The recent downturn in the economy has wreaked havoc in every sector of life, including Internet businesses, which, even if not as badly effected as other sectors of the economy, still haven’t been spared the rod.

This means that consumers have less to spend and are being much more careful about where they spend it, which, in turn, means that business owners need to be much more aware of the internet marketing needs and preferences of the consumer in order to be able to connect with them in a meaningful and productive way.

Web Sites Need To Become A Customer Intelligence Tool

In order to connect with customers, it’s now necessary for internet businesses to gather as much internet marketing information as possible about them, their attitudes, their preferences, interests, etc., in order to be able to target their offerings to them and turn them from potential to actual customers.

This can be achieved by turning your web site into a customer intelligence-gathering tool by applying the following phases:

- Keeping your web site and its content fresh to encourage return visits

– Personalising your site so that visitors feel that it’s all about them and what you can offer        them

– Tracking how visitors interact with your site and what works and doesn’t work, how visitors      reached your site, which content they browsed, where they exited etc.

Utilising this approach will give you the insights you need to make your visitors’ online experience meaningful and develop customer loyalty.

Four Steps To Gathering Customer Intelligence

Here’s a four-step approach you can utilise to gather the customer information you need to help make the internet marketing of your site as attractive and appealing as possible.

1. Feel Their Pain

People visit a web site to fulfil a need or to fix a problem, so being able to identify that “pain point” and offer a solution will keep your visitors happy and coming back for more.

2. Make Sure Your Site’s Ready To Engage Visitors

Visitors to your site are probably already very knowledgeable about the products and services you’re offering, so you need to stay several steps ahead of them and set yourself up as an authority figure. If a visitor looks at the price of an item on your site, that’s a good sign they’re thinking of buying and your site should be ready to allow them to do just that.

3. Check Visitors’ Readiness To Buy

By assigning a score or weight to each piece of content on your web site, you can determine what your visitors care about and even what stage they’re at in the purchasing process. Which pages your visitors browse and which images they click on helps build a profile of your customer and their intent – or otherwise – to buy.

4. Gather Data And Track What Works

The way visitors interact with your web site can give you some invaluable data about their attitudes and behaviours that should be compiled in your database. This data, combined with offline customer data and interactions, can be used to measure successful outcomes, which can then be repeated to improve the customer experience.

Accumulating and utilising data about your web site visitors’ behaviours and attitudes throughout their interactions with your company can help you refine and improve your marketing efforts for both your Internet business and your offline endeavours, and thus improve the overall customer experience and your relationships with your customers.

An Internet marketing service can provide the expertise you need to turn your web site into a customer intelligence tool and take your Internet business success to the next level.

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