Using LinkedIn to follow up on companies that visited your website

When you log into your A1WebStats detailed view of organisations that have visited your website, you will see what each company visitor looked at page by page, but you won’t know the identity of the person who visited your website.

Using the connection to LinkedIn, you can utilise one of a few methods used by our customers, all focused on trying to find a way to bridge the gap between a company visiting your website, and people within that company. 

 

Accessing the LinkedIn information

Within your A1WebStats visiting companies information you see a company that interests you and you click on the LinkedIn symbol …

 

That takes you to LinkedIn, providing one or a range of company names that match …

 

Sometimes there may not be an exact match and so you’ll need to edit the company name in LinkedIn to something shorter.  For example, A1WebStats may show a company as ‘ABC Widgets Ltd’ but on LinkedIn it’s just ‘ABC Widgets’.

Clicking through to a company will show you the employees at that business …

What you can do next depends on your level of LinkedIn subscription, but you will either be able to filter the employees view to a more refined list, or the filtering may be more limited.

 

What to do next

With your list of employees, you will have one of the following:

1. Far too many employees to choose from, also not helped if you’ve got a LinkedIn subscription level that doesn’t let you filter employees in more detail.
2. A list of employees that can be refined to:
   1. Those based in the geographical location the website visitor was at when they visited your website (as shown within your A1WebStats data).
   2. Job titles/functions that most closely match the type of people you would expect to be visiting your website.

In situation 1 above, you don’t have a lot of options, although you could try some of the following ideas if you can identify people of interest to you.

Situation 2 gives you more options because the employees list can be more refined.

At this point, if you have more than the free version of LinkedIn (Premium or Sales Navigator) then you may want to initially skip to this part of the page but then return to the additional strategies on this page (that also apply to those who don’t have a paid version of LinkedIn).

 

Basic connection

Request a LinkedIn connection to one or more people at that company, without changing the standard LinkedIn invitation text.

Advantage: many people accept connection requests without thinking.  If they saw a message from you with the connection request, it may make them think you’re getting ready to sell to them.

Disadvantage: if you do too many of these and people don’t connect, or say they don’t know you, LinkedIn may possibly issue you a warning.  To avoid this happening, keep an eye on your levels of connection requests made (that haven’t been responded to) and remove the requests to those who haven’t connected in more than a few weeks.

 

Simple message connection

Include a short message with your connection request, utilising a simple template.  For example:

Hi Name, I saw that someone from [their company name] came to our [your company name] website [when – yesterday, last week, date] and wondered if it may have been you, and if I can help further?

Some people will reply without connecting, sometimes including saying that it wasn’t them (which gives you opportunity to try and find out who it may have been in their business that went to your website).  

Others may connect without reading your message properly, which then enables you to provide a more detailed (including links to website pages) response via your new LinkedIn connection.

Advantage: although more sales-focused, it’ll be very clear to the recipient who may engage because of your proactivity.   If you get no response from them in a week then you can try someone else in the same business.

Disadvantage: they will see it as a lead into a sales discussion and may not be ready for that.

 

Research-based connection

Include a message with your connection request, using text that shows you’re trying to engage with them, but not trying to sell to them.   For example, find a post they’ve made and refer to that in the connection request – “I saw your post about red widgets, which resonated with me so I hope it’s OK to connect so that I see more of your posts in my feed?”.

Advantage: caters for those who won’t accept basic connection requests, and also doesn’t look like it’ll precede a sales pitch.

Disadvantage: it’ll take you more time for each connection request, plus LinkedIn only allows a meagre number of characters within your initial message and won’t let you paste website urls.

 

After connection acceptance …

What happens next depends on your business and culture, plus resources available to you.

 

Engagement via LinkedIn 

This depends on how subtle you want to be, but these are some options to consider, also depending on how fast or slow your sales process is:

• Pick up on posts that the person makes or comments on, ensuring that you comment in a way that is relevant (i.e. don’t just say ‘I agree with this’), and raises your visibility to that person, but without being too obvious.  Over time there may be the opportunity to further engage with them.
• If they’ve accepted your basic connection (no message sent with the connection request to them) then send them a message that refers to you knowing someone has visited your website from that business.  After accepting your connection you can then use more text and include urls if relevant.  For example:
  
  “Hi [Name], I connected with you because I saw that someone from [their company name] came to our website recently.  Because you’re in [their department/job role] I guessed it could have been you (but am probably wrong!).  If it wasn’t you, would you know who within [their company name] may have been to our website, interested in [describe what they looked at on the website here]?”

