ready to establish a connection. But what if a site visitor doesn’t fill out a form? Those people also represent potential clients. The challenge is sorting the window shoppers from the potential customer with cash-in-hand. For TrendSetters, collecting 3-5 highly-qualified leads per month is sufficient to keep its sales pipeline full. The company has a set of metrics (rating system) it uses to identify where a contact might be along the sales continuum from browser to buyer. Did they visit the case study page of the website? Which blog posts did they look at? How long were they on the website? How many times did they visit the website? Instead of investing staff time or using more expensive solutions, the company customizes Leadfeeder to rate and then organize all of those website visitors to find highly-qualified leads, which eliminates time wasters. What follows is the way TrendSetters identifies contacts and qualifies them in order to provide sales staff with details about the businesses its website attracts and engages. 1. Find Leads — Even If They Didn’t Submit a Form Google Analytics allows TrendSetters to see how many people view its Lead magnet page per month. Which is great. It can offer a sense of how many potential clients are out there. But it’s just the raw number. How many of these are spam? How many are from the right target audience? Interpreting numbers like this is a chronic problem for many companies. Leadfeeder is different. Instead of anonymous numbers, it shows exactly which actual businesses visited the website, and which pages they visited, even if they didn’t fill out a lead form. The main page in Leadfeeder lists the companies that visited the website. The Custom Feeds section on the same page makes it possible to organize and create groups of contacts in a way that supports the sales process. Feeds can be set up to mirror lead qualifying, specific industry targets, or other criteria (more about this later). One company that visited TrendSetters’ lead magnet page and fit its ideal client demographic was Apptio, a B2B software company. With a single click, they can see Apptio’s site and its social accounts to see what the company is doing with its marketing. A quick review of the pages Apptio visited revealed the kind of information that makes it possible to decide if they’ll make a cold call and prepare for it if they do. This same review can be done for companies who do fill out a lead form, which will help with preparation for a sales call. 2. Gather Contact Information For each website visitor, Leadfeeder attempts to pull a company’s personnel information from LinkedIn. TrendSetters’ ideal point of contact is a marketing manager or the CMO. So, a sales rep looking at the list will be able to see the email address—as well as links to social media profiles for Apptio’s CMO and Director of Content Marketing. Microsoft was also on the list of site visitors who viewed the lead magnet page. This contact revealed a more important detail—location. The visitor was someone from Microsoft’s Bellevue office, so Leadfeeder provides Washington office contacts. A great way to land major clients is to start with smaller or local offices. 3. Sifting and Sorting Contact Information Leadfeeder feeds use specific criteria (filters) to organize the Google Analytics data. Leadfeeder includes a few preset feeds that can be modified. But the ability to create custom feeds can automatically sort information according to chosen criteria. The settings on feeds can be modified to create a comprehensive set of feeds to quickly sort and find opportunities. Filters make it possible to be as broad or detailed as needed. Leadfeeder filters are organized by different aspects of the sales process. Behavior: first visit occurred, landing page, page views per day, visit length, etc. Acquisition: ad content, campaign, keyword, referring URL, etc. Company Info: country, employee count, industry, region, etc. TrendSetters found it helpful to match the feed criteria for sorting contacts with its existing sales process. Targets Wishlist clients = specific company names Ideal Computer Software Clients = target industries Sales-related website pages Case Studies Work With Us Visit length = 15 minutes TrendSetters also wants to know who is getting to the website via social media channels, so they created feeds for Facebook and Twitter. It’s also possible to check on how well a particular piece of content marketing is, or isn’t, performing as a lead generator. If sales team divide a market by products or geographical area, those divisions can also be used to create feeds. 4. Going Granular… or Not TrendSetters uses a lead scoring process that gives a numeric value to different activities on its website—a certain number of points are required before a sales call is made. But some companies look for certain qualities such as being in a specific industry (e.g., construction) or a certain size (e.g., over 100 employees). Here’s how those traits can be tracked to further segment the data in Leadfeeder. First, you can create as many custom tags as you need for any record in Leadfeeder. Tags can be used to tie companies to specific actions taken on your website, supporting the qualification process. Traits that might be used for tags can be defined about the target market, such as: Industry: marketing Industry: public relations Size: too small but growing Size: ideal Tags can also be used to assign a specific activity. One contact might require immediate action but others might be flagged as not yet meeting the necessary scoring level. Here’s one possible approach to such a system: The activity in the “visits” section of Leadfeeder can indicate the best way to categorize a website lead and take a follow-up activity. Some of these activities can be managed directly from Leadfeeder such as emailing a contact to the sales rep or assigning a staff person to a specific contact. While this approach applies specifically for qualifying leads, tags are versatile and can be used in other ways. For example, tags can be used to indicate where a contact is in the sales pipeline. Sales process begun: This tag indicates the assigned sales rep is following up on the lead. Offered and refused: This tag could mean contact was made but the company is currently not interested. If the company visits the website later, it could be a sign another contact could be made. Creating tags is a simple “add” and color-coding helps differentiate each for a visual shorthand, when needed. Too complicated? Then keep it simple. Maintain a single feed that excludes any irrelevant site visits (e.g., visitors outside your market area, those who only check a recruitment page). In this case, it’s a good idea for one person to act as a “gatekeeper” who goes through the feed, checks the potential of each lead and makes assignments. 5. Keep It All Coordinated For a company using a client relationship management (CRM) system, it’s easy to integrate Leadfeeder data into just about any solution. But to avoid confusion, it would be a good idea to make sure the language of the CRM is used in Leadfeeder. For example, make sure the names of the tags match the tags used by the CRM. Beyond the technology, it’s important to make sure that everyone using Leadfeeder and the data it provides are all using the same lingo. Sales, marketing, and leadership staff need a common vocabulary. This will make sure the feeds, tags, and other customization to Leadfeeder matches up to the terms used throughout the company. On one hand, this isn’t too difficult - feed and tags in Leadfeeder are used the same way they are in other technology applications. On the other hand, matching the language of the sales process might be a bit tricky. Having a definition for “qualified lead” and defining the characteristics of a “target client” will ensure that everyone knows what those terms mean. The target client for sales will set the criteria for the filters used to sort Google Analytics data. Being 100% clear about who those targets are will make the feeds more effective. And when the boss says, “How many target clients did Leadfeeder give us this month?” the answer will be accurate—no more confusion in monthly updates or quarterly reports. BONUS: MailChimp integration is also a breeze for streamlining communications. Streamline the Sales Process Anything that helps streamline the sales process is valuable, especially for time-consuming activities such as lead qualification. Maintaining the flow of leads can be made easier by leveraging technology to tap the constant flow of digital data and find those essential opportunities. TrendSetters has been able to achieve its goal of finding qualified leads from website traffic data. The intel about which companies are browsing its site populates the company’s “keep an eye on” list, while providing helpful information about others that are clearly shopping for a solution. Some of those are companies they wouldn’t have known to target otherwise.



This post first appeared on Leadfeeder, please read the originial post: here

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How to Identify Anonymous Website Visitors (And Convert Them into Actionable Sales Leads)

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