You Can Achieve Customer Service Excellence Online

...But get to know your customers first!

Dear Jeff,

Welcome to the latest edition of the Inside Edge--your monthly report on Internet trends and advancements that can turn your business into a more profitable e-Business. Web Analytics, also referred to as website traffic analysis, gives you information that you can leverage not only to better understand how visitors are interacting with your website, but how you can dramatically increase your customer conversion rates. Read on.

Online, almost everything can be measured: visits, clicks, engagement, buzz, open rates, conversions, demographics, branding, and time spent are just a few examples of the many available metrics. Marketers and business owners like yourself embrace the very real potential of all this information -- but often feel overwhelmed by mountains of data, as well as stymied by the technology that delivers the solutions.

So how should you determine what to measure? Establish a data-centric company culture? Make sense of all the data, charts and numbers at your fingertips -- then turn it into action? Measure across channels (even offline)? Forecast? How do you best evaluate and select a Web Analytics package?

Every website must have business goals and defined objectives. When customers realize those goals, you have conversions. As the website owner, you can use metrics data to encourage visitors to purchase, subscribe, register, make referrals, or accomplish other goals that can be both measured and optimized. Yes, it's possible to funnel Web analytics information directly to the bottom line and turn data into dollars. Contact your WSI Consultant to find out how.

Perhaps you operate a content site, or offer a product with a long conversion cycle. In that case, your aim is likely to be lead generation. Maybe your customers and prospects convert offline. WSI Consultants are trained to also help business owners like you to set goals for, measure, and improve websites that aren't about actually closing a deal.

In case you are wondering, Web analytics isn't just all about you. Competitive data can provide an apples-to-apples comparison of you to your online competitors and your industry. WSI can help provide data that enables you to gauge metrics such as the percentage share of industry visitors to your site; the campaigns competitors are running and how well they work; benchmarking search marketing; industry conversion rates, and more.

With the increasing popularity of blogs, chat rooms, discussion forums and online groups, chit-chat's never been this measurable. "Buzz monitoring", "tribe analysis", and "influence measurement" are only a few of the terms being thrown around in the nascent era of online listening. Get ahead of the buzz and learn what's actionable.

You can learn a great deal about who your visitors are and how they interact with your website. Web analytics can tell you how they arrived at your site -– did they arrive via a search engine, follow a link to your site, click on your pay-per-click ad, or type in your website address directly into their browser. You can tell how long they stayed on each page, where they clicked, what pages they viewed as well as from which page they exited your site. Once you understand visitors' behaviour, you will be able to identify and eliminate navigational obstacles that slow down or prevent visitors from completing the conversion goal. The result will be an improved visitor experience encouraging more conversions. A scientific, logically progressive way to make more money online.

A big plus of Web analytics is segmentation -- the process of looking at specific groups of visitors, and analyzing their behavior separately. You can group your visitors by paid search and organic traffic, geographic regions, by separate landing pages, genders (if you have products that cater to specific genders), age, etc.

All of this can enhance your efforts to funnel and narrow down information about which traffic is most likely to convert. You can then begin to focus your online marketing campaigns on areas that are more likely to deliver ROI and improve your website to convert more visitors. Contacting WSI is a great way to get started on finding out more about your website visitors.

Meaningful measurement seems to increase in complexity almost daily. Tying together disparate data from advertising, search initiatives, websites, online commerce and even offline marketing initiatives is no mean feat. Making sense of it all is a source of frustration not only for marketers, but for entire organizations. Your WSI Consultant can discuss adapting measurement methodologies, processes and tools like ClickTracks and Google Analytics into something that not only makes sense, but that can dramatically lift your company's marketing and business performance.

If your Web solution isn't bringing customers through the door and driving profits to your bottom line, use Web Analytics to break the inertia. Contact your WSI Consultant Today.

This edition of the Inside Edge has been brought to you by Jeffrey Green, WSI. For more information about WSI Internet Solutions for your business, contact us today! WSI Conversion Matters Jeffrey Green 2365 Queen St. E., Suite 404 Toronto, Ontario M4E 1H2 (416) 628-8411 jeff@wsiconversionmatters.com