A beautiful website alone will not increase your sales. While website design can provide the groundwork for your online marketing and create a professional presence, we still need your visitors to interact with you. For some businesses this may be requesting a quote, downloading a brochure or purchasing products from your online store. No matter which way, we still need to interact with those people who are on the fence. If someone is clicking around your site, but hasn’t given you their contact details, then there’s no easy way to find out what’s stopped them from contacting you or for you to speak with them directly about why you are a good fit. If you can collect customer details, then there are many more ways you can communicate with your customer base.

Incentives

If we want people to get in touch, what reasons would we have for them to provide us with contact details? It’s worth thinking about what people on your site would be tempted to interact with. If you have a blog on your site, perhaps people may want to sign up for a newsletter, an offer of a discount for your online shop or requesting a quote to be sent to them. Every business is different so think about what people might want to achieve from visiting your website, and might be willing to part with their contact details for.

How can I collect details?

There are many tools at your disposal for your website to collect enquires from your visitors, but these same methods could be used for lead generation too. A simple contact form could be used to collect a call back, or sign up for a mailing list, while a chatbot could ask for an email address from anyone who interacts with it, so your team can follow up on their question. Any kind of data input on your website could in theory be used as part of a mass marketing effort or to make personalised contact, or can it?

GDPR and me

Arguably one of the biggest buzzwords that was on every business owners mind back in 2018. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an EU data privacy directive, that despite the intention to leave the EU, is still in affect as a UK specific version will take over on Brexit. In its broadest terms GDPR puts a requirement for contact forms to include an opt in for data retention, so customers have the choice to be included on marketing campaigns. Additionally, any collected data must be kept secure, on servers within EU borders and is to be removed at the wishes of the customer. Your privacy policy should explain how customer data will be stored and used.

There’s a lot to consider when using your website as key marketing tool. Not only keeping in mind how your users would want to interact with the site, but how you could use it to gather useful information, and keep with in the data protection requirements at the same time. If you need some guidance on how a site could be used effectively, then get in touch with our team below.