by: David Bell
It is amazing that so much time goes into building great looking websites, promoting them, yet most webmasters pay little attention to how their visitors will actually use them. You could be throwing profits away, if you don't pay attention to entry and exit strategies - that is, looking at how your visitors enter, walk through and leave your site, and how you can steer their course to increase your profits.
Let's look at entry strategies first. Where can visitors enter your site? Check your wesbite statistics for more information (you are doing this anyway, aren't you?). Often, many visitors enter through a "side door" unintentionally left open. By this we mean they enter at a page, which was not designed to be an entry page, and they are left floundering around lost, not knowing where to go next, a bit like wandering into an office building through an open fire escape door!
This often happens because of search engine indexing, where a keyword rich page gets an unintended good ranking. Remember, any page can become an entry page (unless you use the Meta robots tag to avoid indexing), so ensure visitors who appear in the wrong place are efficiently & easily lead to the "front reception".
Once in, what do you want your customers to do? Read content and gain exposure to advertising? Read sales copy and make a purchase? Sign up for a newsletter/ezine? Often, it's a combination, so make sure it's not all screaming for their attention at once. A visitor who becomes overwhelmed, will soon dash out the door!
Lead them through, one thing at a time. I particularly cannot understand websites, which, as soon as you enter, request your email address, via a pop up box, and I suspect many others feel the same. I like to get a feel for a site first, experience their subject matter and see if their expertise fits with what I'm after, before I sign up for a newsletter, or other communication. So, lead them through, reassuring them that you can be of great assistance, becoming their friend, stating the advantages of keeping in touch , before gently requesting their details.
Now to exit strategies - I see many puzzled faces here! Like it or not, every visitor is destined to leave your site. They can do one of two things :
1) Stop surfing and go and do something else
2) Continue surfing and visit another website.
You can influence them in both instances. By channelling them to a partner site, via a banner or an affiliate link, you can profit. You must do it at a logical point identify the points where customers are likely to leave, and provide an "emergency exit" for them. Analyse your own "surfing" habits, and those of your friends and colleagues.
For instance, if I'm visiting a website which I find is not for me, I always subconsciously scroll down to the bottom of the page before I leave. I don't know why - perhaps it's because I don't want to feel I'm missing out on something they could be giving away $20 bills at the bottom you never know! One or two attention arousing links to affiliated sites could be placed tastefully there, tempting a "lost" customer to visit and perhaps earn you some commission through an affiliate scheme.
What about purchasers? Where do they leave? Most usually through an order confirmation page, where there's only a link "back to home". Well, let me point out that people usually purchase after they've gleaned all the information they can from your site to make their decision. They've decided what they want and purchased it.Why would they go back immediately? Give them a place to go links to affiliate sites of related interest. Make the links provocative; arouse their curiosity to click through. Text links are usually more effective than banners, particularly when they are in the form of an endorsement or personal recommendations.
In short, analyse where your visitors go and are likely to go. Ensure visitors entering through "side doors", get speedily directed to the reception foyer. Position strategically placed "emergency exits" which lead to partner sites. Join some affiliate schemes, do some joint venture deals, and get profiting from those "lost" customers that leave your site.
I hope this helps in your future marketing decisions.