How to Improve Communication and Capture your Members' Attention, Drive Traffic Back to your Website while Increasing your Organisation's Awareness!

As sure as 'death and taxes' eventually all visitors to your website will leave... so what do you do with this 'exit' traffic? Like most organisations you most likely do not even consider it or even realise that you can do something with it.

Like all organisations with a website, you spend an ever-increasing amount of resources, time and money on a variety of marketing campaigns to drive traffic to your website, but have you ever considered how you could increase the 'stickiness' of this traffic and ensure that they come back time and time again and engage more with you? The answer, sadly, is most likely not because most organisations focus on driving traffic and engaging the traffic as much as possible once they are on the website, but in reality the vast majority of these visitors are not in 'buy mode' at this point in time and are most likely just checking you out or researching your offering in the market. They could also be comparing your competition as well.

Let's face it, a website is a great way for users to research you and the products and services that you offer, and for commercial businesses this is such an important part of their sales cycle. However, associations are presented with a different issue which is that they must attract, retain and add value to members all year round and this can be a challenge online without fully understanding the tools available to assist you.

"Invaluable marketing and branding and it provides useful statistics for our media and communication strategies" - Benjamin Wash, CEO, Queensland Taxi Council

For example, you have a website for your association/organisation, and like most sites you offer a range of information, articles, resources, events etc to your members and you are trying to sell value to general visitors, in the hope that they will show more interest and sign up. You also have Analytics installed so you can see how many visitors you have, how many are unique, what the bounce rate is, where they are coming from and a host of other reports you can run to understand your traffic better. But what happens when they leave your website? "We cannot control that or force them to stay" I hear you say. The reality is that you can control it but you just need to understand how!

So let me explain further. As we already know visitors to your website will eventually leave but when they do, you can track them as they move around the internet on a whole host of very known websites (over a million) and you have further opportunities to present your brand to them again in a visual sense and also include an offer or 'grab' to entice them to come back to your site. "Isn't that a bit like cyber-stalking?" you ask. Well no, because you don't know which sites they will visit and you cannot control these actions, however, you can present your brand to them on a regular basis. OK, here's what we can do, we can set up a campaign that tracks every visitor who leaves your website and add a 'digital fingerprint' or 'cookie' to their browser. This in turn allows us to track them with a variety of branding messages, or offers and promotions, depending on your specific requirements. Once they leave your website and go to external sites such as Yahoo, Drive, Domain, SMH, The Australian, eBay, LinkedIn, YouTube, Sky News, CNN (to mention just a few) your brand message could appear and be in front of that audience again and again.

How it Works:

A new visitor comes to your website, has a good look around as they are also in your industry and may be interested in becoming a member or using your services. They spend a few minutes on the site before leaving. As soon as they leave we activate a 'cookie' then, depending on which sites they then visit, they could see your brand message or promotion. Over a period of time they will be thinking that you are everywhere so you must be doing a good job, This perception encourages them to return to the site and join as a member.
 
Example 2:

You have a visitor on your website who is looking through the events that you offer; they view a particular event in Sydney on 22 September but do not book; they then leave the website. When they leave we can add a cookie that knows which page they left from, and then we can track them and present a message that is more specific, relate it to the event they were interested in on 22 September, and even offer a special discount if they book today or similar.

Just imagine the power of this type of marketing/brand awareness to both members and potential members alike. You can even run a campaign just for members that only tracks members logged into your website. The message you may wish to portray could be related to a member-only survey or poll that you are running, or an upcoming conference. The choices and opportunities are endless and the biggest benefit of this type of advertising is that you are only advertising to people who have already shown an interest in your offerings. That is a massive paradigm shift from traditional 'shotgun' type marketing where you advertise to all while knowing that only a small percentage will ever be interested - which costs a fortune and reaps very small rewards for your $!

The product is called AdFollow and that's exactly what it does, presents personalised visual messages to previous site visitors to assist in re-engagement of traffic over time. To see AdFollow in action you don't have to do anything as now you have visited the Member Evolution website we will present adverts to you on other websites and hopefully it may in time bring you back to our website!