 

Phone call

For the more direct approach, ring the company and ask to speak to the person you’re connected to, and when you get through to them, use words similar to: 

“I connected to you on LinkedIn because I saw that someone from [their company name] came to our website looking at [what they looked at] and wondered if it may have been you?”.

That will normally be met with a brief silence followed by one of:

1. No, it wasn’t me.
2. Yes, it was me actually.

If it was them, then great, you can continue the dialogue.

It if wasn’t them, you have the opportunity to ask them something similar to:

“Oh, sorry, I didn’t want to bother you – it was just a guess based on your role within the business.  Would you happen to know who else there may have been interested in [what they looked at on the website]?”

That will give you another avenue or become a dead end.

Also, don’t be surprised if you sometimes experience complete denial that they or anyone else at the business would have been to your website.  It’s common for people not to know what their colleagues have been doing and also, if it WAS them that visited your website (but they don’t want to tell you that), they may be freaked out that someone had identified them, which will make them defensive.

 

Email

There are numerous ways to work out the email addresses of people that you’re connected with (or even not connected with) on LinkedIn.

We cover one method in our page about how to find the email address of someone who has visited your website.

The problem with email is that it’s so easily ignored or falls victim to spam filters.

But it’s worth experimenting with.

If, for example, you’ve identified that a company has visited your website and you’ve found five people (via LinkedIn) who would mostly likely have been the visitors, then it makes sense to email them (not all at the same time – one by one, assessing what responses you get).

The content of that email should be fairly brief and ideally, not too salesy.

Here’s an example of an email template that could be adapted:

Subject line: [Name] – following up on the [their company name] visit to us

Hi [Name],

I saw that someone from [their company name] came to our website [when they visited] and looked at our page(s) about [what they looked at].

As a proactive business that wants our website to be as good as it can be, I thought it may possibly have been you who visited us (based on your job role and what we provide)?

If it was you, and you have any feedback about our website (negative feedback in particular is welcome!) then I’d really appreciate if you had the time to feed that back to me?

If it wasn’t you who visited us, apologies for taking your time.   You’re not on any email list and I won’t contact you again, but if you felt it may have been someone else in your business who may have been interested in [what they looked at on the website], then I’d be very grateful if you could please pass this email onto them?

That type of approach is non-threatening, quite easy to use as a template, and more likely to get a response than if you email them trying to sell your products or services.

 

Letter

This works very similarly to the email method above but has an added advantage:

People don’t receive much in the post anymore, which means that you’re more likely to get their attention.

However, do bear in mind that in the post-covid world there will be people who rarely visit their business work location because of their new working patterns.

Having identified someone who may have been the person who visited your website, you can work out their address and send them a letter.

That letter would ideally be in a bright-coloured and hand-addressed envelope, with a real stamp (first class – you want them to feel important, not second class).  That will get more attention than other post received.

The content of that letter would vary, but would focus on the LinkedIn connection.  Here’s an example of the content of a letter …

Dear [Name],

I’m writing to you personally because I identified that someone from [their company name] visited our website on [date of visit] and looked at [what they looked at], as you can see below.

[paste a screenshot of their company website visit from A1WebStats, showing what they looked at page by page].

I connected with you on LinkedIn because your role seemed like a good match, and because no-one from [their company name] made contact with us, I thought you’d be in the best position to help me understand where we may have failed you via our website.

While we constantly try to make our website as good as it can be, we’re very open to all feedback that will help our potential customers to contact us when they’re impressed with what they see.

Of course, it may not have been you who came to our website – that was just me thinking it may have been.  If that’s the case then I’d really appreciate it if you could pass this letter onto a colleague that may have been interested in what we offer, hoping that I could get some feedback from them about how our website could have been improved?

I appreciate that I’m asking for some time of yourselves but we are passionate about the quality of what we provide as a business and want to ensure that our website matches that quality.

I’ve included my contact details below, including my LinkedIn page, which may be an easier way to interact, and I’m hopeful that you’ll be able to help a fellow [UK/US/where in the world] business to be seen as positively as we want to be.

Thank you for taking the time to read this [Name].