If only 2% of visitors to your site filled out a form, that would be a fantastic conversion rate in most cases. What about the other 98%? Let’s take a look at how you can make the most of those anonymous traffic users. But there are a few caveats to our approach:

• B2B Applicable – Because this approach focuses on finding which companies are looking at you, if you’re B2C, you may need to adjust your approach.
• Small/Medium Size Target Businesses – This approach is based on taking action and researching the companies looking at your site to find contacts. If a massive company is looking at your site, the chances of finding the one person visiting your site is slim. Even if you are dealing with very large companies and can’t narrow down contacts you should still be aware of and leveraging this information via push notifications.

Assuming you meet the criteria above, you are good to start monetizing your anonymous traffic using our approach! So let’s get back to this minimally 98% of anonymous traffic: About 10% to 20% of the time, we can identify the company that’s visiting our website.

With planning and effort you can implement this process and turn anonymous traffic into real business.

Identification essentially comes down to the network the user is coming through to visit your site. The vast majority of these networks are ISPs, such as Comcast, etc., but in many cases you see the company name.

Identifying the user’s network is hardly anything new. But marketing automation platforms (MAPs) have most recently brought this to the forefront. This service has been available via Google Analytics for some time. (You can access this in Analytics by going to Technology > Network.) This will provide you with great info, however it’s also mixed in with a lot of junk. Sifting through this junk is where other tools, such as marketing automation, come into play. They filter out the junk (ISPs) so you can view just the companies. These tools also tend to offer lookup features to help you find contacts within a given organization. The following screen caps give examples of tools available to see this data:

While there are a number of tools out there, each with pros and cons, I’ll keep this technology agnostic. Here are the steps we take when implementing a drip campaign for anonymous traffic that has ultimately landed some great clients:

1. Identify companies as potential clients.

The tool you use should be able to identify the names of companies visiting your site, even if it’s anonymous traffic. Sift through the list of visitors or companies, and identify the ones that are clearly potential clients. We do this by looking at the potential client’s digital presence and gauging whether the company is a potential prospect.

2. Start creeping! Identify contacts.

Now that you have a company name, head over to LinkedIn, or a number of other sources, and start looking for contacts. You will most likely do this based on title. For example, we typically look for a marketing director, head of business development, digital director or someone in the C Suite, based on the size and type of company. In some cases, there may be multiple potential contacts. Once found, we enter the contacts into our CRM.

3. Send nicely branded snail mail.

We start our drip campaign by sending the contact(s) a nicely branded card with a handwritten note that says something to the effect of: “Hi Joe, I noticed you or someone else at your organization was looking at our site. We are a full-service digital agency ready to elevate you on the digital front. Feel free to contact us to discuss how we can help.”

4. Send an email.

We give the snail mail 7 days for a response. If there is none, we send a smart email to the contact(s) through our marketing automation platform with a message similar to the one above, following up and passing along resources/links to blog posts that may be useful to the potential client. Note that we can see if the contact opened and clicked through the email we sent. Through the marketing automation platform, we can also track any activity on our site if they click on a link. This is how we determine whether there is any interest based on that activity.

5. Make a phone call.

We give the email about 7 days, and if there is no response, we call. If we get them live on the phone, great, if not we leave a message. And that’s the end of that if they choose not to respond. We don’t go beyond that point. It’s one thing to proactively followup on potential leads, it’s another to become an overbearing pest.

With a little planning and effort you can implement this process and turn anonymous traffic into real business. We have had solid success landing great clients using this process. In most cases, the clients contacted us after receiving the snail mail. In this day and age, it’s rare that clients receive a hand written note that’s thoughtful and speaks to them. If this makes sense to you, give it a whirl and let us know how you make out. Happy hunting!