Imagine this, you have done up a great website for your business. Firstly, it is very well-designed and you have also provided great resources for your visitors. All these would have ensured a great user experience, however you left out the capability to stay connected with your website visitors.
If you had managed to create a great web experience, chances are, visitors would want to revisit the site, but problems arise when they do not know when will be the next update, and in time when they revisit the website to find that it’s not updated; they might eventually lose interest in your website.
The most viable way would be by putting up a notification on the main page of the website and that’s also provided that they actually re-visit the website on a regular basis to notice the new update. The worst thing that can happen is a change of web address. In an instance, anyone who has bookmarked or have the website in their browser history would have lost their connection to the site. There are still search engines, but that’s assuming the visitors would go through the extent to search for the site in the first place.
The good news is there are actually plenty of solutions which could help you effectively stay connected with visitors to your website. Below are some practical examples in which you could explore.
Mailing list
One of the most conventional ways to connect with visitors would be requesting them to register and subscribe to a mailing list. Upon registering with their emails, updates would then be easily sent to them via email.
RSS Feeds
RSS Feeds or “Rich Site Summary” Feeds help to deliver updates to the website visitors. This is especially useful if yours is a website that regularly changes content. So instead of having to revisit the site to check out updates, visitors would just need to subscribe to RSS feeds and they would have the luxury of being automatically notified when there are new updates to the website. Subscribers can choose from a variety of ways to receive their feeds, they can either choose to receive it on a RSS reader such as Google Reader or even have the feeds sent to their emails.
Leverage on Social Networking
Leveraging on social networking would be considered the most robust way in terms of staying connected. Upon creating a profile, it could then be linked to the main website.
This would allow visitors the option to either become a fan on Facebook, follower on Twitter, etc. In recent developments, A Facebook “Like” could even be integrated within the main website and visitors could instantly become fans without having to leave the website.
The advantages of having a social networking profile are that it not only allows gathering and identification of visitors in the form of Fans or Followers (provided if they decide to join your Social Networking group), it also helps to effectively facilitate 2-way communication.
In the case of any new updates, you could easily post them on your social networking profile and moreover it provides a platform in which fans/followers can easily give their feedback or comment and also the chance for you to engage them personally.
Moving forward to a new era in web advancement, it is of utmost importance that your corporate website is capable of two way communication i.e ability to connect with your visitors, failing to do so might result in you trailing behind your competitors.