Understanding the online marketing funnel, Part 2: Engage

This is the second of a five-part series on the components of the online marketing funnel.

The first part of this series looked at attracting - focusing on bringing visitors to your Web site. Once potential prospects come to your site, it is onto the next step: Engage. You need to capture their attention, build trust with them, and guide them to the conclusion that you are the right person to meet their insurance needs. If you do a good job at this, your prospects will spend time going through your site and when they contact you, they will already have decided that you are the agent they want to buy from.

Engaging visitors on site

Several of the most effective ways to engage prospects on your Web site:

• High quality educational content – Don’t mistake flash for substance. To truly engage your prospects, you need to give them well-written, topical, and informative content. Use your site to explain the fundamentals of life insurance and educate them on the value you bring.
• Professional quality Web site – Online customers are Web-savvy. They can tell a professionally created Web site from a homemade site instantly. To the online customer, the quality of your site is the quality of your business. Your site must load quickly, have a clean and easy to understand design, and be free of spelling mistakes, broken links, and missing content.
• Represent yourself – Show your prospects who is behind the Web site with a picture, a bio, and prominent contact information. Don’t hide behind your site anonymously. If your visitors don’t know who they’re really buying from, they aren’t going to buy.
• Clear calls to action – On the homepage and every page of the site, make it clear what your visitors should do next. Present the most important content clearly on the home page so your visitors don’t have to search for it. Most important, make sure it’s extremely clear how a visitor should proceed when they’re ready to take the next step.

Measuring engagement

Engagement is harder to measure than attraction. At this stage, you’re beginning to look for quality over quantity:

• Bounce Rate – This is the percent of people that leave after looking at just one page. A high bounce-rate is an indication that you didn’t compel people to click into your site because it didn’t appear relevant to them, they weren’t clear what do next, or they didn’t trust the page they landed on.
• Page Views per Visit – This is the average number of pages a visitor looked at in a single visit. In general, a higher number means that you’re visitor is engaged in your site and is going through it reading copy.
• Visits per Visitor – If someone returns to a site more than once, they are considered a repeat visitor. You can track the number of repeat visitors you’re attracting by looking at the average number of visits per visitor. Higher is better.
  (More: 3 other things you should track on your Web site)

As you improve your Web site, keep an eye on these three metrics to make sure that your changes are capturing your site visitor’s attention. Remember to review your metrics on a monthly basis to keep track of where you need to refine your online marketing funnel.