Website Visitor Qualification: the first step in converting more visitors on your e-commerce site

Serving the underserved – not all visitors are created equal

In a previous blog, we highlighted the challenges businesses face with online conversion rates of 2-4%, and the untapped opportunity to convert more visitors and capture up to 20% more revenue by offering the right visitors, the right kind of help at the right time. We refer to this as “serving the underserved,” providing real-time, live sales assistance when the digital experience alone just isn’t enough.

The key to success in being able to convert these visitors is predicting and detecting which “underserved” visitors need help, and of those, which can be profitably offered real-time sales assistance.  If you don’t get this right you will engage visitors that would’ve converted on their own or visitors who won’t convert even with assistance, and all you have done is added cost without increasing revenue.

Whether your go to market model is driving visitors to buy, download a free/paid trial, or request a demo, (or a combination) the principles still apply.

To qualify visitors for real-time sales engagement on your site, you must begin tracking the visitor and the hundreds of available profile and behavior attributes the moment they hit your site and use that information to create a comprehensive, dynamic visitor profile in real time. The word “dynamic” in the description isn’t just to make it sound cool.  It’s a necessity.  A visitor, based on their profile and behavior, may qualify for assistance in one session but in another session, or even later in that same session, they may not.  The model must be able to forecast the potential revenue for each visitor to determine if the investment is warranted.  This is especially critical when you’re selling low margin or low AOV solutions.

If you have the model right, and associated engagement capabilities (topic of next blog), it’s possible to profitably provide live sales assistance to visitors buying products with AOV’s well below $100 and drive a massive lift in overall revenue.  This isn’t theory, we do it every day for our clients.

On the other hand, if you don’t have this intelligence, your online engagement efforts in aggregate may have a positive impact (in many cases not) however your bucket has holes in it.  You don’t know which visitors are costing you money to support and which ones you’re generating a positive ROI from.  There is a proliferation of chat tools in the market that don’t have this intelligence and it is more than likely those using them are not capturing the total incremental opportunity.  The issue is compounded as your site traffic grows.

At the highest level, you need to segment your visitor traffic into three major segments to ensure you’re investing your efforts where you’ll get a positive return:

• Self-Converters: This segment of visitors will convert without live sales assistance. You don’t want to add the cost of live sales engagement as it will generate little, if any, incremental revenue.
• Non/low Converters: This segment of visitors has no or low potential. You want to exclude this group as well because you won’t generate a positive ROI by engaging them.
• High Potential Underserved: This is the group you want to engage. They aren’t likely to convert on their own, or won’t convert at the same rate or AOV as the self-converters. The incremental investment to engage them will provide a significant ROI.  In our experience this group represents 15-20% of your visitor traffic.

Once you have the target segment identified, you will need to break these visitors into micro-segments (typically hundreds) to personalize and contextualize your engagement approach. We will get into that in our next blog on Visitor Engagement.

As outlined above, there is clearly more to visitor engagement than simply throwing a chat tool on your site.  When considering a visitor engagement solution, you want to be sure it can:

• Track visitor attributes to profile and identify visitors who can be profitably engaged (more on this below);
• Take real-time action, at scale, when those visitors are identified to engage them in the moment of truth;
• Understand how the action being taken is driving the result – positive and negative; and
• Use that information (attribution) to refine and optimize your engagement strategies and tactics over time.

To know which visitors can be profitably engaged, your visitor engagement solution must be driven by sophisticated real-time tracking and advanced analytics to:

• Determine a visitor’s propensity to buy;
• Know when a visitor needs help; and most importantly,
• Generate an incremental revenue forecast to determine which visitors can be profitably engaged.

Learn how MarketLinc’s customer engagement solution delivers powerful website visitor qualification functionality as part of an end to end solution that will convert more of your underserved visitors and capture up to 20% more revenue.

Our proven solution delivers measurable results, requires no upfront budget investment or additional resources and you pay only for the incremental revenue we generate, nothing more. That’s our guarantee

Sound too good to be true? We can prove it. Contact us for a free Revenue Loss Analysis to discover precisely how much money your business is leaving on the table.