Written by Troy Burk, published by The Marketing Tech Blog on August 16, 2014.
Online interactions and unique visits to your website aren’t necessarily customers for your business, or even prospective customers. Companies often make the mistake of assuming that every visit to a website is someone who’s interested in their products, or that everyone who downloads a single whitepaper is ready to buy.
Not so. Not so at all.
A web visitor can have many different reasons for perusing your site and spending time with your content, none of which have to do with becoming an actual customer. For example, visitors to your site could be:
- Competitors keeping an eye on you.
- Job seekers looking for a better gig.
- Students researching a college term paper.
And yet, nearly everyone who falls within these three categories is often at risk of getting a phone call or winding up on an email list.
Putting every visitor into a customer bucket is a dangerous practice. It’s not only a huge drain on resources to pursue each and every person who shares his or her phone number or email address, but it can also create a negative experience for people who had no intention of becoming the target for a barrage of marketing material.
Converting visitors to customers, or even just knowing which visitors are a fit to convert, requires a deeper understanding of who they are. This is where 3D (three-dimensional) lead scoring comes into play.
Read more: Not Everyone Who Interacts With You Is a Customer – Marketing Technology
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