At the recent Renewd Summit, I had the pleasure of leading a roundtable discussion on the customer journey and engagement. The two sessions with fellow publishing professionals helped me to clarify some ideas on how to engage web visitors. Here are some of my takeaways from those discussions.
Many customer engagement efforts start with trying to get website visitors to sign up for a free email newsletter. Then they focus on the content of the newsletter — how to get more engagement from the newsletter, and maybe how to sell something.
That’s great, but I believe it fails to start at the beginning, and because of this it overlooks the vast majority of a company’s website traffic.
Most visitors to most websites are drive-bys. They view one page and they’re gone. They’re not going to sign up for your email newsletter. They’re not even going to read a second article. This means that the “sign up for my free email newsletter” engagement strategy is missing the vast majority of your visitors.
Q: How do you engage these drive-bys?
A: You don’t.
Your best strategy for these visitors might be to forget about engagement and maximize your ad revenue. Use as much space as you can to get that precious 0.1 cents, which adds up when you have lots of traffic.
In other words, stop trying to get them to do what they’re not going to do.
The next, much smaller group of visitors, is made up of the people who have stayed for a second pageview (or have come back within a relatively small window of time). For these people, dial back the ads a little and focus on content recommendations. Your customer journey for this group is to encourage them to read a couple more articles.
Then, once someone has read a few articles and shown that they like your content, they might be a prospect for your email newsletter. But probably not before. (You can test that, if you like. And if you do, please tell me what you find. My prediction is that email newsletter sign-ups are much higher for people who have read a few articles.)
If you have the technology to count pageviews per session, you can use it in your copy. E.g., “Hi friend. It’s obvious you like our content. We’re happy to send it to you for free. Sign up now.”
But what if we don’t have the tech?
Unfortunately, as one of my roundtable participants pointed out, this level of precision requires some technology that many companies don’t have, and can’t afford. I took that as a challenge and tried to think of low-tech ways to mimic this sort of strategy.
Here’s what I came up with.
When a web browser requests a page from your server, it sends something called an http header, which you can easily read with php or whatever programming language you use on your site. That header includes something called a referrer, which is the site the visitor just came from.
To roughly approximate the customer journey suggestions above, have your IT guy write a simple script to replace the email newsletter sign-up form with an ad when the referrer is some other website, and only show it when the referrer is your own website. That is, when the visitor is on a second (or later) pageview.
That’s not an ideal solution, but it does allow you to maximize your ad exposure for drive-by visitors. And that’s not nothing.
