Building Stakeholder Relationships via Web Communications

By Lucas Pillman, Implementation Consultant

For most public sector organizations, just having a website is not enough when it comes to engaging stakeholders and increasing stakeholder satisfaction. Government communicators need to be constantly driving traffic to that website through multiple channels so that their mission-driven content is consistently being engaged with and used by stakeholders.

One way to ensure that stakeholders are engaging with your organization’s website is by connecting your email and website communications to increase both your website visits as well as email subscribers.

How can you do that?

Take a moment to think about how most people access your organization’s digital information for the first time. Most people start with a search at a search engine or a link from another website. They visit your site. At this crossroads you have the opportunity to capture them as email subscribers so that you can engage them again in the future, rather than risk the fact they may never find themselves at your website again.

It is important to be proactive in getting your Web visitors to subscribe to your communications. One of the best tools to engage more stakeholders and turn them into consistent subscribers is with a website overlay: a simple, understated light window box that allows you to capture contact information from your website visitors.

Once a Web visitor subscribes to your content and turns into an email subscriber, you can send them emails with links to website updates, encouraging subscribers to continue to come back to your website, building a relationship between you and your stakeholder.

Now that we have established what this process looks like, let’s highlight the key pieces your organization needs to make it work.

1. You need to make sure that you are aggressively capturing your email subscribers on your website. Think overlays, an email subscribe buttons next to your social media icons, and a banner image or other content letting visitors know they can subscribe to receive regular updates from you. Don’t lose the chance to convert a visit into a long term email subscription relationship.
2. You’re putting the effort into making your government website useful and engaging for your audience, so don’t forget to link back to your website within your emails. Your emails will be shorter and easier to digest when you can easily direct subscribers back to the full-length version of the great content you are creating on your site.
3. Finally, make sure that you are archiving your email messages on your website. New, consistent, and original content that most emails contain is pure gold for improving your ranking on search engines like Google. GovDelivery helps clients automate this process so it takes no additional steps each time you send an email.

Check out this blog post on implementing an overlay for more information on connecting your website and emails for successful stakeholder relationship building. Email us at [email protected] if you have questions!