You’re probably wondering, is this even a thing?! Digital body language? Yep, it absolutely is! Your every move online contributes to your digital body language and it can completely alter the way you are targeted on every page of the internet.
When the concept of body language was first being thrown around, people were shocked to think about the vast amounts of information they were communicating unconsciously through their physical mannerisms and actions.
I want you to think about digital body language in the same way. Every single activity that is tracked online—the purchases we make online, the emails we open, the questions we ask Google, the social media pages we visit—creates data embedded with useful insights into you and your behaviour.
Let’s start by discussing how our digital body language affects our sales process. Once upon a time, the sales process depended on a salesperson putting their foot in your front door or addressing you in person in their shop. From the moment you walked into a store, the salesperson would consider your age; your gender; your present company; your attire; and your body language in approaching items in the store, and other salespeople as well.
Moving business online
You could argue that given the huge shift to doing business online, we’ve cut some of the best salespeople off from their bread and butter and have prevented them from having access to important cues such as body language that they used to convert sales. Instead, we have analytics and data collecting tools, which enable you to track visitors’ activity on any of the websites or platforms where your business has a presence (an ad, an online store, a social media page).
Current capabilities
These marketing tools are getting smarter, and they’re trying to read as much of your digital body language as can to give businesses and larger organisations like Google information about your online behaviour and tastes.
With these tools you can find out things like which page led a customer to your page or ad. You can check if they’ve previously visited your website, and how many pages of your website they are visiting. You can also retrieve information about their activity on social media such as if you’ve opened any emails that the business has sent you, and if you’ve submitted any forms to their website.
Businesses and creative agencies pass this information and other data through to the sales funnel to determine a lead score. This score is designed to help understand your engagement with the company, and prioritise your value as a prospective customer.
The value of heat maps
Delving deeper, what if I said that there is a way to know that your customers are unhappy before you got an influx of complaints? How’s that? Heat maps!
Heat tracking maps are a way to understand what your customers are mostly doing on your website. What’s working for them, and what isn’t? What is going unnoticed, maybe it’s too difficult for them to find.
Tracking tools
It’s a scary phenomenon, but there are tools out there that can and will record exactly what you’re doing on the website. Are you moving your cursor along the lines as you read? Are you exiting straight away? From the very first seconds of visiting a website, it’s being tracked.
These tracking tools are essentially a way of watching your customers beeline to particular products in your store. Or watching them wander around for ages with confusion on their faces, which in physical terms would indicate it’s probably time to approach them and ask if you can assist. But on the web, we don’t have that luxury, which is where a tracking tool comes in handy so that you can consistently improve your user journey. If you knew most people were looking for one item in particular—why would you not put it at the front of the store?!
All of these clever tracking and monitoring tools are for more than collecting data. Used strategically and understood well, it becomes more than just a way to understand more about your customers and reaches into the overall art of translating intention and following the funnel to reach your goals.
Samantha Tran is the Business Development Executive at MO WORKS CREATIVE AGENCY. Mo Works is a pro-digital, full service agency based in Docklands, Melbourne. Mo Works specialises in web design and development, logo and branding, marketing and search engine optimisation.
