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Website visitors are among your most valuable prospects. They’ve found you by searching around for a solution. They’re clearly interested in your category, and it’s likely they’re in the market for an offering like yours. The only problem is that they tend to come, poke around, and leave. Without a way to engage them, you may lose a sizable opportunity. But there are methods for converting business visitors to identifiable prospects for ongoing marketing interaction and development. Here are six.

Motivate visitors to fill out a webform. This is the oldest trick in the book but, oddly, is missing from many B2B websites. A content offer is the most effective way to persuade visitors to give you their contact information. Offer a research report, a guide, a case study—something that will help them address their current challenges. Or invite them to sign up for your newsletter. Then nurture those prospects until they are ready to have a sales conversation. You can append additional data to the email record and create an omnichannel nurturing program using social media, postal mail, retargeted digital ads, and other channels for your follow up. 

Identify their company. If they came to your site through their company browser, you can easily identify their firm through the IP address. Many marketing automation tools today, such as Marketo and Hubspot, have this functionality embedded. Once you know the company your visitor represents, there are a variety of actions you can take. If the firm is already in your database, then let the account rep know someone has come by. If it’s an entirely new prospect, create outbound marketing campaigns to various contacts in the firm to introduce yourself and get a conversation going. 

Enhance the company ID with specialized software. A variety of services have sprung up to automate the company-identification marketing process. One of the earliest, VisitorTrack (now part of Bombora), will send you an email alert about each visitor and provide you with the names and contact information of various top executives at their firm. And there are others, such as LeadFeeder, that will send the visitor record directly to your CRM for follow up. 

Use identity graph tools to link visitors across devices. As more employees work from home due to the pandemic, it’s getting harder to connect visitors to their company IP addresses. But identity tools like Stirista’s VisitorIDGraph will help link the business and consumer personas across their various devices and provide you with richer “visitor intelligence.” 

Install a chatbot. You may think of bots as customer service tools, but they have become much more than that. While answering questions, bots can also be programmed to ask for name and email address. More sophisticated tools, such as Drift and Intercom, do all that plus connect with your CRM to customize the chat, schedule meetings, and deliver outbound messages. These chatbots help turn a question into a relationship. 

Use the LinkedIn Insights tag. Install this piece of code on your website—it’s free—to connect individual visitors to their LinkedIn profiles. This allows you to retarget them with LinkedIn advertising, as well as analyze their characteristics and firmographics.

You have lots of opportunity to de-anonymize your website visitors and turn them into productive relationships. 
A version of this article appeared in Biznology, the digital marketing blog.

About the Author

Ruth P. Stevens, a past president of DMCNY and previous Silver Apple honoree, consults and speaks on B2B marketing. She also teaches marketing at NYU Stern and other business schools in the U.S. and abroad. Reach her at ruth@ruthstevens.com