Website Visit Increase
Brian Berg/BB Direct – brianberg@bbdirect.com
I recently received 16 visits to our website from one telemarketing call. Here’s what happened.
First, BB Direct uses Live Person as our chat tool on www.bbdirect.com, our primary corporate website. With this tool, we’re not only able to chat with visitors on our site, but the service also allows us to view who visits our site, how they found us, how much time they spend on what pages they visit and so on. The details of who the visitors are are sketchy at best, i.e., ip address, city and county, and the browser they use. On occasion, if the organization is large enough, their business domain page is also displayed.
Last week I peeked at a visitor profile previewing our site. Without mentioning names, I noticed it was someone from a prominent ad agency looking at some of our e-marketing pages. I initiated an invite to chat of this visit but they were uninterested. After a few minutes I decided to make a friendly telephone call to this agency and ask for the individual who might handle the e-marketing services. I explained to the receptionist that someone from there organization was visiting our site and I was hoping to reach out to them. She told me that their agency has many possible individuals working in the e-marketing capacity, but offered to send an “all persons” email to the company to ask who might be searching our site at that moment.
(I’d like to say at this point that I don’t normally call a company who is on our site but doesn’t respond to my chat invitation. If someone doesn’t want to chat, why would they want to take my call? I called this agency only because we work with many agencies and this particular one was on my radar.)
Back to the story…. After a minute or so, the receptionist explained that no one responded to her “all persons” email and we ended our call. What happened next was interesting. As I viewed the same visitor who was still crawling through our site, I got another visitor from this agency, then another, and then another. At one point I had 16 visitors from this agency on our site at one time. Then it occurred to me, the “all persons” email sent out by this one receptionist included a link to www.bbdirect.com. Many of the agency employees read the email and connected to the site. Throughout the day I had other visitors from this agency but I cannot tell if they were new visitors or repeat visitors.
This example begs the question, what can you include in your emails that would invite viral sharing? And how can you initiate a viral email campaign into your telemarketing campaign. An email that’s been sent to us by someone we know is given far more attention that one that is sent otherwise. Never underestimate the value of your emails. Always include a link to your website, and if you’re talking to your customer or prospect about an email that you sent them, ask that they share it as the content may be of value to others.
Now, email a link to this blog post to 10 people (preferably those with the master list of all employees within your company) within 5 minutes you’ll have extremely good luck for one year. 
And, of course, thanks for sharing!
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