Almost every company has a website but very few are being used to their fullest capabilities. A very important piece of the website pie, that many business owners forget, is that your website is not only acting as your company or product brochure but as the tool to help you gather extremely useful and important information about your prospects and customers. You’ve invested money and time in your website, invest a small amount more to expand it and utilise it to gather market intelligence!
Why is market intelligence important to SME’s?
Ok we all know that the big dogs probably have an entire department dedicated to just researching the market and customer trends because they have enormous budgets. But that should stop you from doing exactly the same on a much smaller scale. Any business owner knows the communication struggle they go with to get customer and market information out of their sales people’s heads and into a format that they can quickly and easily read to get a sense of trends. Those trends can do everything from telling you who is interested in your products, or more importantly who is not… to new products ideas… to finding customer service issues. So if you know this struggle, what are your options? Invest in new employees, outsource the research to a telemarketing company, but even then you are still playing the waiting game to see results… In this new digital age, if you have customers that use the internet (and mostly likely you do!) you need to learn more about personalised URL’s and how they can help solve this problem for you.
gURL’s and pURL’s I assume we aren’t talking about necklaces so what are they?
A gURL is a generic landing page that all of your new website visitors see that asks them to answer a few questions. This mini survey then populates a pURL, or personalised landing page where the content dynamically changes dependent on how they responded to each question.
What are the benefits of this sort of campaign?
The answer is more than you are thinking…
- They are significantly more likely to read and respond to your offerings with an average response rate of 15%! Well above the average 1-3% for most campaigns.
- Because the pURL is personalised to the reader it keeps your visitors online longer and increases the frequency of their visits.
- Use their responses to automatically trigger events such as a notice to your sales team to ring them immediately or an email sending the prospect more information that they expressed an interest in.
- Use the data to intelligently access your market and generate a second very successful targeted marketing campaign.
- Automatically integrate their responses into your CRM to cleanse and update your database with 0% effort from your sales force.
Visualise it… a generic example for a hotel:
- A direct mail piece is sent to existing customers and prospects, each with a different message or offer that will encourage them to visit your gURL. For existing customers it offers them a free breakfast with their next stay and for prospects it offers a competition to win a free weekend stay.
- They go to your website and answer no more than 3-5 questions such as: are you male or female? Are you staying alone, as a couple or as a family? How often do you travel to this area? How long do you typically stay? Do you typically eat at the hotel?
- The submit button is hit and it now takes them to their pURL or personalised page that displays content specific to their answers. Example: photo of a business person vs couple vs family at the hotel… Specific hotel information such as room internet and desk space, or exercise room, or spa facilities… A list of room specials applicable to when they are staying, how many, size of room and for how long… Preferred member discounts if they will be staying frequently or are an existing customer… A list of local restaurants if they prefer to eat out… A list of local events and nearby family outings…
- The information the submitted on the initial survey is now immediately sent to you and can be monitored in real time online. So you can use this to see your response rates, percentages for each of your questions, to contact those that will be staying again soon and in general see who is typically staying and how to best target them in the future to keep them coming back.
So how exactly do I implement gURL’s and pURL’s into my business model?
First you need to find a reputable digital or cross media marketing company. They will be able to build you a system that links onto your existing website to generate the pURL’s. You should simply need to supply them with your customer data, your branding requirements and the questions or research that you want to learn about your customers. Your next job is to send a direct mail or email campaign to your target, if you want to avoid having to do this step yourself, then find a company that does digital and cross media and also direct mail. A good cross media company will also be able to link this system directly into your CRM (if you have one) so that the customer responses are automatically populated and it will also send notifications to the correct people when a survey response needs immediate action.
If you value knowledge about your customers and the market and you have a website, then taking this extra step will not only give you the intelligence to direct your company down the right path but also present your company to your customers in a manner that shows you respect and care about them enough to ask them for their opinions and reward them for their honesty.
