Your Website's Success - Beyond Online
In 3 simple steps to analyzing any online campaign, we ended the search for results with online conversion (sales, registrations or downloads -- whatever your objective), but the consumer's interaction with your brand does not end there.
It’s an alarming stat, if looked at on its own, that over 97% of visitors to your site do not end up buying online (if even 3% did buy, you'd actually be doing much better than the average eCommerce site). One barrier has always been the consumer's unwillingness to complete the transaction online whether it be due to security concerns, needing more information, needing to discuss with a spouse, etc…).
So instead of focusing on how to increase that 3%, put some effort into enabling the other 97% to purchase. One clear way is to breakdown the walls between channels and adopt a multichannel framework. Research has consistently shown that consumers “shop” across channels and the most profitable ones use multiple channels. So as marketers, we should make it easy to shop across channels, and more importantly, as online marketers, we should acknowledge that our hard work leads to much more than just 3% of the traffic.
Here are 4 strategies to spread your website's impact beyond online sales:
1. Unique 1-800 numbers: The easiest and fastest way. Place a unique, trackable 1-800 number at decision making points throughout your site. Then either through your regular call center metrics or by using services like Mongoose Metricshttp://mongoosemetrics.com/, you can track the number of leads and sales from that number.
2. Click-to-Talk or live chat services. Give your users the ability to connect with a customer service person by phone or online chat. Track the number of chat sessions and in-bound calls plus the sales and service requests resulting from them. There are many companies that provide such services, like LivePerson.
3. Call-me-back. Lunch hour represents one of the busiest times of day for traffic, but it's not necessarily the time when people are ready to make big decisions. Give them the ability to leave their number and arrange for someone to call them back at their preferred time. It gives a whole new meaning to telemarketers -- your phone call will actually be welcome in the evening. Track the out-bound calls, and sales and service requests resulting from them.
4. Store Locator. Most sites have one but may not be using it advantageously. Track the number of people who search for and get specific store locations -- there is a high likelihood they will visit. Allow them to book an appointment with an in-store associate -- you will likely get a customer who, having just researched on your site, is ready to make a decision and who may possibly be open to more than one product. Apple does this well with their OneToOne.
Now for those who are already doing the above and want to really explore the possibilities of measuring all offline impacts, Avinash Kaushik’s post does a great job at detailing other ideas and options.
