SpeedieConsulting

You spend lots of time, effort and probably money attracting people to your site. So what do you do about those that come in and leave straight away.

Do you just let them go? If you are, you are crazy. That would be like standing at the door of a shop and letting people stand at the door and look in and then hold the door for them as they leave with a big smile on your face!

What if I told you that you if you implemented a few simple strategies on your website you could monetise these visitors. In fact, you could earn an income from ANY visitor, even the time wasters! Have I peaked your interest yet?

Now before we go on, I must confess the techniques I will recommend will not sound fantastic, and in fact they are quite ordinary but I ask you to have an open mind.

In 2003, I introduced these techniques to one of the largest Finance Sites in the UK. In fact, most now use it in some way shape or form. They didn’t really like the idea but I was quite persuasive and had them try it for 30 days. In the first 30 days they added £135,637 in EXTRA revenue with no impact on their other business activity. They worked out if they had implemented it at the bigging of the year they would have earned over £1 million in income from people leaving their site.

In 2004, they did just that, and in 2005 and last year they made changes to the service and rolled in out on ALL their websites and the income they earned went stratospheric! And the beauty is the more they sent in the front door, the more they earned from the back door.

So what are we talking about?

The Trusty pop up window. Before you scoff and leave, my finance client above hated pop ups too! Until it added £1 million worth of income to his bottom line that is. They were convinced they would get thousands of complaints. But guess what they didn’t get one.

Why?

Because in this day and age if someone doesn’t like pop ups they will have popup killers and toolbars ready to pounce so they will not even see them, yet there are enough people out there that still like popups as they can see a benefit in what they offer.

But!

I’m not talking about delivering adverts via popups when people visit the site. No No No. This is what gives Popups a bad rap!

These are popups with a difference, in fact, they should be called exit consoles!

I’m suggesting that you look at your site traffic statistics and look at the section entitled “Exit pages”. This will show you where you are leaking traffic. On these web pages add some code to deliver a popunder so that if someone leaves through that page they get a relevant exit console.

For example, if the page they were on was about Credit Cards, you could deliver a credit card related Exit Console.

What you put in that popped up window is key! Don’t just put in a banner ad or a advertisement! Give them something of value or use.

Why are they leaving? Because they didn’t find what they were looking for. So help them do that. Give them options. Open with something like…

“Sorry you did not find what you were looking for.”

This shows them you are trying to help and gives the visitor the impression that the resources being delivered are recommended.

Secondly, brand it like your site but don’t open it as a full window. Create a mini branded console. This tells them where this window has come from.

In this window, you can do lots of things but in the main, you want to try and direct them back to your site, get them to leave an email address, or give them a phone number so they can call you.

In my example above, they sent these visitors to their competitors.

Yes that right, they send all this traffic to their competitors and got paid for it! They realised that these visitors were going off to other sites anyways so why not earn from that fact.

For every click through from their exit console, they earned an commission for the click itself, they didn’t even need to worry about the partner converting the traffic to sales.

There are other clients that used their Exit Console to carry out customer research, build a maiing list, offer exclusive deals, drove traffic to their call centres and genreally earn an income from people that were leaving their website.

So if you have a high traffic or medium traffic site you could be generating a revenue from those that are leaving your site.

Obviously there is a bit more to it than that. But this article was just to get your thinking about the possibilities.