I would say it's highly probable that at some point during the sales process 100% of your prospective customers are going to visit your website for some reason.
It's like the Eisenberg brothers taught us in 'Waiting for your cat to bark', for organisations with multiple levels of management the decision making process goes in stages.
The procurement of office stationary for example might begin with an office junior conducting research in order to build a list of say 10 prospective suppliers which is then passed up the organisation chart to more and more senior levels.
At each level of seniority and even horizontally across the organisation chart different decision makers and influencers are going to want to pull different bits of information from your organisation, and there's no more effortless way of them getting this than from your website.
That is assuming your site has the relevant information but that's a whole other story.
We all know what prospecting is like, especially if you are a direct sales person and are reading this, there's a lot of contacting that goes on.
Often you don't get hold of the person you want to speak to but sometimes you get an email address with which to send an introduction.
Prospects will read your email and often click through to your company website to see what it's all about. They may decide they are not open to what you are offering but they will be curious enough to check out your website because we all like to make at least semi informed decisions.
This applies especially to more junior members of their team because typically (and yes this is a generalisation) people will find reasons to procrastinate and your email could be just that opportunity.
My advice would be to do what we do and tag the link in your email footer so you know how often prospective customers are checking out your website following an introductory email, rather than them just deleting it.
If I contact a prospect to offer them our search marketing services I'll always send something ahead of the phone call, that's just the way I prefer to do it.
In the footer of the email that introduces Upright Solutions there'll be a link that looks like this:
http://www.simplifyinternetmarketing.co.uk/
The actual URL it links to though is this:
http://www.simplifyinternetmarketing.co.uk/?utm_source=email-footer&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email-signature
This is a URL that has a tag that informs Google analytics about the specific source of that website visitor.
So we've created a new segment for the site traffic. The result?
Well in our traffic sources report instead of the standard, direct, referral and search segments we get:
This week 15 people have received our introductory emails and clicked the website link in the footer. On average they visited 2.8 pages, so just a quick look to see what we are about.
This is a good exercise because without the link tagging all the email footer traffic would have been counted as 'direct traffic'.
The same goes for any campaign you are running, you can change the link to to segment off traffic from any source or campaign that you like.
Remember we can't improve that which we do not measure, so get tagging.
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