LMS Marketing Tip #2 – Keep A Close Eye on Who Visits Your Website

Originally published on www.elearningindustry.com

It’s not enough to merely draw visitors to your LMS site and hope for the best. You need to nurture your leads and develop an effective follow-up strategy. In this article I’ll discuss how to keep a close eye on who visits your website so that you can boost conversion rates.

Knowing Who’s Visiting Your Website and Following Up is a Top Best Practice for LMS Lead Nurturing

People are more likely to purchase your Learning Management System if they trust the name behind it. Which is why you must build a rapport with your prospects after you make your first impression. Leads must be nurtured if you want them to find value in working with you and include you when they release their LMS RFP. Here are some tips to help you closely monitor site traffic, generate more leads, and turn casual visitors into customers.

Qualifying Your Leads

Knowing who lands on your website, and following up with the most promising visitors, is something that needs to be done every day. Some examples of promising traffic are:

• When more than one person from the same company hits your website on the same day, you need to investigate.
• When former prospects turn up on your site, that probably means they are having second thoughts about the system they picked over yours.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to automate this type of monitoring, so it has to be done by a live human being. There are apps that help you do this, but I’ve found that smart people who know your business are much better.

Compiling a ‘Hot Lead’ List

After you recognize the tell-tale signs of promising traffic, what do you do next? First, you’ll need a good “buyer database” so that you’re not constantly digging to find names and contact information. My favorite for corporate training and HR buyers is the MentorTech list. It’s very comprehensive, well maintained, from a high-integrity company that has been around for a long time. ZoomInfo is also excellent for HR and training buyers and DiscoverOrg for visibility into corporate org charts. There are many, many others, but the vast majority of them have relatively low-quality information.

Targeting Different Stages of the ‘Buyer’s Journey’

Visitors come to your site for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they are your customers looking for more information on your latest release or brand-new people who’ve heard about you and want to learn more about your product. Or they are in the market for a new LMS and want to see if you’re the right fit. Then there are those who are on the fence about including you in their RFP and simply need a little nudge. These are all different stages of the buyer’s journey and sales funnel. You can learn a lot by analyzing which pages they visited, for how long, and how often.

For example, visitors who read your “top 10 reasons why you should invest in a LMS” article are probably in the market for a new tool, but in an early stage. They still need some convincing. This is your opportunity to include an opt-in form to add them to your mailing list and follow-up with more info, such as emails that highlight the benefits of a modern LMS and/or product and how it can improve their ROI.

Factoring Referrals into the Equation

Clicks that come from external site links are generally from referrals. For example, a blogger mentions your product and speaks highly of its robust reporting features. Or you published an article on a popular eLearning site that generates more traffic to your site, courtesy of the embedded links. These stats help you focus your efforts, in that you can see where your marketing investments are paying off, as well as which allows you to reach your target audience most effectively.

Invest in a Marketing Automation System

Lastly, if you don’t have a good marketing automation platform to see who’s hitting your site and to automate lead nurturing, then you need one. I have a love-hate relationship with Marketo, having used it for many years, but I do recognize that they may be the best at monitoring website traffic. I’m sure there are other systems that do an okay job at this, but Marketo is the best I’ve seen. In my recent head-to-head comparison between Hubspot and Marketo, I found that Hubspot consistently missed much of the traffic that Marketo picked up. However, I’m told that they’re getting better in this area.

Some other marketing automation systems I like are Act-on, which can be a little pricey, and Active Campaign, which is more reasonable for smaller vendors.

Key Takeaway for LMS Lead Nurturing

You’ll uncover some of your hottest leads by paying close attention to who hits your site. However, the analytics are just raw data until you dig into them and detect patterns that can help you nurture leads. Use this article as a guide to go beyond the charts and percentages to sort promising hits from marketing misses, which gives you the focus to concentrate on hot leads instead of time wasters.

Read LMS Marketing Tip #3: When customers succeed, so do you

If you want to get more tips and tricks for LMS marketing, download the free eBook 10 Marketing Strategies That No Learning Tech Vendor Can Live Without.

About the Author

Gordon Johnson has been a marketing leader in the corporate L&D industry for over twenty years. His specialty is developing transformative marketing strategies that generate qualified sales opportunities, employing the latest digital marketing channels, coupled with traditional techniques to achieve industry-leading brand awareness, widespread web presence and high-impact value propositions. Other marketing concentrations include content marketing, messaging, social marketing, positioning strategy, analyst relations, events, account-based marketing (ABM), email marketing, customer success and lead-generation. Contact Gordon.