Five ways to ensure sales make the most of visitor analytics

As generating business online is becoming more and more competitive, business owners, sales directors and marketing managers welcome any additional insights that allow them and their teams to meet their targets and begin conversations with new customers.

Businesses today are building amazing websites and using tools such as Pay per click (PPC), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and social media to drive traffic. However any business that fails to properly analyse their site data is looking at a huge missed opportunity.

One way to do this is to use visitor analytics to examine user behaviour around your website, online communications and newsletters.

Less than 3% of website visitors actually make an enquiry. So using this figure, it’s well worth implementing a programme to improve your conversion rates.

The key to using visitor analytics – and one that should always be considered – is making sure you’re asking the right questions. What are the stumbling blocks: unanswered questions or lack of call to action that prevents a visitor becoming a new customer?

By gaining these valuable insights, you can make changes to sales and marketing tactics and create quantifiable objectives.

Here are some tips to ensure your sales team is making the most of visitor analytics.

1. Collect data in one place

This might seem like an obvious step, but not all companies do this. And not all companies that collect data actually use it to examine what works and what needs improvement within their sales process.

Here are some essential questions every business must ask:

• Are you collecting the right data?
• Is it numerical or individual data you need?
• Do you know the right things about each visitor?
• Is the data in a format you can use?
• Do you have the right access to the data analytics?
• Can you download the data in a format you can understand or manipulate?

2. Are you collecting statistics or insights?

In a world filled with more and more data, statistics around your website visitors are only useful if they provide your business insights and have an impact on the bottom line.

There are many free analytics packages, including Google Analytics, which do a fantastic job in providing essential data. However, the biggest downfall with these software packages is that they provide population data and do not focus on the individual journey. It’s often said that you “can’t pick up the phone and engage to a page view”.

Ensure you pick the right software to answer your business questions.

3. Implement up-to-date insights within your business process

Once the right software has been selected and installed, it still needs work to delve into the data and pull out the right insights. Don’t just buy software and expect magic – it still needs to be implemented into your business holistically.

Share the data across the whole team. Feedback affects every department and you can gain insights on the way forward from everyone across your company: from marketing, IT and sales team.

Importantly, make sure your frontline sales team have access to all the insights gleaned from the data, as well as the rationale behind it. Information regarding customers, the online customer journey and consumer behaviour is key to the sales process.

4. Measure the impact on the bottom line

It also is important to create a cost analysis of using analytics software to set against objectives and to create a benchmark.

Work out the cost of a new enquiry (via Google Ads or any other inbound marketing technique). If every visitor to your site costs 10p and you only get one enquiry for every 100 visitors, you have your benchmark, which can be improved upon.

Therefore, if you invest in analytics software, it is easy to work out how many enquires and conversions you must achieve to pay for the costs and to meet objectives.

5. Ensure analytics are built into all sales communications in the future

Once you have introduced analytics to improve the sales function, ensure it is written into all processes in the future.

All website enquiries, new promotions and products and any newsletters should be tracked, with data collected and used to follow up sales leads.

It’s your sales team that is working on the day-to-day leads so make sure you get full feedback from them and examine their data. If they work through email form enquiries or newsletter leads, for example, but have very low conversion rates, you need to go right back to the beginning and refine the process.

By examining all of your business’s marketing, your team learns what works, what increases conversions so naturally improves over time. 

You should be able to prove the cost-effectiveness of the time spent and any subscription to analytics software by proving your objectives are being met.

Tim Langley is the CEO of CANDDi.