Hello Bars

Use hello bars to convert visitors into customers & make return visitors feel welcome

What are hello bars?

Hello bars, sometimes referred to as welcome messages, are a powerful website personalisation technique that can be used for a variety of objectives, but generally as a way to boost visitor engagement, which in turn can help improve lead generation and increase your online sales.

They are effectively a subtle way to ensure you can present a personalised message depending on your visitor’s demographics, past experience, journey to your website etc.

Hello bars can be something as basic or simple as recognising and acknowledging these things, for example saying ‘Welcome back’ to return visitors, to the more complex targeting of individuals with very specific offers and messaging, talking them on an almost one-to-one basis.

Ultimately they are a way of personalising the visitors experience as you would attempt to do in a physical shop, travel agent, restaurant, hotel etc.

How to use hello bars

Hello bars can improve the effectiveness of your website by displaying the right message when a visitor lands on your page. Making the right impression with visitors makes them feel special, whether they are returning to your site for a second, third, fourth time, or just browsing for the first time.

Hello bars are often placed at the centre of the page usually just below the navigation to be prominent enough to immediately draw the attention of the visitor, without taking over the entire experience.

They should be impactful and stimulate interaction but it’s advisable to restrict hello bars to occasional use rather than on every single visit, or on every page (as is advised with exit intent messaging too), as the visitor soon ‘tunes out’ and the impact is then reduced.

What you can use hello bars for

As referred to above, a common use for hello bars it to simply acknowledge the visitor and maybe something about them that you know.

By importing your own historical, and real time, customer data you can promote relevant offers or content to customers based on their past browsing or purchase history. Alternatively, you can present them with hello bars which highlight your social media channels or ask them to sign up to your mailing list.

You can also use hello bars to make announcements or communicate with visitors on important things going on in your business, their location, or the wider world. For example, low stock notices, current delivery timescales to their region, or even updating on any relevant global incidents. This last one has always particularly useful in the travel industry, but also for many others too. Below are a few more specific examples.

  • Travel website hello bar example
  • Travel website hello bar example, alternative design

Travel Example

Welcome new visitors with promotional specials & selective offers for existing customers.

  • Retail website hello bar example
  • Retail website hello bar example, alternative design

Retail Example

Personalised offers for registered customers and promote specific offers based on gender.

  • Finance website hello bar example
  • Finance website hello bar example, alternative design

Finance Example

Remind registered visitors of last pages viewed & inform customers of service changes.

Hello bars with Webtrends Optimize

With Webtrends Optimize’s simple to use drag and drop segmentation tool you can set up the target audiences for your hello bars within seconds.

Take a look at this short video to see just how easy it is to do, whether you want to keep these audiences fairly broad or create lots of very specific demographic groups.

The video also shows some additional basic, but really effective examples.

Hello bars as part of your CRO strategy

As with all personalisation and website optimisation techniques the true power of CRO comes in combining these to maximise the impact on your conversions, your visitors experience and your website as a whole.

With Webtrends Optimize you get access to a whole host of tools and features. As standard. With no additional cost to access them. So, for example you can AB test different hello bars with different content, different audience segments etc. and quickly and easily understand what works best for your own customers, all from the one platform.

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Get in touch

Want to know more about hello bars, or how Webtrends Optimize can help your increase your conversion? Click below to send us a message or call us on 0333 444 5502.

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