A recent study on B2B site traffic patterns suggests that marketers shouldn’t just automatically turn off the lights when a holiday approaches.
Software selection guidance site SoftwareAdvice.com recently looked at site data collected over a five-year period, collected from more than six million unique visitors.
The site found that traffic in the week leading up to Christmas is fairly close to average for the December period in general, noted Derek Singleton, sales and marketing analyst for the site. “We find it pays to have about half of our sales team making calls,” he says. “There’s more opportunity there than you would expect and we find we can still get in touch with people before and immediately after Christmas.”
People who are making calls during this period likely have a higher purchase intent, and are leveraging the down time before the holiday to do research. They might not be immediately ready for a purchase but they are targeted traffic, says Singleton.
The site, which helps users narrow down their options for software purchases, tries to follow up with inquires to the site by phone within five seconds. There’s a 30% increase in the ability to qualify, if you can respond that quickly, he notes.
Of course, not every prospect should be followed up on immediately, he notes. It’s important to understand the nuances of your audience and realize that someone who just downloaded a whitepaper might get scared off by an immediate phone call.
Map to your own seasonal variations and trends,” he says, noting that from their experience, many B2B conversions happen in the first part of the day. “IF this is true for you, it would make sense then to have your sales team working at full capacity and plan your team meetings for later in the day.”
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