Not all webmasters realise the power and potential of capturing the contact details of their visitors.

Unfortunately in the real world this is quite a rare situation and the reality is that when a visitor clicks through to your site you actually only have a very short timeframe to direct them to what they are looking for, or to point out something else to them that will make them stick around on your site.

If the page that your visitor has clicked through to is not giving them the information they are searching for and you do not present them with something else that captures their interest then they will click straight back out of your site and go to the next result in the search engines and you can wave goodbye to another prospective customer.

Take a look at your stats and see how many visitors are only on your site for a short length or only visit one page before exiting your site. You should be making every effort to make the most of this wasted traffic and convert it into valuable traffic.

This is why it is so important to try and capture the email addresses of your visitors so that you can remarket to your dead traffic and try and encourage them to return to your site by pointing out content / features of your site that may be of interest to them.

So how do you capture this vital email address of your visitor after all this kind of personal information is usually closely guarded by most people and you only have a matter of seconds to extract this out of your visitor before they leave your site.

Well, you need to offer them something that is targeted and is of interest to them, and you need to ensure that this offer is in a prominent position on every page of your website so that no matter which page your visitor enters your site via they see this offer and it captures their attention before they click on the back button and exit your site.

For example on the Poker Professor website the first thing a visitor sees in the top left corner of every page is an offer “Subscribe now to our Poker Strategy Newsletter and receive this free report “10 Critical Texas Holdem Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.”

This is offering something targeted to our visitors and something that hopefully captures their attention and encourages them to enter their email address to receive this free report.

You have to make it very easy for them to give you their email address as well. All they have to do is enter their email address and name on that same page and click submit which takes little more than a few seconds effort.

So the first thing you are going to do is send out the free information report that the visitor originally signed up for, and it’s important to make this quality content as you need to make a good first impression for your site and the kind of content it offers.

The key to this initial contact is to ensure that quietly throughout the initial report that you point out the benefits of your site and make a case for your visitor to re-visit. Going back to the earlier example at the Poker Professor website we send out a free report called “10 Critical Texas Holdem Mistakes and How to Avoid Them”. Now of course during that report for each “mistake” and “solution” we point out parts of the Poker Professor website that will give them more information on that particular solution and hopefully directing them back to re-visit our website.

It doesn’t stop here however. Most studies have shown that it can take up to seven email messages or more before a prospective customer makes a purchase or takes the action you are trying to get them to do (such as sign up to a poker room). You need to follow up with each lead multiple times and at set intervals.

So a couple of days after sending the initial contact email you should be sending a further email with a short message saying something along the lines of “I hope you liked the information we sent to you the other day. If you did there is plenty of similar helpful information on our website.” Then a few days later a third message saying “Did you know about this tool / feature on our website which you may find useful” and so on.

You can customise your follow up message sequence to fit in with your site and what it offers, but you get the idea that what you are trying to do is point out the various key features / information that your website offers and offering plenty of opportunities for them to re-visit your site.

Hopefully you can now really see the benefits of this subject. Previously you had a visitor who came to your site and only saw one particular page of your website, decided it wasn’t what they were looking for, and left your site never to return. Now, you have a visitor that has come to your site and seen one small part of your site, but then subsequently has had the full benefits of all the other parts of your site explained to him, so that if there is anything of interest to them they will return and will no longer be a lost visitor.

Automating the Process

I’m sure your thinking that having to send out an email to each person who opts-in to your list every few days / weeks would take masses of time, and to all but the smallest webmaster it would take up too much valuable time to do this manually.

On Poker Professor we use a service called Aweber which is an online tool which captures the email addresses of our visitors when they opt in, and then sends the emails out automatically from the list of follow up messages that have been setup by us at the set intervals we have stipulated.

It basically means we don’t have to worry about our opt in list and the follow up messages at all apart from the initial setup of the message queue and intervals and the occasional custom mailer sent out to our opt in list letting them know of a special offer or event we have running.

What really helps our conversions as well is the way that Aweber can personalise each email with the visitors name and address all emails “Dear Bob” or make the subject line “Bob, here is your free poker report you requested” which helps to make your email stand out from the masses of SPAM that “Bob” receives in his inbox and increase the chance that your email will actually be read.

We have found that the monthly cost of this service is far outweighed by the increase in both return visitors and revenue generated from this previously wasted traffic.

So many potential customers are being lost by wasted “bounced” traffic and your website can really benefit from the small efforts involved in converting those dead visitors into valuable customers.

Adrian Milewski is a member at PAW as well as webmaster over at The Poker Professor website which is an online resource to Learn Internet Poker Strategy.