I’ll share a secret with you. The statistics you’re currently collecting on your website are lying to you. At least, they don’t tell you the whole truth. A visitor is never just a visitor. Even if you’re using Google Analytics and you know which countries these visitors come from, how many are repeat visitors or how many are one-off visits.
Well, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. If you have a content site (blog, news site) and you see your number of visitors increase every month and maintain a constant percentage of repeat visitors, you know you’re attracting and retaining your audience.
Otherwise, you don’t really know who these people are. They do visit you, but do they bring you closer to your goal?
To draw a parallel, a visitor to a website is like a passer-by in a retail store. A passer-by is not a customer until he or she has an item in hand and has passed through the checkout. That’s why merchants generally count the number of sales they make rather than the number of people who walk through the door to assess the effectiveness of an advertising campaign or an article about them in a newspaper.
On the web, this is known as a funnel. Street-front businesses do it too, even if they don’t use such a nice term. They could count the number of passers-by versus the number of people who walk through the door versus the number of people who approach the item for sale versus the number of people who buy one and thus become a customer.
So how do you go about it? Very simply, create different control points on your website. Here’s a practical example. Let’s say you want to know how many people are interested in your new website monitoring service. You then write an entry in your blog or a page on your website. The teaser will be visible on your home page (if you arrived here on my blog, it’s because the teaser on the main page was enough to keep you reading, or you found it through a search, which shows its relative importance). The important thing is that your visitor has already qualified a little. He’s arrived at your text about this superb service. Towards the end of the article you announce when it will be available.
Many of you would stop there, and that’s a big mistake. Your visitor read you (maybe stopped in the middle) but is he interested? To find out for sure, ask them to subscribe to your mailing list, where you’ll inform them when the service becomes available. Offer him a discount to make the offer even more attractive. That said, never break a customer’s trust. If he gives you his contact details, it’s not so that you can sell them, and it’s not so that he can be contacted for services other than the one he signed up for.
Once they’ve signed up, send them an initial e-mail to let them know that they have indeed signed up, and that you’ll be in touch when your service is pre-launched. With a discount to match.
At this point, you’ll say to me, “That’s all well and good, but we’re still talking about creating a mailing list, sending e-mails, making multiple pages. How complicated is that?”
To which I reply, “Not at all!”
Here are five steps to get you there:
- Open a MailChimp account. They manage your distribution list. They also make sure you comply with SPAM regulations.
- Create a distribution list. This step allows you to describe what you want to do with the information, as well as your contact e-mail addresses.
- In the process of creating your distribution list, you also create the subscription form. Don’t hesitate to give it a visual that matches your website.
- Finally, place the link at the end of your blog, text, in short, on your website.
- When you launch your product, you go back to MailChimp and send an e-mail to all your subscribers.
There you go! Now you know how many of your visitors are potential customers.
If the size of your list increases rapidly, you’ll know you’ve written correctly to reach the right customers. Otherwise, it’s still very simple. Vary your content and the placement of links on the page. The number of registration links. Don’t make too many changes at once. You want to measure the impact of each change, so you can go back if a change doesn’t have the desired effect.
At this point, your visitors are no longer mere strollers, since you’ll be able to measure whether you’re getting closer to your goal.
—
Jean Marc
You’d like to track your visitors better, and would like us to help you get there faster. Contact us directly by e-mail and we’ll be happy to see what can be done.
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