While on a recent run (Ok, jog) around the neighborhood, I headed up the steepest climb, rocking out to Sticky Fingers (who doesn’t love the Stones?).  As I made my slow uphill progress, I heard another sound that I couldn’t quite place.  I removed my earphones and saw three neighborhood kids cheering me on from their vantage point in the backyard.  I smiled, waved and felt re-energized by this impromptu cheer.

Oddly enough, it also made me think about website visitors and leads – and how, in many cases, you don’t really know who your fans…your site visitors…really are.  It’s like leaving money on the table because these visitors are interested enough to come to your site, yet unless they contact you directly, you’ll never know who they are, what product they are interested in, etc.

For example, when you use Google Analytics, you can see useful aggregate data and trends but you cannot drill into visitor behavior (aka ‘your fans’) on a granular, individual level.  Additionally, when you send an email using one of the popular email service providers, you can see who has opened/clicked on an email but you can’t take the tracking past that initial click.

Marketing automation software can bridge this gap between aggregate anonymous traffic and identifying your supporters.  If someone completes a form on your website, they are no longer an anonymous visitor, and you can now track their current visit, future visits and also add them to future email campaigns (if they opted in).  Once the people in your database interact with an email you’ve sent, they are recognizable within the software so all past, present and future visits are fully trackable.

This type of visitor intelligence can quickly become addictive and you’ll be able to think of website visitors as leads…

•    See the company name of anonymous visitors (by way of their business class IP address) to give your outbound callers a great starting point for calling efforts
•    Gauge what topics or offers produce the greatest number of repeat visitors to your website so you can tailor web messaging, special offers, etc.
•    Store your lead’s site visits, email activity, pages viewed, etc. in one central location so you can create lists based on attributes OR behavior
•    Associate lead sources with specific visitors to send more relevant communications

As you can see, the possibilities of using this deeper tracking are really limitless.  By identifying and appreciating your fans (or leads) on an individual level, you’ll be able to build a relationship with your cheering squad to make climbing that big hill of lead generation a little easier.

>>Learn more about Net-Results website lead tracking.

“Personally Identifiable Information (PII), as used in information security, refers to information that can be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person or can be used with other sources to uniquely identify a single individual. The abbreviation PII is widely accepted, but the phrase it abbreviates has four common variants based on personal, personally, identifiable, and identifying. Not all are equivalent, and for legal purposes the effective definitions vary depending on the jurisdiction and the purposes for which the term is being used.”(Wikipedia 2010) Read more

Utilizing Net-Results has its obvious online marketing advantages, but how do you take your marketing to the next step efficiently and cost effectively? One of the most effective ways to integrate Net-Results with outside and interactive efforts is to use it to promote, register, track and analyze webinars, seminars, or interactive events. By utilizing Net-Results for your event marketing, you have the ability to integrate your event registration, email marketing, post event analysis, and website tracking of event attendees and registrants, all in one platform.

The first step to getting the word out to your prospects about your upcoming event is to create your email invitation campaign in Net-Results. You can not only create a standard email campaign, but an action based campaign that will track whether or not a recipient has signed up for your event either through your email or through a registration form on your site. If a recipient does not register, Net-Results can be set up to automatically send them another set of emails until they elicit the desired response. Net-Results will of course also track all opens, clicks and visits to your website from your email invitation. However, unlike other ESPs, Net-Results tracks the recipients visits to your site far beyond their initial opening and viewing of your email, and provides individual contact information and site navigation each and every time they return. You can even set up a real time alert to let you know when someone has opened your email, visited your site, registered for your event, or opened your email and did not register for your event. You can even set up an alert to notify you when registrants return to your website in the future.

When using Net-Results to track your registration, you are not only collecting your data in a streamlined, easy to access fashion, you are also able to view your registrants return visits to your website, automate your responses when someone signs up for your event, and cross reference your website’s pre existing web form capture mechanism, to ensure you are capturing each and every registrant and visitor. Not only can you see your registrants contact information and navigation through your site once they sign up for your event, you can also see all of their future visits, whether its next week or next year, you have access to exactly what they’re looking for and when and how to contact them.

Additionally, mapping your registration forms to Net-Results eliminates time consuming and manual data transfer, because all of your registrant’s information is easily streamed into a list in Net-Results, and hopefully into your sales pipeline. Also, having all of your registrants in a list in Net-Results enables you to send them future email marketing campaigns, promotions, discounts, and nurture them to the point of sale.

Once you’ve mapped your registration forms to Net-Results, the next step is to set up your auto responder emails to confirm their registration and provide them with any further information regarding your upcoming event. It also gives them a chance to respond back with questions, comments or suggestions. By using the Net-Results auto responder functionality, you’re saving money and time with email invitations, automatic confirmations and 24/7 self-service online registration.

Article marketing, blogging, pay-per-click advertising, banner ads, search engine marketing and optimization, social media, web design and development- These ideas and strategies that were meaningless 10 years ago were the hot topics at the Direct Marketing Association conference in San Diego this year. Net-Results showcased their state of the art intelligent email marketing and lead management automation tools in the exhibit hall amongst the industry’s latest in technology, services, and strategy providers including conglomerates like Google, Experian, and Kodak. Read more

This post is the 2nd in a series that explains the world of website visitor identification and tracking.  The first post laid out what’s not possible when trying to identify website visitors.  Now we get into what is possible in a business to business environment (the next post will discuss B2C and more on the B2B side).

Certain B2B sales and marketing organizations have a leg up when it comes to using a visitor tracking system to identify website visitors.  Why? Because in a lot of cases it’s possible to instantly identify the companies that visit your website using just an IP address.  The website visitor doesn’t even have to fill out a web form or otherwise identify himself at all. The instant a visitor comes to your site that visitor’s IP address is available to you.  Many IP addresses are easily associated with a company name and location.  Professional visitor tracking systems make that association for you and go much further, detailing exactly which pages were viewed by that visitor, the search engine they used, even the exact search phrase they typed so that you know exactly what they were looking for (this allows you to easily identify qualified vs. non-qualified prospects). Read more

The Net-Results website gets a lot of traffic from people who would like to identify individual website visitors.  Search phrases such as “identify website visitors” and “track individual web site visitors” bring traffic to us on a daily basis.  We find that many people are searching for a solution that will tell them the email addresses (or names & phone numbers) of each person that visits their website.

This post is the first in a series that will explain exactly what is and is not possible when it comes to identifying and tracking visitors to your website. Having personally built popular software for identifying website visitors I have at least one truckload of experience in this area, maybe more depending on the size of your truck. Read more