Making the most of every visitor on- and off-line!
Depending on the type of business or market segment it is sometimes an advantage to seek to attract site visitors to your “bricks & mortar” stores.
If you are an online business that sees an advantage in face-to-face interaction there are a number of challenges and issues to be faced and addessed to enable that process.
First, is to set the ground rules
The first criterion is deciding what action you want them to carry out. You want your visitors after visiting your site to visit your physical store but what behaviour can you measure on your web site that will indicate their interest in visiting your “bricks & mortar” outlet.
Whilst a web order or form submission can be seen as a macro-conversion smaller actions and behaviours can be stepping-stones or micro-conversions within the lengthier journey towards a potential future offline transaction.
There are a number of simple onsite bahaviours that can be monitored as examples of visitor intent. Tracking and optimising these micro conversions will contribute to higher conversion rates.
Some micro-conversions that can be tracked:-
- Links to store location page
- How to Find Us page showing address and Google map with directions option Viewing this page indicates a desire to find out where your physical shop location is.
- Making or requesing an appointment
- Visits to a contacts page with corresponding increase in either phone calls or email.
Tracking micro-conversions are important
Tracking micro conversion is important at an analytics data level, but it’s equally important to follow up whether these tracked visitors taking these stepping stone micro-conversion actions actually end up your in-store.
Most analytics applications make it relatively simple to track analytics data, but mapping your visitors behaviour taken on the web site to purchases offline in your shop/store takes a bit more effort and ingenuity but are as important.
Because it can be difficult matching and mapping website micro-conversions to instore purchases many companies sometimes track one but not the other.
Questions that need to be asked
Asking the right questions is helpful in determining whether information online contributes to off-line sales.
- Have in-store purchasers previously visited website
- Is each customer buying in-store asked whether they have ever visited your web site before visiting your shop/store?
- Do you collect email addresses from purchasers and use the list to survey how they found your store and why they visited?
- Did those who purchased instore already know about your “bricks & mortar” store and used the website to check on physical address?
- Do you ask them whether they were searching online and discovered your web site before they knew about your physical location and they only found out from your website?
Other tracking possibilities
One other strategy is to use your telephone system (if service is available) to monitor incoming telephone calls coming from numbers listed on web pages:-
- Is telephone caller information collected to help identify its possible contribution to future physical sales?
- Are phone numbers listed on website sufficiently unique from other activities to enable you to track them effectively?
- Are the phone numbers on different sections/areas of your website unique?
- Can you differentiate from these onsite telephone numbers where on the site they were listed eg did customer see it on your contacts page or how-to-find us page?
Tracking this information helps you understand your visitors online behaviour and what might motivate them to contact you and why.
“Bricks & mortar” businesses are aware of the importance of optimisation in the lead up to Festive and Holiday Seasons because it delivers a strong impact on revenue.
However, organisations who use their websites mainly to pull in website visitors to their “bricks & mortar” retail store may not be as aware of the influence as much because they may not be monitoring the actual contribution it makes effectively.
If you find your business in that circumstance it is relatively simple to implement many of the areas highlighted above to start monitoring some of these micro conversions and optimise your website visitor behaviour for higher conversion rates.
There’s no time like the present and where you might have missed a particular festive or holiday opportunity there’s invariably the next just around the corner!
Get going right now! There is nothing to lose but potentially everything to gain!
WebMedia can help you get it off the ground and start optimising your website for higher conversions! Give us a call now on 01506 517037 and start making the difference.
