CPR For a Dead Website

Whoa! What Did You Say?

Yes, it’s true. We are witnessing the death of websites. Whether websites become obsolete today or tomorrow, they’re no longer the ideal platform for marketing your products or services. Websites are the equivalent of a printed product catalog or service brochure. Even the development of online shopping carts, or e-commerce sites such as Shopify, BigCommerce, Squarespace, and so on, don’t change this fact.

Getting customers to browse the “company catalog” or “read the brochure” is the challenge. And traditional marketing channels, such as television, radio, print media, even smaller advertising media sent via US mail, are not guarantees that consumers will browse your products, read about your services, and convert into paying customers or clients. It is casting a wide net and hoping to catch as many fish as you can. And all of these marketing channels cost money. It’s expensive to get your brand in front of the consumer.

Let me guess, you have hired a marketing agency, or a marketing freelancer, a copywriter, a photog- rapher, a videographer, a website developer, and a search engine optimization specialist to create your marketing materials. Next, you’re paying for radio ads, television ads, magazine or newspaper ads, printers to produce your small mailers, a mailing list, and postage. I once worked for an ad marketing expert who told me that if a company received a 1% response rate from mailers, that’s a high response rate. Ouch!

I am not suggesting that the traditional marketing channels are not helpful, of course they are, but the game has changed rendering them less effective as they once were. Why? Because these channels focus on the company, not the consumer. They focus on casting a wide net in the hope of reaching interested consumers. In effect, they control the “traffic” to your brick and mortar site, to your agency, to your website.

The Name of the Game

The name of the game is control of the traffic. It doesn’t matter which channels you advertise through, and how much money you spend on them, you do not control the traffic. Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Pinterest, Shopify, and many more all control that traffic. SEO optimization and purchasing Google ads, Facebook ads, and paying Instagram influencers help get customers to your site, but they still control the traffic.

None of these channels share customer information with you. And that is critical. Customer data is the foundation for building a better marketing strategy. And to do that, you need to control the traffic. Here’s a traditional example of what I am referring to. Recently I walked into a specialty shop. They sold a specific brand of candies, cakes, and pies. When I went to the counter to purchase my little bag

of candies, the sales person asked me to write my name, address, and email address down on a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard. A bit old fashioned, I thought, but ok I did it. I am sure I don’t need to explain to you the value of that list, right? Now, this little shop can market their products to me directly either via US Mail or by email. That small shop now as the ability to control the traffic, and even better, I am a ‘qualified’ customer because I have bought from them before and am more likely to buy from them again.

To control the traffic, you need customer data. You need to build an email list. According to Marketo’s Lead Generation Guide, 96% of visitors to your website are not ready to buy yet. It takes nurturing the customer via consistent contact. Anyone serious about sales knows that it takes anywhere from 3 to 8 communications with a customer to make a sale. The same is valid for visitors to your website. To convert a visitor into a purchasing customer or client, you need to nurture them. An excellent and more famous example of this is Trey Lewellen’s story. Trey started out selling one t-shirt. He now runs a multi-million-dollar company, and his mentorship is sought after by entrepreneurs around the world. He achieved that success in just a few years. How did Trey do it? He took advantage of two things: how consumers become aware of specific products and services in today’s market, who they were, and what their email addresses were.

Customer awareness is no longer about casting a wide net; it is about targeting specific markets, it’s about the customer seeking you out, and your marketing strategy accomodating this new approach to customer awareness. Like Trey Lewellen, you want to find those customers who already have an interest in your products or services; you want to target them, capture their information (name, email address), and then you want to nurture them. Even after they purchase from you the first time, you want to continue to nurture them. Nearly 70% of survey respondents found that improved targeting of the message was the most important benefit of automation marketing (Liana Technol- ogies; The Benefits and Challenges of Marketing Automation, 2017). That is controlling the traffic.

So how and where do you start? You may have an email list already or no list at all. Either way, what you need is a ‘funnel’. If you have an existing email, a funnel will help you to grow your list, if you don’t have an email list yet, a funnel will help you build one. There are many types of funnels; lead generation funnels, sales funnels, application funnels, webinar funnels, and so forth. Even non-profit organizations can benefit from a well-designed funnel.

Funnels work for any business or organization because the conceptual model of the funnel is not strictly about sales. Conceptually, a funnel is the path a consumer takes when they view your funnel and leads them through a process that narrows their focus and leads them to take action. The first step or the top of the funnel is awareness, which leads to interest, to a decision, to taking action.

At the top of the funnel, the consumer is introduced to your company, what product(s) or services are offered. With good copy, the consumer becomes interested in your product, with a reasonable offer, the consumer makes a decision and then takes action. Whatever action it is that you want the consumer to make, a funnel helps you get them to take that action. And if they don’t, you have their contact information so that you may nurture them via an automated email campaign.

Danette wrote this post in conjunction with Susan Herrera, Alignable’s in house content coach. To learn more about driving visibility to your business and Alignable’s Premium Content program visit this post.