From anonymity to insights - A complete guide to website visitor identification

Offline visitor identification - Traditional methods meet customer insights

Over the years, gathering information about customer behavior has been a common practice among business owners. Whether it's a shop vendor in a local neighborhood or an enterprise, understanding visitor preferences has been crucial. For example, a skilled shop vendor in a neighborhood might keep track of their visitors using metrics such as:

• The number of times they visited the shop

• The time they visited the shop

• The kinds of products they frequently bought

• The kind of feedback they have about the products, and their overall customer experience (CX)

• Their demographic details

More significantly, these business owners actually talk to their customers face-to-face. They make sure to stay in touch and give them a personalized experience. They keep track of buyers at various stages using different things like notebooks, files, Excel sheets, and whatever else they can find.

Online visitor identification - Unveiling the power of website tracking tools

If we jump ahead to the present day, it's fascinating to see how much online businesses have learned about their visitors. Online businesses have zero physical interaction with their website visitors, but to get a transparent view of how their visitors interact with their business site, they've adopted website visitor identification tools. These help them track visitors in real time, amp up their sales and marketing efforts, increase conversions, and provide proactive customer engagement and CX.

Particularly after the pandemic, the entire CX journey has elevated to the next level. Business owners are now facing some interesting challenges, like the need for on-demand personalization and instant support availability—especially the sales, marketing, and support teams.

What is website visitor identification?  

Website visitor identification helps businesses identify website visitors, their demographics, what devices and apps they use to access the site, and preferences. It also tracks visitor activity, including the pages they visit, the content they demonstrate interest in, time spent on each page, and how many times they visit a particular site. It's like having a behind-the-scenes view of how visitors engage with a particular website.

How has website visitor tracking impacted businesses? 

With the implementation of a website visitor identification tool to analyze the visitors' behavioral patterns, companies have acquired insights into identifying things that previously seemed impossible.

Businesses can now see the entire digital footprint of individuals browsing their sites, including information like the following:

 Website traffic

 Rate of engagement/bounce

 Demographics

 Behavioral analysis

 New or returning visitors

 Path discovery

 Real-time reporting

All these behavioral analytics yield insights that help improve marketing, sales, and other business areas with more focused targeting strategies.

Investing in a website visitor identification tool is essential for businesses for the following reasons: 

1. Improves lead generation   

Website visitor identification helps you understand your target audience better so you can refine your lead generation strategies. Knowing details such as preferences, geography, and interests helps set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART) lead generation goals.

By improving buyers' journeys to becoming potential customers, website visitor tracking assists businesses in increasing conversion rates.

2. Improves your understanding of buyers  

Understanding buyers and their journeys becomes easier with the help of website visitor identification software, as businesses can connect the dots to understand visitor behavior on their websites.

For example, say a user lands on the website of a company called Zylker website and starts browsing through their brochures and services. Let's also say the user's session duration increases and their bounce rate decreases—meaning they've found what they're looking for. Zylker gives the user precisely what they want from the product. This browsing pattern continues with the user checking out their pricing—a sign of increasing intent to buy.

From the above example, it's clear that tracking potential buyers' browsing behavior patterns helps businesses predict users' personalities and preferences. Businesses can thereby devise better marketing strategies and more immersive customer experiences.

3. Enables personalized customer experiences (CX) and customer engagement (CE)

Continuing with the previous example, how can Zylker amp up the CX of that particular user? With a website visitor identification tool, Zylker can see that the visitor is from a Fortune 500 company based in the U.S. Moreover, the visitor's activities indicate that they have a high buyer intent (time spent on the site, number of pages visited, and actions taken on the site), and are the "right" account for Zylker.

Zylker can start a proactive live chat with that user and instantly connect with them. A live chat enables Zylker to speed up the sales cycle. Furthermore, they can send the user personalized emails with products of interest, complementary products, and special discounts. This results in an enhanced and timely CE. Isn't that all that matters when it comes to delighting potential customers?

All business owners want to provide the best customer experience and service possible, but how many are committed enough to take action? Going that extra mile is how businesses can gain a sustainable competitive advantage. Offering personalized approaches can create unique experiences tailored to specific individuals and build long-lasting customer relationships.

4. Improves ROI

Data is everywhere. Using data from website visitor identification software can yield actionable insights to improve ROI. Businesses can drill down to track the progress of the sales, marketing, and support teams to understand the effectiveness of their strategies.

