5 Ways to Increase Your Website Conversion Rates: Part Three

Senior Lecturer in Digital Marketing, Tanya Hemphill outlines the benefits of maintaining regular email contact with your customers and the time-saving tools that will help you achieve this.

Nurture your leads via email

Many businesses take a lot of time and effort to build a database of email addresses but once they have it, it’s often under-utilised. According to the digital marketing advice website Smart Insights, 72% of companies rate email as ‘excellent’ in terms of ROI.

There are a lot of inexpensive and easy to use email systems such as www.constantcontact.com/uk and www.mailchimp.com. A more recent development that offers exciting potential for businesses is the growing number of marketing automation systems available. As a former business-owner myself, I know that one of the biggest issues that stops a company from growing (via marketing lead-generation) is time. Most business owners know what they should be doing but never seem to have the time to do it.

A marketing automation system will send emails ‘triggered’ by a certain action and, if an email hasn’t been opened within a certain period, it will automatically send another with a different subject line. Emails can also be set up to go out at key buying periods, etc. This is ideal for businesses with a product that is usually used within a particular period of time, so that you can remind customers that their product needs replacing soon (and offer them a discount for buying it within a certain time-frame). The possibilities are endless - some systems even link to a customers’ / potential customers’ social media account!

Although time is needed at the beginning to set everything up (i.e. mapping customer journeys/ touch points and compiling emails with the right messages for each stage), the medium to long term benefits of having regular email communications running, however busy you are, are clear.

Critical success factors for this type of conversion tool are: having enough opt-in email addresses to start with, making sure customer journeys are carefully mapped, finding the right software provider with a scalable system and allocating a long-term budget to this tool. Recommended providers include: Act-On, Hubspot, Pardot, Marketo and Eloqua.

This article has been written by Tanya Hemphill, Senior Lecturer and Programme Leader in Marketing and Public Relations, based at the Warrington School of Management (University of Chester).

@DigitalTanya 

@WSofManagement

STOP PRESS:

The Warrington School of Management is launching an exciting new business service that will include networking events and ‘Master Classes’ to help small and medium sized businesses grow. If you are interested in registering for more information, please send your details to Beth Morris at b.morris@chester.ac.uk