Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

Some organisations focus almost entirely on their website as the main means of communication with contacts to the exclusion of other channels, particularly email marketing. There are two dangers to this - it assumes either that users will visit the organisation's website of their own volition if they have visited before; or that they will find the site from Google searches if they haven't visited before.

One of the sites I visit regularly is the British Computer Society website - I'm a member of the BCS. The vast majority of my visits come from emails, generally to read blog posts, book reviews and event details. This points to three great ways of driving traffic to your website:

• Email, particularly email newsletters
• RSS feeds - for blog posts, articles, etc
• Social media

There is also another dimension to this - personalisation. Personalisation of emails, making the emails relevant to the individual user, will lead to them reading the emails more often and will also increase the click-through rate to the website. And personalisation of the website will lead to more pages being viewed per visit.

Personalisation requires storing the user's interests and preferences - normally in a CRM - to generate the personalised emails and control the personalised website content. The sources of information for the CRM can be a combination of user preferences (that they enter on the website); the website pages they visit; and the click-throughs from the emails, RSS feeds and social media.

Multichannel contact management can be good value for money. Assuming that there is already a website CMS in place and a CRM, there are no new systems to buy. It is a matter of using these existing systems more effectively and in an integrated way.