What is website visitor identification software?

website visitor identification software enables online businesses to track visitors who end up on the website from various sources. It gathers web traffic data on each user and provides insights to businesses to improve lead generation activities.

For instance, let's explore the website visitor tracking feature offered by Zoho, a leading provider in this domain. 

What features does website visitor identification software include?

1. Real-time visitor tracking

A good website visitor identification software provides businesses with real time website visitor details. This is done anonymously so as to avoid identifying individuals and violating their privacy. However, website visitor identification tools can de-anonymize the tracking if the visitor voluntarily provides details such as their name, email address, and phone number.

The tool can gather general details, such as:

• Organization name

• Number of employees

• Country

• Region

• Website

• Contact details

Most importantly, the website visitor identification software shows visitors' on-site behavior and provides a solid understanding of each individual user.

2. Customized views

Another significant feature to look for in a website visitor identification tool is that it should enable business users to create customized views based on a specific set of criteria.

For example, say you're running a campaign targeting financial service organizations in the UK and Ireland region, and you want to track the companies visiting from that region. It's tedious and inefficient to filter your views manually all the time. Setting up a customized view is much easier and more effective.

3. Lead prioritization

Website visitor identification software should help with automatic lead scoring. With behavioral data, businesses can assign lead scores to visitors by setting up rules that add lead scores to visitors automatically. Depending on the business's requirements, it can be positive lead scoring or even negative lead scoring.

Accordingly, businesses can prioritize leads with the highest lead scores and target them to convert them into potential customers. Lead prioritization helps the sales team focus on the most important leads.

4. App integration

Having scattered data makes it challenging for businesses to make informed decisions. Ensure that the website visitor identification software is flexible enough to integrate with your business's existing tools, such as web analytics tools, email campaign software, data visualization tools, and more.

Integrating with CRM software also helps businesses easily sync potential leads identified via the website visitor identification software and add them to the CRM pipeline to expand outreach strategies.

Related Resources:



Integrate CRM with live chat software
 

Is website visitor identification software GDPR-compliant?  

Yes. Due to the strict compliance rules and regulations on privacy and security, website visitor identification software is, by default, GDPR-compliant. Failure to adhere to GDPR results in hefty fines for vendors, so they have strict rules for collecting data. A website visitor identification tool will not identify the user if the visitor does not consent to tracking on their web browsers.

 What's next?

It's essential to choose the right tool by understanding the current requirements while anticipating future needs.

The journey continues even after a visitor becomes a customer. Businesses need to think about how they can boost customer engagement. Before finalizing a tool, revisit your goals and objectives, and then make a decision. Also, think about what's next. What else can you do to improve the customer experience?

There are many tools available, such as a customer engagement platform with a built-in visitor tracking feature. This kind of tool helps businesses start proactive live chats with visitors, set up chatbots to have conversations 24/7, and provide instant customer support. It can also help streamline communications from different channels like email, live chat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and others.

How can Zoho SalesIQ help in tracking anonymous website visitor identification? 

Zoho SalesIQ is a customer engagement platform that can assist in tracking anonymous website visitor identification in the following ways:

i) Live chats: Through live chat interactions, Zoho SalesIQ captures visitor information, allowing for engagement and lead generation.

ii) CRM webforms: Online inquiries or newsletter subscriptions can be done through CRM webforms, enabling the collection of visitor details.

iii) Email campaigns: Zoho SalesIQ tracks website visits originating from email campaigns sent to CRM contacts or leads

iv) JS API Configuration: By configuring the JS API, Zoho SalesIQ can identify visitors and gather their information.

Important Note: Zoho SalesIQ ensures that visitor details are only collected with their explicit consent, prioritizing privacy and adhering to data protection regulations.

Learn more about Zoho SalesIQ's website visitor tracking software.
 

More importantly, what about privacy?

Leading the way in user privacy: Cookies and SalesIQ

'PRIVACY FIRST' is Zoho's way, and SalesIQ has been implementing it since day 1. In this video, watch our Senior Technical Support Engineer, Manikandan, talk about how Google's policy to revoke support to third-party cookies doesn't affect our SalesIQ users.

Also, check out our data privacy and security deck to get detailed information about our commitment to privacy.

Conclusion: 

From offline vendors to online enterprises, understanding visitor behavior and preferences drives targeted strategies, personalized experiences, and improved ROI.

As businesses continue to prioritize customer engagement, website visitor identification remains a critical tool for success in today's competitive landscape.