Using digital communications to improve conversions in the public sector

Despite good intentions, many public sector organizations fall short when it comes to converting their audience. Some organizations excel in high-level functions like attracting and engaging customers, but struggle with bottom-of-the-funnel actions like customer conversions and renewals. While it’s great to have organizational awareness, at the end of the day your agency success comes down to getting people to perform actions.

Within the public sector, there are two ways to define a conversion.

• Align a product to convert customers online through email, web marketing, social, or mobile communications
• Get your audience to perform downstream actions

All About Audience

Those who successfully create conversions are experts in leveraging audience behavior and insight to trigger personalized and targeted digital communications. After identifying an audience’s demographics and defining the subsets into personas, take it a step further to create behavior-based marketing from psychographic research. By gleaning audience insight, you get one step ahead and can deliver messages that resonate in a channel that is convenient for your audience.

Conversions in the Public Sector

While private sector organizations worry about the customer experience because of their financial bottom line, the public sector has a different goal: to inspire action through engaging customers with life-changing or life-saving information. The private sector (especially e-commerce companies) defines a conversion as the act of converting a potential customer into a paying customer.

The public sector is different. While the bottom line is not always the top concern in the public sector, conversions equate to having a public who is actively engaged with the programs and services you provide.

How to Establish Conversion Goals

You know that conversions are important, but where do you start? Measure conversions by benchmarking performance metrics like quantifiable goals and objectives. These organizational performance metrics provide a purpose toward which all endeavors are directed, and through conversion analytics you can uncover how your communications are performing, what action is taken, and how much of your public is taking those actions.

Many organizations “shoot from the hip” and execute communication tactics without any goal. And, worse, they do not establish conversion goals prior to a campaign. Success comes from a clear view of what you’re measuring. People who define marketing through metrics make mindful, goal-centric choices about how they communicate to an audience.

Conversion goals help define, clarify, and analyze your marketing efforts, and test the best method and message. Above all else, they set a baseline for your organization to benchmark results.

If you’re struggling with how to track conversion goals, Google Analytics is a good starting point. Additionally, proprietary platforms like GovDelivery have the technology to create touch points to move customers through the funnel, resulting in increased conversions.

And, if you’re engaging customers with offline actions, get offline data and map it back to the messages used to drive those actions. There are many ways to do this, and GovDelivery clients can tap into our Digital Engagement Services experts to provide strategy and insight into public sector best practices that help map offline actions to digital communications.

Stay tuned later this week for more on ways to convert your public sector audience.