Small Biz in: 15 On Location recently traveled to Austin, Texas for ZohoDay 2022. In this episode, Shawn Hessinger, Editor-in-Chief of Small Biz Trends, talks with Zoho Corporation’s Chief Product Officer, Naresh Kumar to learn more about how heatmaps are made and other software marketing tools can be used to grow your business.
Demystifying heat maps
Shawn: What is a heat map for those who don’t know, and how does it apply to a small business and what they’re doing?
Naresh: Heatmaps are basically a visual representation of how visitors behave on a website. Generates the different sites the user has clicked on. And it has different components.
So a heat map is one thing, a displacement map is another, and an attention map is another. The heatmap gives you the different places the user clicked on… it gives a number of clicks on that particular component.
How heatmaps can help page performance
Naresh: Say you have a main CTA on a part of the page. Or you have a really good video that you want users to watch on the second or third full page of the website. Then you notice that not many people are scrolling down to see that particular CTA or video.
The heatmap gives you the different places the user has clicked; gives a series of clicks on that particular component.
In addition, the heat map will give you information about it, such as:
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- How many users have scrolled down to that particular part of the website?
- How much time do users spend on this particular video or other content with this CTA?
- How many users clicked on it?
Then, when you gather all this information, you can get, for example, that only 50% of visitors have scrolled to that particular point on the page, and only 10% of visitors have clicked. You immediately lose 50% of the user’s first scroll and the remaining 90% of users never click on that particular part.
You can draw an inference from that data, and that’s basically the hypothesis you test using A/B testing methods. So if you make the CTA all the way to the top of the page, 100% of visitors will see it. Then you can see if it works for you by doing an A/B test with the current page against the new page, which can help with the hypothesis. Later, you can see how it works and you can process it.
Finally, you have to keep measuring again and again and again until you achieve an optimal process. And even after that, the measurement continues.
What businesses do heat maps help?
Shawn Hessinger: Are there companies where heatmaps are more useful than others? I would imagine that e-commerce might be one.
Naresh: It’s 2022 and after the pandemic, it’s more important than ever to have a website to run a business. I wouldn’t differentiate between saying this is important for e-commerce and this is not important for others because a website is necessary for every business at this time. You must also provide all required data points on the website and generate leads through your website.
With this in mind, I believe a heat map would be appropriate and essential for all businesses. It depends on what goal you have for the website and it depends on how you measure your website to see if your goal is being achieved or not.
What to look for in conversion and optimization software
Shawn: You mentioned heat maps, displacement maps, and attention maps. When I’m looking for this software, how do I know what to look for or that it has the necessary features to deliver what I’m trying to figure out?
Naresh: These tools are called conversion and optimization software in the market, and there are quite a few players offering these services. However, what you want to get depends on what you want to achieve.
So what I would recommend is first: go back to the website; it is a gateway to everything. Go to the website and look at the feature pages and see if what you need is something that a particular software offers.
Second, register to all these products and check whether it matches your requirement or not. It’s the only way to go, in my opinion.
The third, and one of the main things I look at when I’m evaluating, is how much your page speed will be affected when you implement these software solutions. Because you need to have JavaScript code to track your website visitors and you need to place them on the website to do that. So when you do that, that has some impact on your tracking code; to your page speed right? So, this is one more thing that you have to constantly look at when evaluating this type of software.
Automated marketing software can also help grow your business
Shawn: Let’s talk about Zoho Marketing Automation. What are the types of ways you can use this platform to grow your business?
Naresh Kumar: Zoho Marketing Automation is a complete marketing suite. It covers the top, middle and bottom of the sales funnel. You can use it as a lead, in order to nurture and follow up on it, by qualifying it and marking it as a qualified sales lead, or you can market a qualified lead and pass it on to the sales team.
You can also use automation for a customer in terms of loyalty, management and retention.
So, these are the different ways in which you can use marketing automation. And to get into the details, there are different models that help you do that.
In addition, the basic contact module helps you manage all your company contacts. And we also have the lead generation model where you can generate leads for your business with the help of registration forms, pop-up forms and other ways in which you can generate leads.
And on top of that, we also have “Journeys” where you can create a Customer Journey and orchestrate them based on whether you want to send them a follow-up email or whether you want to do the entire Sales Journey for the customer in terms of Journeys dynamic – where, if the user has opened an email, it is sent to a different party. Or if the user hasn’t responded to an email, it’s sent down a different path…that’s what Journey does.
And let’s say we also have engagement models where you want to send a standalone email campaign, seamless campaigns and multiple engagement mechanisms, you’ll be able to do that. In other words, if you want to navigate the entire funnel of your business, marketing automation helps you do that.
The ones to take away
In closing, heat maps are just one more example of how technology can help your small business run better. Also, consider heatmaps when trying to figure out how visitors behave on your website and use their data, along with tools like Zoho Marketing Automation, to help you grow your business.
Be sure to tune in for the rest Using heat maps to grow your business to learn more about Zoho Journeys and get other tips and ideas to elevate and grow your small business.
If you enjoyed learning about heatmaps and want to learn more about them, be sure to read Small Biz Trend’s informative article: 10 Heatmap Tools and User Tracking Tools.
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