How to Improve Your Inbound Marketing Strategy
Inbound marketing, also known as permission-based marketing, is a great way to build brand equity, generate leads, and increase revenue. By creating value for consumers at each stage of the buying process, inbound marketing enables you to create highly relevant marketing campaigns and collect valuable information that you can pass on to your sales team when you send them an SQL.
But even if you’ve been running inbound marketing campaigns for a while, you’re only scraping the surface of this strategy’s full potential if you aren’t using website visitor identification.
The Limitations of Inbound Marketing
Across all industries, conversion rates tend to fall in the two to three percent range, which means that the vast majority of you have limited means to contact them. You can use retargeting ads, but you won’t have a way to deliver further content marketing or email marketing campaigns unless you find a way to reach your anonymous site traffic directly.
Overcoming Low Conversion Rates
Fortunately, you can add up to 40 percent of your visitors’ contact information to your CRM without requiring them to fill out a form with a technology called website visitor identification software. The software matches your visitors’ with contact records in a third-party database. Then, it delivers the contact information from the database to your CRM.
Website visitor identification typically match visitors to contact records via third-party cookies. But some companies supplement cookie tracking with additional technology like digital fingerprint and IP tracking, which means that the software will continue to be effective even if third-party cookies are phased out.
Combining Inbound and Outbound
Of course, you’ll be stepping outside the confines of permission-based marketing because these contacts won’t have opted in. That said, companies like LeadPost collect their data in a way that keeps you compliant.
For example, LeadPost only provides data for customers in the US, so international regulations like those in Canada and the EU don’t apply. US laws at the federal and state levels don’t restrict the use of this sort of data collection. You may, however, need to update your privacy policy, and you’ll need to follow CAN-SPAM guidelines as always.
While visitor identification is an outbound tactic, your inbound marketing strategy will inform and benefit from your outbound lead generation and outreach efforts.
Once you begin collecting this data, you’ll be able to:
- deliver valuable content via email based on the visitor’s progress through the Buyer’s Journey
- raise brand awareness through direct mail
- enrich your existing data for better personalization
- segment your audience based on detailed contact records
- reach out to your visitors by phone
Scale Your Inbound Marketing with Visitor Identification
Inbound marketing campaigns can be difficult to scale. If you rely on organic channels to generate traffic and leads, you’re limited by factors like the search volume of the terms you rank for and your organic reach.
That means you have fewer opportunities to convert visitors into leads. Visitor identification means more of your traffic will turn into leads.
Not only will you get more out of your existing traffic, but you will also be able to send affordable, top-of-funnel ad traffic to your site and convert up to 40 percent of your clicks into leads.
Here are a few ways a visitor identification tool will enhance your inbound marketing efforts.
Deliver Valuable Content
If someone visits your website without converting, you can use website visitor identification to enable email retargeting the way you run retargeting ads. For example, if they visit a landing page for a resource without filling out the form to download it, you can email them to reengage them.
There are a few ways to do this.
The simplest thing to do would be to send an email with copy similar to the landing page copy to see if they convert the second time. Since you already have their contact information, you might consider providing a direct link to the resource without requiring the recipient to submit a form.
Another option would be to redefine the value. Maybe the landing page copy didn’t resonate with them. You can put a different spin on the value of the resource to see if it’s more effective.
Another alternative would be to offer a different resource to see if it performs better. It should provide similar value to the original offer because that’s how the lead found you in the first place. Something brought them to your landing page, but it may be that they didn’t feel the original resource you promoted met their needs.
Enrich Your Data
You can also use website visitor identification to enrich the data you already have. If you only have a visitor’s email address, for instance, you can supplement their contact record with their first and last name, gender, age, income range, and other details. This demographic data will allow you to send more personalized marketing messages through channels like email and direct mail.
If you use software like HubSpot that offers progressive form fields, you can gather other information through the forms on your website. Progressive form fields are removed when you already have a specific piece of information for a contact. The fields are replaced with other fields that you add to a pool.
So, if your visitor identification tool adds a visitor’s first and last name to your CRM, those fields will be replaced when they go to fill out the form so you can get other information instead.
Segment Your Audience
As you begin collecting more details on your visitors and existing contacts, you will have comprehensive contact records you can use to segment your customers. You’ll be able to track how each customer segment performs and test different messaging and promotions with each segment to see what works and what doesn’t.
Reach Out by Phone
If it makes sense, you can also reach out to potential customers by phone. A call might be too aggressive at the top of the funnel. But depending on your industry, your product, what stage of the Buyer’s Journey the consumer is in, and other factors, it could be a nice touch at the bottom of the funnel. Website visitor identification gives you the contact information to have someone reach out in person when the time is right.
Take Your Inbound Marketing Strategy to the Next Level
If you’ve developed an effective inbound marketing strategy that nurtures leads and converts them into sales, it’s time to scale your approach. The simplest step to take is to squeeze every lead you can out of your current approach with website visitor identification.