Going fishing -- hooking Web page visitors and turning them into customers

by Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.samizdat.com

This article was heard on the radio program "The Computer Report," which is broadcast live on WCAP in Lowell, Mass., and is syndicated on WBNW in Boston and WPLM in Plymouth, Mass, and is also available as RealAudio at www.thereport.com

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As an experiment I just added HumanClick links to the page at my Web site that describes my consulting business www.samizdat.com/consult.html

If you depend on your Web site to bring you customers, consider using Human Click www.humanclick.com. To see it in action, go to my marketing page www.samizdat.com/consult.html There you'll see a HumanClick icon. Click on it and if I happen to be online at that time, we can hold a live chat with one another.

The software (which runs on your PC) is free for now. You designate which page(s) you want covered. Whenever someone goes to that page, a bell goes off on your PC. At that point you can prompt the visitor to chat. If someone asks to chat, another bell goes off.

You see info about visitors, live -- e.g., if they came from a search engine, you even see what they were looking for.

You can use their management capabilities to set up so different people cover different pages, etc.

I've found it a very effective way to turn visitors into leads and customers.

Normally visitors see Web pages, and the business that owns those pages only finds out about it after the fact --

With HumanClick, I'm alerted that someone is at my page, and I can prompt them to chat with me right then.

The point is that there is an enormous difference between an experience where the customer (unbeknownst to the vendor) picks up and looks at goods and messages, and one where the store people are aware of what the customers are looking at and can intervene.

In the old environment, you only had a lead if someone registered, or filled out a form, or initiated a transaction, or sent an email. And you had to depend on the prepackaged content at your site to intrigue them and motivate them to do something.

In the new environment, every page view/visit is a nibble, and your people can immediately engage visitors in text chat to get them to nibble more, and eventually to hook them.

My HumanClick chats have very much been fishing expeditions, and in the best cases, I've hooked people, who if they were just looking at the static Web page would probably have moved on without contacting me. And, in any case, I've had very interesting and informative conversations with people from all over the world. Give it a try.



Unfortunately, in September 2001, HumanClick decided to self-destruct. They eliminated their free service and tried to get people to pay $249/year. I just eliminated HumanClick from my pages. Although this is a very useful app, that price is way out of line. It will be sad to see them go under.

I'm now experimenting with a similar service from SiteChatter www.sitechatter.com.  You put a brief piece of code on whatever of your pages that you choose, and visitors to those pages can, with a click, initiate a private chat session with you. This is a convenient way for you to answer the questions of customers interested in buying your products or for providing post-sales support. The setup is easy (takes about 15 minutes), and the cost is just $10 a month. I just added SiteChatter links to my consulting page www.samizdat.com/consult.html and to every page at my online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat (It works fine with Yahoo stores.)



See the sequel (about my further experiences with Sitechatter.)


Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com

This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com


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