We're asked this quite often. Many people we talk to were looking to update their web site and CommsBox does a lot more than simply running a very good web site. So why? As a potential client why should you invest in a product like CommsBox rather than go down the traditional route of separate web site, CRM system, email marketing plaform, blogging system?
The answer lies in the information 'flows' within your organisation. Where is data generated and what could you do with it given the right tools?
Information about an organisation's leads has traditionally been captured by people within the organisation and this has often been the justification for a CRM system. A single system into which sales, marketing and other employees can capture information about leads and about customers.
The Internet however opens up a whole lot of new sources of information about your leads, much of which is hard or impossible to capture manually:
The task of your marketing activities is to deliver qualified leads to your sales people. The higher the quality of the leads you pass over the more efficient the sales process will be. Ideally you only want to pass over pre-qualified leads that are most likely to generate sales.
If the number of leads you're generating is small then it's perfectly reasonable to use a manual approach to qualifing those leads, or even just dealing with all of them as potential sales. As the reach of your marketing campaigns grows you'll start to generate more leads than you can comfortably manage by hand.
The solution is a lead scoring process by which each contact is awarded a number of points. The higher the point score the higher the quality of the lead. The number of points each contact has can move up and down depending on how much you know about them and how well they engage with your organisation.
Rather than have to manually score each lead it's generally more practical to automate so [read on]
It's time to revisit your web site! Whatever the initial driver it's worth taking a step back and asking "how does my website fit with my overall digital marketing strategy?", which in turn will lead to "what technology could help me meet my marketing objectives?".
Many organisations are waking up to the opportunities of digital marketing, recognising that their web site can be much more than a digital brochure instead becoming part of an active digital lead generation engine.
Despite this recognition I'm quite surprised by the number of organisations that approach us to discuss digital marketing and tell us "we're just developing our new web site, it's almost ready". Often the new website will tick all the visual boxes. It'll be responsive and look really cool. How did they choose the technology to use? There are various reasons including "it's the thing our web developer recommended", "it's what everyone else is using", "our techies liked it".
This is unfortuate. The decision [read on]
My primary source of news on the Internet has for years been the BBC. They have been at the forefront of the digital revolution. So it's informative that over the last few weeks they've launched a revised beta test version of their news site. Apart from a minor visual redsign this site is 'responsive'. The BBC was the most popular news provider on a mobile handset (14.5 million users) in April 2014, and a fifth of mobile internet users access news on their handset every day (Ofcom)
CHECK TO SEE IF YOUR SITE IS MOBILE-FRIENDLY WITH THE GOOGLE TOOL
A responsive design aims to build web pages that detect the screen size and orientation of a device and change the way it looks accordingly. Responsive design has prompted a lot of discussion over the last couple of years as more and more people ditch the traditional computer and use a variety of tablets and mobile phones to browse the web. Looking at traffic to some of our own sites over the last couple of months non-PC users accou [read on]
Over the late months of this summer, we took to the road and asked people what they thought of the latest version of Commsbox. To our surprise the depth of analytics on individual customers was the key feature that most blew them away.
Google Analytics is a great tool. This information is fantastic in aggregate for understanding the strength of campaigns and how customers in general reached your site. But what it won't tell you is the exact journey that a specific individual has taken through your website.
A quote from Google's terms of service is interesting. You may not use the Google Analytics service to track individuals. So it can give you a great overall picture of the performance of your site and, if you use campaign IDs correctly, you can get a measure of success for a particular promotion. But Google analytics does nothing to help you convert individual visitors into prospective customers.
"You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use t [read on]