How to Create eCommerce Lead Nurturing Funnels With Your Website Visitor Data

1. Using Website Visitor Data to Understand Your Audience

There are several insightful ways you can use website visitor data to better understand your audience. Sales and marketing teams play a crucial role in utilizing this data to enhance lead generation and retention.

The depth of insight depends on how precisely you can identify who is visiting: identifying visitors at the person level gives teams the names, emails, and demographics behind the sessions, rather than anonymous counts.

Let’s take a look.

Segment Leads Based on Visitor Behavior and Interests

Audience segmentation is a powerful way to connect with your prospect and customer base based on specific criteria.

An identity resolution tool resolves website visitor data like demographic, firmographic, and behavioral information to tell you who’s interacting with your website and how.

Start by analyzing and filtering basic demographic information like income levels, and then dive deeper into behavioral patterns like pages visited or session duration. Divide up these audiences into segments based on their shared behaviors and attributes and create targeted marketing strategies for each segment.

Develop Buyer Personas to Target the Right Customers

Website visitor data can also help you craft buyer personas.

By looking beyond basic demographic information, you gain insight into their browsing patterns to help you understand not just who your customers are, but what motivates their buying decisions.

For example, a shopper that visits your high-ticket product pages frequently might respond better to exclusive product launches, while a price-conscious shopper would appreciate a bundle deal more.

Gain Insights from Prospect Data to Personalize Marketing Messages

Website visitor data reveals plot holes about your prospect preferences and behaviors you might not otherwise receive from traditional tactics.

Uncovering this information helps you craft personalized messages that speak directly to their interests based on their actual website behavior and user profile.

So instead of blindly crafting your next ad campaign based on an offer you think they might like, use the data to create a targeted message and offer that speaks to their user journey.

2. Building a Lead Scoring System to Qualify and Nurture Leads

To properly build and track a well-performing nurture funnel, you’ll want to create a lead scoring system first.

Track Lead Actions and Behavior for Lead Scores

While we’re not breaking down the process of lead scoring completely (you can find a lead scoring 101 guide from the masters at Hubspot here), let’s look at a high-level view to get the ball rolling.

Lead scoring is essentially the process of assigning points or values to leads you think will convert to a customer. Scores are typically based on their demographic, firmographic, or behavioral attributes.

Examples of high-value lead attributes might include:

• Viewing pricing pages or certain product pages multiple times
• Adding items to cart
• Subscribing to newsletters
• Demographic and firmographic attributes that fit your ICP

Use Website Data to Identify Cold Leads vs High-Intent Visitors

Identity resolution tools recover website visitor data that helps you understand visitor intent, which can be used to allocate your marketing resources more effectively.

For example, someone with high-intent, or a “hot” lead, visits your website multiple times without purchasing. Or they spend extended amounts of time on product comparison pages or specific product collection pages.

By identifying these patterns, you can drill your focus into those leads likely to convert and nurture them with targeted messages and offers (like discount codes or educational information) correlated to their behavior.

Keep an eye on content engagement levels and iterate your approach based on how leads interact with different types of content. You’ll begin to understand what content resonates best with buyers throughout the sales process and can better qualify them based on their behavior.

3. Developing Lead Nurturing Campaigns to Engage Your Audience

The power of lead nurture campaigns lies in their creativity and timeliness. Let’s dig into how to engage your audience effectively.

Personalize Nurturing Campaigns Based on Lead Segmentation

Remember when we introduced lead segmentation at the top of this post? Draw on those grouped audiences to create hyper-targeted campaigns with messaging and offers that speak to each specific audience’s needs and interests.

For example, if you create a list of visitors that have viewed a specific product page, put them into a short nurture campaign that speaks to this action and offers them incentive to purchase the product.

Automate these nurture campaigns into a workflow to reach audiences at the right time, every time (more on this in the later in the post).

Use Multiple Channels, Including Email, Social Media, and Display Advertising

Lead nurturing performs best when it’s coordinated across your advertising channels like email, social media, and programmatic advertising.

Luckily, an identity resolution tool ties to an identity graph that connects all of these channels together to give you a complete user profile, making it easier to track attribution and target your campaigns.

With that in mind, draw on this data to understand where your users are throughout their journey to create email campaigns that complement your social media ads and display retargeting efforts. For example, your display ads might offer an immediate engagement point like a general advertisement for your brand while the email campaign offers more detailed product information.

See the symbiosis?

4. Integrating Marketing Automation to Streamline Your Sales Funnel

You’re going to need a vessel to send leads through a nurture campaign. Marketing automation helps you move prospects and customers through the sales funnel while scaling your personalization efforts.

Using a CRM or dedicated email tool allows you to create automated workflows triggered by prospect and customer actions, like cart abandonment or product page views. We love Hubspot, Klaviyo, or Mailchimp for eCommerce!

Not only are these great tools to automate nurture campaigns so you can focus on big picture items, but they also provide data and analytics to monitor campaign performance and find optimization opportunities.

Such changes might include adjusting email send times, tweaking promotional offers, or updating targeting attributes based on campaign performance data.

Automation workflows should also adapt based on your lead scoring system. As a lead’s score changes, so should their place in your funnel. A lead’s score can influence things like:

• Timing of promotional offers
• Sales team notifications
• Email frequency and content type
• Cross-sell and upsell opportunities
• Re-engagement campaign timing

Tracking and Optimizing Lead Nurturing Efforts for Better Results With Your Website Visitor Data

Before you dig into the data on your nurture campaigns, determine a few KPIs, or key performance indicators, that matter to your overall business goals. These might include:

• Conversion rates by segment
• Revenue per email subscriber
• Customer acquisition costs
• Campaign ROI metrics

Keep a close eye on your KPIs to look for leakages in conversion points and optimization opportunities. Study how the website visitor data in different segments respond to content types and messaging.

So, if you’re seeing a high bounce rate from your target ICP on important product pages, that’s a sign you need to clean up the copy to add more detailed information and/or include social proof elements.

Or, if a particular campaign for top-of-funnel leads is seeing strong engagement, study why it’s successful and apply it to other communications.