What is Converted Traffic?
Conversion marketing is hot these days, and when we’re talking about the digital world, it’s easy to see why: a global marketplace and a vast increase in consumer choice makes for more competition and therefore more pressure to stand out in the marketplace in order to convert leads into customers.
As you move through the four stages of your funnel – cold traffic, warm traffic, hot traffic, and conversion – you’re going to be observing and acting on the ways your traffic flows from one phase to another. You’ll use a combination of owned and paid media to drive, nurture and engage traffic with the end goal of creating a fantastic customer experience.
In looking at our Game Theory Matrix, the last of the four columns, the converted traffic, appears to be the “last” phase, since that’s the source of your revenue. In reality, though, it’s a better idea to think of this phase as the beginning of their journey with you.
Why is this the case? For one thing, customer acquisition is costly. When customers reach the conversion phase and decide to come back for more, it costs a business much less. Repeat business appears to offer a much higher ROI because it costs less overall. But many businesses fail at this point.
Really, this is the phase that you need to be putting in effort to hold their attention. Your quest to get them to become loyal customers is possibly the most important part of the customer journey, but many businesses forget about this – they make a sale and walk away.
While this may have worked well in the pre-digital age – for instance, if a customer had to return to a specific store to get something they needed just because it was close by – today it’s not the case. And given the plethora of marketing channels available in the digital age, it’s not too difficult to keep converted customers engaged, either.
Goal Framework
When you’re aiming to convert, you‘ll want to pay attention to every aspect of the funnel and understand what keeps customers interested enough to move through each phase of the decision-making process. This phase is partly a reflection of your customer’s behaviour in the warm and hot phases, and it’s also an essential point in the journey for data-collection.
Remember that your brand says as much about them as it does about your product or service.
You’ll want to stay aware and engaged with people who have already made a purchase, asking questions like:
- What’s going to keep them coming back?
- What’s going to keep them talking?
- What is it about your brand that makes them feel good?
- What type of statement does it make?
Your messages to your repeat customers should focus on persuading them to continue to purchase your offering. Re-engagement campaigns, special offers, re-targeting efforts can be designed at this phase to engage all types of traffic.
You want to make it easy enough for your customers to move through the purchasing process – you want to make it so that it’s stress-free and simple.
Audience & Market
Your converted customers audience is a segment of people that you can assume wants to buy from you again. Everyone should be looking to get repeated customers, no matter what your business or service or product or brand. You can do this via upselling, down-selling or cross-selling.
Coupons, special offers, and discounts should all work in your favor at this juncture. The main thing is that you keep them coming back for more.
Mindshare & Messaging
The main thing you want to bear in mind here is that you’re doing everything in your power to drive loyalty. You want to keep showing them interesting, positive, valuable things about the brand and company and you will probably have to keep finding new and interesting ways to do this.
Creating valuable content like video can be multi-purpose and work across not only many different channels but also target customers in each phase of the journey. You’ll want to try to keep telling your story and sharing your offerings in new ways in order to keep them interested.
Marketing
Buying traffic through a PPC ad campaign or investing in your website will work to keep people coming in and coming back. Keep targeting and retargeting all of your advertising and marketing beyond brand awareness and towards engagement.
Most marketing platforms, including display ads, email and social, can be effective in this phase as well as for re-targeting and nurturing. There are plenty of other marketing options to consider as well – think events, trade shows, broadcast media, brochures, and direct mail, if those suit your brand and budget.
Think about the channels and strategies you are already using, and then incorporate these into marketing that’s targeted to your current customers. Integrated strategies that combine digital and traditional techniques can work well these days, especially if your company is still making the transition to digital.
Generally, the more innovative you are about using different techniques, the more likely you’ll be to catch everyone’s attention.
Measurement
Key performance indicators (KPIs) that show important information about traffic that has already been converted will center around their actions with regards to how and why they are coming back to make multiple purchases.
You may have an understanding of why they came to you in the first place, but what keeps them coming back?
To find out, monitor metrics such as:
- Repeat purchases
- Recommendations
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
- Loyalty
- Monthly active users
- Open rates on your emails for existing customers
- Social referrals
- Paid versus organic traffic
Remember that your KPIs should reflect your key business goals and marketing strategy, so these are going to be different for each. Google Analytics offers a full suite of these measurements, but they won’t all be relevant. You’ll want to pay attention to, for instance, how many purchases were made in a single session, or how much was spent in a single conversion.
What Keeps Customers Coming Back for More?
Your aim for this part of your customer experience is to surprise, delight and reward them. Just like any relationship, you can keep it exciting by always offering something new and unexpected.
The way you communicate with your customers after they make a purchase is key to further conversions. Create something interesting, create something shareable, make it easy for them to talk about you to others to encourage organic traffic. And keep everything as “human” as possible.
Customer loyalty is one of your best assets, in part because you will already have data to work with to improve your marketing strategy. If you haven’t yet collected enough data, you can use things like loyalty programs to do so.
Remember that each part of the buyer’s journey doesn’t exist in a vacuum; though it’s impossible to have a repeat customer that’s also a new customer, lines between the other columns of our matrix can be blurry. Always bear in mind the mindset of your customers as they’re approaching you and engaging with you. This is about so much more than a specific product or how they much they are willing to spend.
Remember that this is really the beginning of your relationship with a given customer, not the last phase.
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