Net Marketing Tips Part 3

Lesson #3: A Simple Secret - YOU must contact your website visitors.

So let's assume you now have:

• an effective sales website set up
• effective sales pitch which motivates people to buy from you
• traffic coming in from search engines and word of mouth

Satisfied, you sit back, pull out your calculator, get your bank account info ready and wait for the sales to start rolling in.

What happens? Nothing. Nada. Zip. (Probably not quite that bad but nothing compared to the millions of pie-in-the-sky Rand you had expected and had already spent in your mind's eye)

Why are those website sales not flowing in?

Over the last few days I have had an excruciating headache which feels like it's slowly squeezing the fluid out of my brain stem. The reason I've shared the nature of my wellbeing is this (I promise there's a razor sharp point here so keep reading) - I needed to find info on a product a couple of days ago and visited quite a few websites dealing with the service I was looking for. I found about 10 websites dealing with the product I was interested in (all the while the Headache Hacker was merrily beating away at my brain). I briefly read through all 10 websites and liked what I saw on 6 of them.

I sat back and thought about which of them I wanted to buy from. I then decided that I needed Panado and would make the decision about buying later. So up I got, fed myself some Panados and sat back and thought pleasant thoughts about my beautiful wife (who probably wouldn't have approved of the many Panados I was indulging in :) ).

Now here's the crux: Which of the 6 websites did I return to later when I got round to buying the service?

The one that contacted me!

This morning the headache had eased somewhat and I went alooking again. Of course (and I would like to blame the headache) I had completely forgotten the names of all of the 6 websites that sold the service despite the fact that they had impressed me.

However, on one of the sites I was looking through they had offered a free e-book that instantly got emailed through to me on certain aspects of the product I was looking for. I had filled in my name and email address (please only fill in your email address where the company involved has a strict privacy policy and is easily contactable - else the horror of spam will infest your email inbox) and had received the e-book. Although I hadn't yet read the e-book, I was getting ready to go searching for it so I could see the name of the company and then lo and behold I received an email addressed to me from the company asking me if I had enjoyed the e-book and letting me know they were there if I had any questions about their service. BANG. There it was. Product sold to Mr. G Visser :)

Did I then remember the other 5 websites? Did I even go searching for them again? No on both counts. I bought the service from the website that contacted me.

Did the E-book sell me? No. So what did? The follow up email.

The one thing you need to understand is this simple secret most people forget:

Visitors won't buy your product straight away - You can't wait for them to contact you - you have to contact them!!

Stats show that you need to contact many prospects at least 7 times before they will buy from you. So how do you contact them - By email of course.

This is the key: Instead of sitting and hoping that your visitors will go out of their way to contact you or immediately purchase your product or service - You must try and collect your visitors' emails every time they visit your site so that you can contact them proactively!

So how do collect your site visitor's emails? Here is your action plan you need to institute:

ASK THEM FOR THEIR EMAIL ADDRESS!
Seems pretty obvious but do you have any form or any other email capture device on your site? They won't give you their email address if you don't ask. And they usually won't give you their addresses unless they are motivated to do so. Below are some ideas on how to do this:

Action Plan Ideas:
(Remember the more that's in it for the visitor the more likely they will give you a contact email address)

1. Ask them whether they want you to contact them - Simply put a form on your site saying something like: "Please fill in your email address here and we will contact you to find out exactly how we can help you (this works very well with asking for Phone numbers as well). This is not too effective simply because the visitor doesn't get much out.
   
   
2. New Content Notification - Offer to send them an email to let them know when you've updated the content from your site - probably the least effective method.
   
3. Free Reports and E-books - This is a great way to collect details of highly targeted prospects. Make sure that what you are writing is in fact informative and does relate somewhat to the product / service you are selling. This will ensure that the people signing up are interested in your product. However, don't fall into the trap of writing an E-book that is simply a sales letter for your product. Give them valuable information!
   
   
4. Free E-zine / Newsletter - offer a Newsletter and send it out on a monthly / weekly basis. This is a great way of reminding your subscribers of your website and products. With compelling content your newsletters will draw subscribers to your website again and again
   
5. Competitions / Surveys - prospects will generally enter competitions if there is a great prize to be one. Alternately you can reward people for completing surveys regarding your website, products etc with the potential of winning a prize for their effort.

This lesson has been pretty long and I suspect that that 12th cup of coffee has become the 13th so I will close off with the following:

Spend some time thinking about the visitors that come to your site. They are very very very (and a few more very's) precious. They have come to your site for a reason. They are interested in what you offer. However, many of them are not quite ready to buy yet - They are either planning to do some more research about your offering or they are only planning to buy at some point in the future.

What are you going to do about it?

What most of us do is hope for the best and wait for them to come to our website again. I reckon that happens 1 in 50 times if we're lucky. Most won't return even if they like your product because in today's society we suffer from information overload and forget most of the things we see every given day.

What you have to do right now is:

Go through the action plan above and set up your chosen plan on your website to encourage people to give you their contact details. Then follow up with personal emails reminding them why they need what you offer. That way they won't forget about you :)

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