Marketing Automation for Security Dealers & Integrators

It’s a new year, and our team is especially excited about helping dealers and integrators Ignite their RMR in 2017.

One of the many inbound lead generation methods available to our clients this year is marketing and sales automation. In this multi part series, we’ll be discussing some of the specific marketing automation strategies that we are implementing to empower your sales team to close more sales and shorten the sales cycle. In this post, we’ll be talking about a powerful application of marketing automation: site tracking.

What Is Site Tracking?

Site Tracking ties your contact’s behavior on your website so our marketing and your sales processes can react and adapt in real-time to the behavior of individual contacts.

The purpose of site tracking with marketing automation is simple: Get the right message to the right contact at the right time.

We begin by collecting page view data on each visitor to your website. This data is anonymous (and inaccessible) until a visitor is identified by opting-in to your list, then all page views that have been collected up to that point are automatically attached to their contact record and subsequent page views are tracked and reported in real-time.

With a time stamped history of each web page a contact visited on your site, you’ll know:

– when they visited

– how many times

– the paths they’ve taken

Each of your contacts becomes a rich case study when Site Tracking page view data is combined with all the other data that our marketing automation platform provides — Location History, Event Tracking, Activities History, the contact’s social network profiles, and any tags or notes you’ve applied.

Isn’t this the same as Google Analytics?

Google Analytics and similar services report statistics on anonymous groups of visitors while Site Tracking with Ignite RMR lets you see exactly what a specific contact has (or hasn’t) done on your website. Statistics are a great way to identify trends in large volumes of data, and are popular for good reasons, but individual case studies are an underrated resource for creating detailed profiles, forming hypotheses, and examining exceptions to rules. The two approaches to data analysis complement each other giving you a more complete picture of who your target market is and how people are interacting with your website.

Know exactly what your contacts want from you.

You can make two extremely valuable assumptions about a contact based on their page views:

1.) What they are interested in

The links a contact chooses to click tell you what they are looking for and what content on your website is most important to them.

2.) The amount of interest they have

Repeat page views and, especially, repeat visits to pages indicate increased interest in that content. Someone who has viewed a product page five times during three visits to your site is probably more interested than someone who has viewed it once.

It is good “to know,” better “to do…”

Beyond just “good to know,” this data is actionable. Site Tracking becomes even more useful when this behavioral data is used to trigger Automations. Our marketing automation platform can “see” what a visitor is doing and perform actions based on that behavior opening up all kinds of possibilities for marketing automation and creating a truly personalized experience.

Site Tracking Applications for New Prospects

Here are a few things that we can do to generate new leads with site tracking:

Email a discount code to a contact who has visited a product page two or more times.

Check in with a contact who has viewed a product six times (but not yet purchased) to find out if they have any questions or issues — helping you identify barriers to purchase while providing excellent service.

Increase a lead’s score 1 point for each page view and 2 points per visit. When their score reaches 20 points, Ignite RMR creates and assigns a task to notify your salesperson it would be a good time to give the contact a call.

Send a contact a personalized “thank you” note two hours after they reach the confirmation page of your website’s “tell-a-friend” feature.

If someone is referred to your site from Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you could begin an automation that invites them to follow you on your social media accounts.

Tag visitors to a specific web page detailing a free webinar you are holding and then begin a sequence of follow-up emails to give them more information as it draws nearer, remind them when it is live, and ask for feedback when it is over. By redirecting attendees to the webinar through a page on your site you can tag them as such (you could also apply this tag using “Clicks a link in email”).

Site Tracking For Your Existing Subscribers

Your existing customers are just as important as new leads. Ignite RMR can:

Send a contact a short “Do you have any questions/How can I help you?” message if they repeatedly visit your FAQ and product documentation pages after a purchase.

Trigger a “new customer” Automation following a purchase that increases customer satisfaction by delivering a timed sequence of messages including product-use tips, asks for a review of the product after they’ve had it a week, gives them a discount toward future purchases, and suggests other products they may be interested in.

Give your contacts more of what they want.

In addition to reacting to what is happening on your website in real-time, we can use your contact’s page view history to further segment your lists. For instance, you might have a sale on a product that would not appeal to everyone on your list. With Site Tracking data you can send an email to only those contacts that have viewed the product (or that category of product). Or, you could send additional content on the same topic a visitor has indicated interest in while browsing your site.

This kind of segmentation helps keep your list as responsive as possible and contributes to a strong, positive relationship.

Your contacts will come to expect that a message from your company will contain relevant content that appeals to them — increasing your open and interaction rates while reducing unsubscribes.

Putting it to use…

One useful application of Site Tracking data is an Automation that tags your contacts if they view important pages of your website multiple times.

For example, we can apply different tags based on the number of visits. If a contact visits a page about smart home lighting two to five times we could tag them as “Interested in Smart Lighting.” If they go on to visit six or more times we could remove that tag and retag them as “Very Interested in Smart Lighting.”

We can then use these tags to:

Send precisely targeted messages about Smart Lighting and Z-Wave related products.

When sending out campaigns we send messages to only those contacts who are tagged as interested in those products.

Customize emails with Conditional Content

We can tailor a message to display the products they find most appealing. For instance, if you are having a promotional sales we could mention specific products they’ve demonstrated interest in:

“We are having a 20% off sale this month. This is your chance to save on Smart Home services like:”

– “Smart Lighting”

– “Smart Thermostats”

– “Smart Locks”

Gain additional analytical insights

By running reports on contacts with these tags you can know which products each of your lists is most interested in. These numbers will be different than those of your analytics service (unless you’ve configured your analytics to segment based on your lists of subscribers) which will report page view numbers biased by which products are doing well in the search engines, or linked to most often, and so will not necessarily reflect the interests of your contacts.

Begin other automations

By using “Tag is added” as the trigger to begin a new automation, we can pick up where this one leaves off. We could begin a series of follow-up messages that treats the contact slightly different depending on how they are tagged or move the contact into another one of your sales processes.

Marketing & sales automation is complicated art and science. Our expert team here at Ignite RMR have invested hundreds of hours of research, training, and client implementation to make this new technology work for our clients: security dealers and systems integrators. For a free demo and consultation, please contact us today. We’ll discuss your growth goals and how our marketing automation strategies can help your sales team thrive in 2017.