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Marketing ROI: Breaking Anonymity on the Web (PDF-336 KB)

In today's world, prospective customers can search your site in complete anonymity. They can review your technologies, applications, and products, without speaking to a person.

Compared to the pre-web era, when people had to fill out bounceback cards or call an 800-number to get information, that's a major challenge. But it's an opportunity as well.

Can you organize the content well enough, write the information powerfully enough, and make offers compelling enough that prospects willingly break anonymity and tell you who they are? That's the challenge and the opportunity for B2B marketers on the web today.

A start-up company in the intellectual property space needed to connect with prospects at the "C" level in engineering and IP/legal areas. We helped them raise their profile by launching an e-news program linked to web content and, especially, white papers on the key topics in patents, trademarks and other IP areas of concern. Online advertising helped drive their "stealth prospects" to the web site to break anonymity by signing up for the e-newsletter. The program helped them grow from their initial beta customer to become a viable business. Metrics included incoming web traffic, e-newsletter sign-ups, white paper downloads, emails and anecdotal feedback and, ultimately, sales opportunities and contracts.

One of our clients was living the concept that, "to your customers, your web site is your company." They found that their home page "contact us" feature was enticing people to break anonymity for everything from a sales inquiry to complaining about a distributor to making a request for a part or service...sometimes of an urgent nature. All were directed to the marketing communications department since they were responsible for the web site. Using the raw data and responses, we helped create better options and links on the home page to direct diverse user needs to the appropriate part of the site (and the corporation), creating new functionality to better serve the needs of the users.

A key concern for one of our service clients was that users would come to their web site, be successfully led to the action step, and then would link to a partner's site to pursue the sale. Our client needed to capture these actions to enhance their own marketing efforts and also to report metrics to partners on the outstanding results provided by their web site. We developed a solution in which clicking on a partner link would lead to a promotional page for the partner, still on our client's web site. One more click would take the user to the partner's site. The additional step helped our client promote the partners more, and also capture key data for reporting.

Anecdotal Information
There also is anecdotal experience about the techniques used to encourage users to break anonymity;

• One of our clients sought a way to have a direct interaction with users on their site. We developed a sophisticated problem drilldown that helped them find relevant content on the site, but also gave them the opportunity to complete a form. The resulting leads contained extensive information -- from both the drilldown and the form -- and were of high quality.
• Another client challenged users to test their knowledge, requiring that they register to take a quiz. The leads gave them significant insight into the users' needs through their answers to the quiz questions.

Getting Web Users to Break Anonymity

Persuading anonymous users to become well-qualified leads is one of the most significant challenges — and opportunities — marketing communications managers face today. And we can help.