As bloggers and site owners, we all know that content is king. However, with over a billion active sites on the internet today, content will only get you so far. The truth is, content is just the tip of the iceberg, while the rest of the structure is made up of the engagement, marketing, and management of the data and individuals accessing your site.
No matter what type of website, blog or e-commerce site you might be running online, these same rules apply. However, at the same time there has been a massive influx of management and tracking solutions flooding the marketplace. While it’s great to have the ability to track every aspect of your website and ad campaigns, it’s can be quite overwhelming at the same time — not to mention how quickly it can add up in costs as well.
A good example of this would be if you were to break down the many components of a successful online business today. Here’s what you would likely need.
- WordPress – Platform for creating and managing your content.
- Web Hosting – Storing your site information online for others to access.
- List Hosting – Collecting and building an email newsletter for your site.
- Subscription Forms – Tracking and management of subscription forms.
- Tracking Tools – Visitor and conversion tracking on your site.
- Ad Networks – Monetization flows and tracking incoming/outgoing money.
As you can see, there are many different components at play for nearly any active site on the internet. The focus is no longer on just creating content and getting it to rank in the search results. Now it’s about creating content, ranking and knowing what users are doing while they are on your site and doing whatever you can to convert them into paying subscribers.
Again, looking at the list above we can also imagine what type of monthly operating costs one might incur by having to work with all of these different components. WordPress is free and web hosting usually runs $10 a month for a simple site. However, once you get into list hosting, subscription tracking solutions, tracking tools and running your own e-commerce site, you can easily be looking at over $500 a month in management costs.
There has to be a better way.
GetResponse, a world leader in the email marketing field, has recently launched their “Marketing Automation” platform, thus providing their users with the ability to track and manage nearly all components of their site traffic and customers in one simple and cost-effective solution.
To kick things off, let’s first take a look at a short video and see everything in action. I could write text about this all day, but nothing delivers a message and concept better than video.
After watching the video above, you will have seen the sheer power that lies within GetResponse’s new marketing automation solution. Now let’s cover some of the key features built within the platform and how you can start using them to increase conversions and ROI on your own sites.
HOW GETRESPONSE CAN HELP WITH MARKETING AUTOMATION
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, there are over a billion active sites on the internet — that means there is a whole world of competition for you to try and compete against. The better the management and tracking tools you have in place, the better you are to stand against the competition. However, as also mentioned at the beginning of the article, there are plenty of solutions to choose from. To best highlight what GetResponse currently has to offer, let’s cover three of the most important areas that site owners and online businesses need to be focusing on — customers, traffic and shopping cart abandonment.
Understanding How to Value Your Audience
The old way of content creation and doing business online was to simply create as much content as you could and look at your ad costs/profit numbers. If you made a profit, excellent — you were a success! Now it’s a whole new ball game and it’s extremely difficult to try and pull a profit just through “being online”. If you aren’t tracking every aspect of your business, you are going to lose money. To help with this process, GetResponse has created a scoring and tagging solution that allows you to set up a pathway for your audience to walk through, as they complete different tasks on your site.
Not all traffic types are the same, nor are the customers or signups that are happening on your site. Some leads will results in higher value, while other may sign up and never visit your site again. Knowing the difference between the two allows businesses and brands of all sizes to better focus their content creation and advertising online. After all, wouldn’t you rather spend more money on the areas of promotion that are proven to result in the highest value customers? Of course you would!
This can all be easily tracked and accomplished through the use of scoring and tagging, where subscribers and customers can be assigned with custom points, tags, segment groups and follow-up actions based off wherever they might currently be in the sales process. Refer to the screenshot below to see how your organization could start storing user data from within the GetResponse dashboard area.
Tracking Your Web Traffic on All Levels
If you want to run a successful business or lead based business online, you need to understand every aspect of your business — this includes ad copy, landing pages, click through rates, conversions, profit margins and of course, the generic traffic running through your sites on a daily basis. The more you can understand about your traffic, the better you can provide them with valuable content and ultimately convert them into paying customers.
We keep coming back to ‘web traffic’, simply because that is where the whole process starts. In most cases, someone will search for something on Google and end up your site, or maybe they type it directly into the browser. No matter how they got there, the important thing is that you are tracking what they do once they get to your site.
Through the web traffic tracking feature, site owners can increase conversions and their bottom line by viewing their audience based off individual URLs visits, subscriber interests, scoring points and building mailing lists for individual pages. To further improve tracking and conversions, sites with actual sales or e-commerce models in place, can start tracking with post-purchase thank you pages, follow up thank you messages and more tagging and point rewarding options.
You can see a great example of this in the screenshot below where the URL visit triggers the process, then tracks the user based off their next several actions.
Reducing Cart Abandonment and Tracking Customers
If you’ve ever had the opportunity to run an e-commerce site or sold anything online, you will likely have experienced the pain of shopping cart abandonment. There are many reasons why someone might decide to leave your shopping cart, but the difference between successful e-commerce sites and those that just exist — is knowing how to track their customers and finding out what the abandonment happens in the first place. Shopping cart abandonment results in billions of lost dollars for millions of brands and businesses every year. Amazon.com is the largest shopping site in the world, and one of the reasons why is because of their amazing shopping cart experience.
Nearly every person on the internet has made a purchase through Amazon.com at one point or another. Being the most successful and largest shopping site in the world doesn’t happen by accidents, and one of the reasons why they’ve been able to accomplish this feat is through their amazing shopping cart experience.
As an online business, your shopping cart should be of the utmost importance. Now through the advanced tracking and management solutions within GetResponse’s Marketing Automation platform site owners can increase shopping cart conversions while having better control over knowing who, why and where abandonment happens.
The following ID and tracking features are all available to help with shopping cart abandonment.
USING MARKETING AUTOMATION TO GET MORE DONE
At the end of the day, if your business isn’t using marketing automation, you are simply falling behind. As mentioned throughout this review, there are simply way to many moving components in the world of online business today — and it’s only going to keep getting more complicating.
GetResponse is revolutionizing the way e-commerce sites and brands will automate, track and manage their businesses online. Visit GetResponse Marketing Automation today to bring your online business to that next level.
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