Web Marketing: Knowing When It’s Time to Meet the Parents
One of the most serious decisions in the dating world is knowing when it’s time to have your significant other meet your parents. As the movie by that name showed, it can be a real make-or-break for the relationship. Because dating normally has a long “sales cycle” before moving into engagement and then marriage, trying to get to the meet-the-parents stage too early often leads to losing the “prospect” completely. And to drowning your sorrows in a pint or two of Haagen-Dazs.
Online marketing for considered-purchase items is very similar. It, too, generally has a very long sales cycle. And if you try to rush it with the marketing equivalent of meeting the parents before it’s time (seeking more of a commitment or investment of time than the Web visitor is willing to make), you very well may send the prospect running for the hills. And that may cost you more than a bit of premium ice cream.
There is one significant difference, however. In the dating world, you have to rely on experience, signals, and gut instinct alone to determine when it’s time to move into the next stage. And that’s not always reliable, as evidenced by the popularity of Greg Behrendt’s and Liz Tuccillos’ “He’s Just Not That Into You” series of books. For Websites specializing in considered-purchase products, there are all kinds of analytics that create data points that purport to help you make informed decisions—providing you know how to read them and turn the complex data points into actionable information.
That’s where many marketers fail. They tend to use Web analytics to measure the beginning and the end of the sale, as though they are selling iPods through an online store rather than through a more costly, complex, considered purchase buying cycle. They measure how many page views were generated on the site, and how many sales were made. But page views don’t buy products.
Yet too many marketers leave out all the little steps in between and therefore leave some of the most important information on the digital table: what specifically is driving the buying behavior. This is the wealth of information that resides within the individual clicks and paths taken that will indicate how to move prospects through the sales cycle more efficiently. Studying a buyer’s actions before and after each stage can help you construct a profile of how to sell to potential customers.
Installing one of the popular Web analytics tools would seem to be a simple enough solution. But that alone is not enough. Many businesses that have made investments in Web analytics software are all but drowning in a sea of general traffic and page view stats, so that they can barely keep their head above the swells of data, let alone figure out what to do with the information. Or they go the route of measuring campaign-specific initial responses (clicks) and potentially some final conversion events.
This level of data and insight, while generally directional, does not give the business the visibility necessary to know what their Website visitors really want and care about and what financial value their qualifying actions have for the business. And that’s assuming, of course, that the visitors are representative of the target-market prospects they crave.
The balance of power continues to shift to the buyer, who has more and more relevant and contextual information to support buying decisions than ever before. Marketers need to respect this, provide a Web context for them to show their behaviors, and measure this in order to more specifically target offers to them.
Simply put, it’s time to stop thinking of a Website as merely a disseminator of information and instead to use it to develop the relationship with prospects more fully.
Suppose a prospect in the consideration stage is moving through the Website. Everything is going as expected until he is asked to fill out a form to receive a white paper. Suddenly he abandons the form, bringing the sales process to a halt. By seeing where he was before going to the form and where he went afterward (assuming he stayed on the site), you can gain valuable insight as to why he didn’t fill out that form.
Tracking and translating meaningful prospect activities—such as requesting specific information (e.g. the aforementioned downloading of white papers), tips, and toolkits, and providing contact information for future e-mail communications—can help to grow your relationship with the prospect. all are indicative of a growing relationship. By understanding various Website pages and activities from their relative business value and assigning them placements and relative scores in your pipeline, you can determine a financial outcome based on the value of the ensuing pipeline. You also can work to keep prospect segments on the engagement path by detecting and removing obstacles in their way, thereby moving more prospects to more meaningful actions, eventually resulting in a qualified lead or sale.
One example might be adding an e-mail question mechanism to a page with a “contact us” form. A contact form by its nature implies a commitment; you’re asking for a lot of information at once. To ask a question, however, all a prospect needs to supply is an e-mail address. There is a lot less perceived risk on the part of the prospect, yet you are still working toward moving from general information-gathering to a more serious look. The prospect isn’t being asked to meet the parents, just to come over for a home-cooked dinner.
The Internet has shifted the balance of power from seller to buyer. Sellers, however, can study buyer interactions and preferences at each stage of the buying cycle and continually improve their value. By knowing when it’s time to play it cool and when it’s time to take customers and prospects to “meet the parents,” you’ll be able to increase your yield of customers from visitors by creating a mutually beneficial relationship on the customers’ terms.
Karen Breen Vogel is president/CEO of ClearGauge (www.cleargauge.com), an online marketing services firm. She can be reached at [email protected].
