What Good is Insight about Your Visitors?
Web Marketing Today, Issue 63, November 1, 1999
What a stupid question to ask: "What good is insight about your visitors?" Really now! But many site owners make decisions every day on the basis of what they learned in Hunch Marketing 101. Too often, they are wrong, and their online business suffers for it.
You may have carefully designed your website for a particular target group. But after you're up and running for a few weeks, the real question is not Who are you trying to reach? but Who are you actually reaching? Here's why it's important to know.
Tailor products, services, and information to your visitors
Let's say you find that the majority of your B2B visitors don't have authority to make a purchase on your site. You'll want to approach them differently than the Vice Presidents or Purchasing Agents who can go ahead to make a purchase.
What if your site visitors turn out to be predominately 45 and older. You'll use different graphics and copy than you would with Gen-Xers.
If you find most of your visitors don't have a college education, it will affect the way you present information, the length of your articles, and the kinds of graphics.
If you find that 80% of your audience is using a high-speed access to the Internet, it'll guide you in site design, too.
If you can develop a demographic profile of your site visitors, it'll be a lot easier to sell advertising on your webpages and in your newsletter.
Once you find who is coming to your site, you'll know what kinds of products and services to feature. You'll know what kind of information to provide. You'll know where your site is lacking and where it is adequate.
How customer data helped Web Commerce Today
I've been publishing Web Commerce Today (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/), a subscription-based e-commerce e-mail and web periodical for the past two years. Until a month ago I had been using the same sales approach I originally wrote in 1997. It was essentially feature-based, describing our hands-on newsletter and superior E-Commerce Research Room. And subscriptions kept coming in steadily. The newsletter has helped a lot of companies get up-to-speed on e-commerce, and has been quite successful.
But I knew it could do better. Last summer I read Dr. Ken Evoy's book "Make Your Site Sell" (http://sales.sitesell.com) and I discovered many ways to improve my sales approach for the newsletter.
The first step, however, was to poll my subscribers to see why they subscribed. I learned that I had a diverse subscribership:
- Individuals who wanted to get up-to-speed quickly in e-commerce
- Wannabe retailers desiring to set up their first online store
- Site developers needing to learn the ins and outs of shopping cart program and payment gateway selection
- Entrepreneurs who needed to research so they could write a business plan that would attract venture capital
- Consultants who needed to keep up on e-commerce so they could provide on-target advice to their clients
- Employees who had been assigned to supervise their company's e-commerce website, and needed to learn the ropes
Each of these groups can profit greatly from the kind of information Web Commerce Today supplies. But how could I write sales copy that meets each of these needs?
I solved the problem by turning the newsletter's main page (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct/) into a self-diagnosing menu entitled, "What is your biggest e-commerce question?" I expressed the in the form of questions each of the main reasons people subscribe to my newsletter. When a visitor to that page clicks on the question that interests her most, she is given a sales pitch geared to her particular felt needs, and then invited to subscribe. I even included an equivalent to the little folder in the direct mail envelope that says, "Don't read this unless you've decided not to subscribe."
It took me three days of work to write and post a dozen new webpages, but the result has been a significant improvement in the daily subscription rate. I keep asking myself, Why didn't you do this sooner?
The reason, I suppose, was that I hadn't quite figured out who my subscribers REALLY were and what they were REALLY looking for. All I had to do was ask. A little insight on your visitors can take you a long way.
