The number one question I get from clients is "How do I get more traffic to my site?" The general idea is that the more the better. I don't deny that generally, in the case of the web, more visits means more business. However, did you ever consider the possibility that more visits means more losses?

When you designed your website, your web designer failed to ask you a key question. He didn't ask you this question because he is a web developer, not a consultant or marketing person (typically). The question you should have considered when you built your website is "What if you (and believed) that every single person in your target market were going to be on your site."

It's February 16th. EVERY POTENTIAL CLIENT IS GOING TO SHOW UP ON YOUR WEBSITE'S DOORSTEP ON MARCH 1ST. If you were to take that seriously, you would be panicing. OMG - how am I going to deal with all those people? See how your mindset changes? And that is how I highlight the problem. How many people that visit your site fall through the cracks? Do you really want to increase traffic or do you want to make sure you capture and respond to everyone that does visit.

You need something more enticing than newsletters. You need to put your marketing hat on and figure out what exactly people in your target market are looking for. BUT...you don't just give it to them. You TRADE for their first name and email address. Then you let your drip campaigns do the rest. I've seen real estate agents with very creative use of MLS (using email reponse when new house targets are found). This is a good example. A good real estate agent should go beyond that. How about sitting down and really coming up with some truly responsive campaigns. How about school district comparisons. How about actual neighborhood surveys.

Let's assume you might be interested in technology associated with improving your web autoresponse capability. To give you an example of what I'm talking about, go to www.webresponsetools.com and act like you're interested. You will notice all of the opportunities on this website to ask for information. You will get it (and most of it is pretty good). The cool thing is that as long as you have edit access to your own site, these types of tools are available to anyone. It's a tragedy that they are not already built into your site. This particular site uses not only email as a response but also voice broadcast, snail mail and fax. There is an appropriate use for each. As you bounce around this site, you may in fact get a follow-up phone call from one of the sites sales reps. I will tell you ahead of time that very likely he/she knows what pages you spent time on, if you looked at the demo and the myriad of other things you may have done on the site. All of that information goes into your CRM tools so the salesperson knows what his client is interested. This is amazing to me to have this kind of tracking and followup capability. It seems ideal for real estate agents.

Marketing studies have shown that the average person follows up with prospect 3-4 times if that prospect doesn't respond. Similar studies also show that a prospects needs 7-9 contacts to feel comfortable enough to call or respond back. If you don't have a system in place to help you develop these prospects, it is entirely possible that they are going to someone else. So yeah! Optimize your website. Get more traffic. But make absolutely sure you are responding to the traffic you're getting. Otherwise, you're just another website. Nobody wins in mediocrity.