Secret #6 - Pull Them Back

How many seconds does a visitor stay on your website?

Studies suggest visitors only stay on a website less than 10 seconds on average. That does not give you much time to build a relationship.

One of the best ways you can create a lasting impact with a visitor is by creating an ongoing relationship with an eNewsletter or eMagazine. From the moment someone lands on your webpage, you can actively encourage them to sign up for an eNewsletter or eMagazine. These ePublishing tools often reside on your website and also go out through email. This acts as a reminder to the recipient and pulls them back in to see what is new. If done properly, they will have links to pages on your site and traffic will go up significantly for a few days after publication.

What are the benefits?

Increase Website Traffic
Reminder – Brand Freshness
Quick, cost effective mass interaction
Easily track results and resonance of message
Additional content on website

Many of these tools track opens when possible. If your email publishing system tracks clicks, you will be able to see which articles and links are most popular with recipients as well.

If you make an email publication, such as an eNewsletter or eMagazine, focused on useful information and providing some value to the subscribers, your ePublication will be an important part of your online success strategy.

If your have an organization that cannot produce enough quality articles specifically about itself, take a broader approach. Build an ePublication around something like inspiration, small business advice, supply chain optimization, whatever is a broad topic that you could write articles about and work in some things about your organization.

Another great use for this kind of publication is that you can ask each person when you meet them if they would like to be signed up for your eMagazine. If they say yes, you can enter them into your list and they will get the next publication. This means many more people that might have taken your card and forgot about you will end up on your website.

RSS – Let them do the pulling

Another very effective way to create a longer lasting interaction with a website visitor is to get them to subscribe to your RSS feeds. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. In short, this is a way that some users can subscribe to a feed of information from your website or blog and only get information when there is a change. It is most common with blogs, but can be used on any element in a website, including newsrooms, article repositories, enewsletters, etc.

Blogs remain the most common form of creating RSS feeds. When someone subscribes to your blog RSS feed, they will see when updates happen and be able to read them at their leisure. You can measure the number of people subscribing to your RSS which will give you an idea of how much people value your content.

Whether using email or RSS, your site must have quality information in it so that these visitors will take the time to stop and give you permission to push content out to them and try to pull them back into your website in the future.

Once you get them hooked on the valuable information you create, you need to start identifying the best candidates and working on conversion.