Why You Absolutely Must Keep In Touch With Your Website Visitors…
…And How To Do So
It is essential you keep in touch with your site visitors whatever industry or niche your business is in (whether it’s an online business or in the “real world”)…
…and it is essential you build a relationship with not only your customers but those people who visit your business and don’t buy.
It stands to reason that there will be a high percentage of people who are just browsing or simply don’t make a decision to buy immediately. Statistics suggest that only a maximum of 3% of website visitors actually buy.
That’s 97 out of every 100 visitors who will disappear never to be seen again.
“Do you have so many visitors to your site you can ignore 97% of them?”
Let’s go back to basics first.
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase:
THE MONEY IS IN THE LIST
unknown author (ab)used by many!
You can read below why I take exception to that phrase, but for now let’s assume it is correct.
Let me explain why I take exception to the term “the money is in the list”
Every business, no matter what industry, niche or product it provides, should be building a database (list) of both potential and actual customers names and email addresses.
Without that “list” you have absolutely no way of contacting those people who have already shown some interest (no matter how vague) in your business.
Bearing in mind most people are unlikely to ever return to your site and those that do need to be exposed to your offer around 7 times (on average) before they’ll take any action, you can see how vital it is you find a way to collect their contact information.
Of course, you can do this manually with hand written scraps of paper; sticky notes; collecting business cards; competitions; surveys – the list goes on BUT, this is extremely time consuming and fraught with danger since nothing is systemised.
The answer is to add a method to obtain your website visitors address automatically without any personal intervention. Put simply, you put an Optin Form on your website to collect email addresses as an absolute minimum.
In the good old days simply asking people to subscribe to your Newsletter may have worked as the “enticement” but there is now much greater reluctance to providing an email address without knowing “what’s in it for me”. And frankly, a Newsletter just doesn’t hack it!
You’re going to need something a little more valuable to your potential customers:
- A video tutorial
- A training series delivered by email over a number of days / weeks
- An e-book, a gift of some description that is relevant and has a perceived value
- Discount vouchers
- Anything you can conjure up that your site visitors see as a fair exchange for their email address
You’re now collecting email addresses but you need to do something with them!
The list building needs to be automated – as does the follow up.
UPDATE: This is just so brilliant
Thrive Content Builder now provides 2 step opt-in – just like Optin Links but totally customisable. I’ll be using that from now on. (Sean, superb update mate!)
