How to follow up on residential visitors to your website

First, the bad news …

You can’t identify ALL residential visitors going to your website.

Now the good news …

You CAN identify anything from 10-30% of visitors as being from residential locations (based on over 600 customer use cases that I’ve personally been part of).

Geolocation works in two ways:

1. Identifying visitors by a specific address.
2. Identifying visitors by a geolocation reference.

Here’s an example of someone identified by a specific address:

Here’s an example of someone identified by geolocation without a street address:

Ideally, people go to your website and they will contact you.

However, there are reasons they don’t, including:

1. They’re currently just researching options (you and others they may find online).
2. They have to make the decision with other people.
3. There was something lacking in your website and so they didn’t make contact.

The answer to all the above is to send something impressive to their residential location.

Why?

Because it’s unlikely that your competitors will be doing that (so you stand out).

For those who went to your website researching options, your posted communication can be enough to make them respond to you, and sometimes to share with other people who are part of that decision-making process.

For those that didn’t get enough of a good feel from your website, what you send them could be enough to turn that around in your favour.

There’s a good reason why businesses don’t spend a lot of budget on posting to houses: the spiralling costs of postage.

If you’re a relatively local business then you have the option to hand-post through letterboxes.

If your target area is further afield you only have two choices:

1. Pay postage costs.
2. Have local people in that area who can hand-deliver at less cost than postage would be.

A letter introducing you and your company should be brief but impactful.

It would ideally be one page that includes your contact details, and have supplementary information as extra pages.

For example, if someone has been to the website of a chiropractor and looked at pages related to sciatica and back pain then they could receive three sheets of paper:

Sheet 1

This is the covering letter and would include your contact details and be hand-signed. The text would include similar to this:

You may not have heard of us before, but we have been removing pain from customers in this area for over 20 years, and are proud to have the privilege that our customers refer us onto their own friends.

We provide chiropractic care to help in many ways, including:

• • Sciatica
  • Back pain
  • Neck pain
  • Hip pain

If you or anyone you know is ever in need of such pain relief, please do contact me via any of my details below.

I’ve also attached just a small selection of testimonials from customers who had previously suffered two types of pain, so that you can see what a difference we make.

Sheet 2

Titled: Testimonials from customers we’ve helped with sciatica.

Several testimonials from customers who have been helped with their sciatica.

Sheet 3

Titled: Testimonials from customers we’ve helped with back pain.

Several testimonials from customers who have been helped with their back pain.

The point of that letter and attachments is that it’s likely to be read by the person in that house who had been to the website looking at sciatica and back pain (either for themself or someone else) and so the testimonial examples will be very topical and hopefully give them enough reason to make contact.

That’s just one example of course.  The letter and related content will differ for each industry type but the principle is the same: include information related to what the person in that house/residential location looked at during their website visit.

It’s critical to be measuring what you gain from the promotional activity.

Each posted communication that’s delivered needs to be recorded against the original geolocated data that gave you the residential address.

Why?

So that you can measure good results and poor results.

For example, you send 100 brochures by post and you get 20 enquiries.

Each enquiry will have an address associated with it, which you can link back to the original geolocated data (and also the original source of the visitor to your website (e.g Google Ads), so that you can see what led to the geolocated targeting and ultimately to the enquiry you gain).

For those brochures that didn’t gain enquiries, you’d compare that to the geolocated data to identify if there’s a need to refine which types of geolocated visitors you do send to.  For example, the geolocated data may tell you that people on desktop computers using a specific internet provider don’t respond as well as those who were on mobile devices, which could indicate that geolocated data isn’t as accurate for some internet providers.

There will be patterns in the data (and it’s something I help my customers to identify) and so your starting point is to ensure that you keep accurate records of all data related to the promotional materials you send to people.