Attracting repeat visitors on your website should be a key part of your strategy to find more customers. This way you can keep people up to date with your latest news as well as present prospects with multiple opportunities to engage and become a customer. 

One attraction method is to create a blog that inspires people to return regularly and review the latest posts; Another is posting on social media with links to pages on your site where they can learn more; similarly, you could leverage a slightly more traditional method of email marketing also with links to pages on your site. 

Posting on social media often delivers great results, however, it is somewhat reliant on a bit of luck from a timing perspective. If your subscribers become busy shortly before you make a post, and don't happen to catch up on their social feeds for a day or so, the likelihood of them seeing your post is pretty slim, unless they are actively searching for your content. Also, the public nature of both social media posts and blogs mean that the messaging can't usually be personalised for a specific individual. Email marketing on the other hand, allows you to provide a personalised message and will generally remain accessible for the intended recipient to view later even if they have been busy for weeks. However, to send someone an email, you firstly must capture their email address, and consent to market them. 

Common ways of capturing email addresses include allowing visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, as well as completing a "Contact Us" form on your website. You could also promote additional content, such as a white paper, that is only provided to people that complete and submit an online form. 

A lot of the time these web forms provide a structured format for the visitor to enter their information, however, when the form is submitted, it is transferred through as text within an e-mail. This means that someone then must manually extract the information and put into a marketing database, spreadsheet or CRM tool before it can be used effectively. This is not only inefficient, but also leaves room for error.

At Customer Consulting Group we help clients improve the process of capturing data from their website visitors by implementing Zoho Forms. Zoho Forms not only stores the data in a structured way for improved retrieval and reporting but also integrates with other applications such as Zoho CRM and Salesforce.com to increase productivity even further. In addition, the rules engine, wide range of field types and multi-page structure enable businesses to build sophisticated yet easy to use forms that allow you to capture even more data about your visitors which in turn will enable you to provide a more personalised customer experience. 

An increasingly large percentage of Australians are using Social Media platforms on a regular basis. According to socialmedianews.com.au Australia now has approximately 15,000,000 active Facebookusers, 9,000,000 active Instagram users, 4,700,000 active Twitter users and 4,500,000 active LinkedIn users, not to mention the multitude of other social media platforms that are used every day. This presents businesses with a huge opportunity to get in front of their target audience by implementing a social media strategy, but where do you start?

First thing is to understand that there is no "right way" to leverage social media as such. There are certainly ways that have more success than others, however the specifics will vary based on the goods and services you are offering, your target market, and your desired outcome. In other words, a company that is wanting to expand their customer demographic to include young adults by selling tickets to an event would have quite a different strategy to that of a company that is wanting to offer advice to their retiree clientele on ways to make the most of their existing investment. Sometimes developing the strategy can be quite daunting, especially for those that aren't avid social media users themselves. As such, if you need help in developing your strategic plan, Customer Consulting Group recommend taking a look at the events and services that KerwinRae provide. 

One factor that is common in a lot of successful social media strategies is to redirect traffic from the social media platform to somewhere that they can find more information and ultimately capture their contact details, so you can in turn communicate directly with them via email. A website is generally the best place to do that because, as I mentioned in my blog post about the importance of having a website, you have far greater control over the overall user experience on your own website, and can have specific landing pages with forms that capture specific details that will help you sell or service the enquirer.

Customer Consulting Group help businesses implement their social media strategies by leveraging tools such as Zoho Social and Microsoft Social Engagement that allow you to manage your social media accounts in one place, engage with your prospects and customers, as well as monitor keywords across public posts in multiple social media platforms. Below are some videos that give a high-level overview of some of the capabilities of these tools