The vast majority of web visitors are anonymous. On average, only 2-3% of web visitors will “raise their hand” to accept an offer or complete a transaction.

How do you reach the 98% of anonymous web visitors?

Anonymous visitors on your site can be tracked using their IP addresses. You can find out who, when, which pages, and how long specific visitors have been on your site. You may also be able to discover company information and key contacts associated with an IP address. Best of all, this type of tracking does not require an opt-in from consumers as the information resides on your web property.

Here’s an example of what the information from a specific visitor looks like on our marketing platform. Note that you can see the company that visited with some details on revenue and the number of employees. You can also see which pages they visited and for how long. These individual entries can be collected on a marketing platform, and the information can be leveraged in any number of ways.

So what can you do with all this data?

Track anonymous visitors’ web activity

By tracking the activity of individual visitors, your business is able to see when they are ready to engage. As they go through the process of evaluating your products and services, you see what content they are interested in and when their interest level increases. You can use this knowledge to initiate a sales call based on the visitors’ interests, or tailor your web content based on the pages they visit. This insight into your existing web visitors allows you to respond more effectively to their behaviors and interests.

Retargeting

The most common method to reach anonymous visitors is retargeting. It makes your brand “stickier” by getting ads to visitors after their web visit. When consumers visit your site and leave without completing a transaction, you can continue to marketing to them by placing an anonymous cookie on their browser. This cookie allows you to stay in front of potential customers over time, by serving banner ads on the other sites they visit. The limitation here is that cookie based systems may end up delivering ads to bots rather than humans, and there are now greater visitor controls for limiting the delivery of retargeting ads.

Append email addresses

Another way to reach anonymous visitors is to use a service provider to send emails to your list of anonymous visitors. You can remarket to that email list with a targeted email campaign based on your anonymous visitors’ interests. These emails are sent through service providers who have collected opt-in accounts.

Append a physical address to your anonymous visitors’ IP addresses

Businesses can go a step farther and actually send their anonymous visitors something in the mail. For example, a direct mail piece with a product sample based on the product page visited can be sent to anonymous visitors. In this way, the cost of direct mail is used to its greatest effect. Unlike email lists, direct mail does not require an opt-in from consumers. The process can be automated within a set of parameters to function as a part of your overall marketing strategy. At Sharpdots, we automate the process for our clients by fulfilling Direct Mail triggered by anonymous visitor web activity.

‍

‍

Lookalike audiences

Once enough data from anonymous visitors is collected, your highest value customers can be replicated by creating lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences allow you to attract new and similar prospects, who are much more likely to become customers. Lookalike audiences can be marketed to through social media platforms, Google Adwords and digital banners ads.

There is more activity on your site than meets the eye. Learn more about your visitors and get to know the anonymous visitors who have not yet raised their hands.