By: D. Bruce Johnston, President & CEO
One thing is certain; advisors are under utilizing their websites. This is a consistent theme borne out in study after study on advisors website utilization habits.
Marketing has changed dramatically over the past several years and that applies to advisors website marketing as well. The biggest change we see is the change in prospect and customer behavior; they want to be engaged. No, they demand to be engaged. And, they want to be engaged on their terms with content that is relevant to them and their needs. Simply put, that means if they are interested in equity type products, they want information on equity products, not fixed income.
Compound these new “customer rights” demands with advisors inability to convert more of their website traffic to clients and you have the recipe for frustration for both parties. Perhaps by examining some of the available data on website visitation behaviors we can shed a little light on this low conversion rate phenomenon advisors are experiencing and how to improve these numbers.
First, engaging, acquiring and retaining clients online is a challenging business. Available studies suggest that 95-97% of website visitors are not sales ready. Even on pure retail websites such as Amazon, 90% of the time site visitors leave without making a purchase or providing additional information. In fact, prospects will interact with your site 5.5 times on average before they download something or contact you directly. Only 2-3% of websites earn the confidence of the visitor to the point where they identify themselves on the first visit. The good news, over a two-year period 70% of those initial visitors will convert to clients, provided you have nurtured them and stayed in front of them along the way.
Here’s the struggle. Advisors know they have website traffic because their website analytics package tells them they had website traffic. The problem is your website visitors know more about you then you know about them at this point. You created the website, you invited them in, you told them about you, your firm and what you do, and didn’t even ask them to introduce themselves.
Smart marketers and advisors are no longer sitting back and hoping that these visitors convert to clients. They are beginning to leverage segment-based automated marketing technology, which allows them to listen to prospects and keep the conversation relevant. They are aggressively implementing website visitor identification strategies and are embracing the ability to nurture, score, track and provide alerts on countless behavioral factors, in any combination based on their needs.
This is all being done for the express purpose of engaging prospects and converting them to clients. Advisors are realizing that in order to bring visitors to their website and more importantly convert them to clients they have to leverage the combination of content, calls-to-action, multiple sources of engagement through blogs, thought leadership pieces and defining next steps to accomplish this.
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