There’s a lot of work that goes into converting an account from prospect to customer. Still, it’s important to realize the journey doesn’t end there. In many instances, your website is still a valuable source of information for customers, and the homepage is often their gateway to log into their accounts. For that reason, your site shouldn’t just be a place to communicate with potential customers. It needs to be relevant to existing customers too.
The first step in delivering relevant customer experiences is to recognize your customers when they visit. When you do, you can use the opportunity to drive upsells and, more importantly, avoid causing them needless frustration. I’ll explain more about treating your customers to relevant site experiences in this blog post.
It’s like you don’t even know me!
I find myself in this scenario every month, so you are probably familiar with it too. Picture this: you visit your cable provider’s website to pay your bill. When you go to log in, you are presented with a new offer in the homepage hero area: “$79.99 Triple Play, and a year of free Netflix.” This is a great deal, and it’s significantly lower than what you currently pay. Who wouldn’t want that? But wait. When you click on the “offer details,” it says the offer is for new customers only. You’re not eligible!
This a frustrating customer experience, and it has a high risk of offending or upsetting current customers — people that regularly pay for the cable provider’s services. It is especially frustrating to me as a personalization expert because I know the hero area could be used in a much more relevant way!
Even if you’re not a cable provider, you may still be delivering an experience like this
Now think about your site.
Are you providing an experience like my cable provider? Do most of your customers come through the homepage to log in? Do you promote offers to entice new customers that may be less than the existing customers have paid? Or, are you showing content that might not be relevant to existing customers (such as CTAs to take a demo or get a free trial)? Are you presenting everyone on your site with a hero about your upcoming conference or webinar, even to the people who have already signed up?
It doesn’t have to be as black-and-white as the cable provider example, but there are changes that you can make that will enhance the experience for all visitors.
How to deliver more relevant experiences to existing customers
Make sure you have customer tracking on your marketing site so you know who visitors are as they hit the site (oddly, my cable provider has this!). If you know who the visitor is and you have data about them (either through an integration with your CRM, by making it visible in the data layer, or via recognizable behavioral patterns which I discuss below), then you can provide a more relevant experience with personalization.
Here are some examples of different experiences you can offer customers:
Even if you cannot explicitly identify a person as a customer, you can still use implied data captured from prior visits. For instance, you can track behaviors such as clicking the “login” button on your site and assume anyone who has taken this action more than once is a customer (a single click might be accidental, but multiple clicks indicate that they are signing in regularly). The key here is you don’t have to have specific data attributes to talk to your customers relevantly.
Final Thoughts
Don’t let all the time and effort you spent securing a new customer go to waste. You need to continually delight your customers, and that starts with recognizing them when they come back to visit you, and talking to them as customers — not prospects. With some click or page tracking at the easier end of the spectrum, or data integrations with other systems at the more advanced end, you can not only be relevant and less frustrating to your customers but you can also start your cross-sell and upsell conversation right on your homepage.
