Forum Moderators: DixonJones
After five minutes, a pop up from a fellow appeared, as a chat box, asking me if I needed any help. I quickly closed the site and I'm not sure if I'll ever return there again.
This was the first time that I saw such an aggressive way of converting idle site visitors into customers. The entrepreneur in me likes the idea and would like to replicate the experience with my own sites.
The Web surfer in me loathes it and think it is an invasion of my personal sphere. When I surf, I don't want to be interrupted and neither do I like the implications that they could send a pop up directly targeted to me.
Part of it is my fault. I was visiting a safe site which insisted on pop ups earlier, and forgot to block them after. It seems like for some reason, Java was still enabled, even though I block it all the time. Don't even remember when I enabled it (could it be when I got the new Firefox upgrade and it put back all values to default?)
I'd like to communicate with iddle visitors and let them know I'm here to improve conversion. But I don't know if people would find that intrusive or helpful. I really am on the fence on this issue. Yet I feel that if I don't do it, everybody will and I will be left behind.
What are your opinions on this issue. I didn't mention the privacy concerns, but that means that my computer was well identified and easy to target, if they could blow up a chat pop up on me. Scary
Personally, the nearer I am to purchasing something, the less intrusive I find this type of popup. If I'm a wavering shopper, then it could make the difference between me buying something and not doing so.
Conversely, if I'm just browsing for comparisons or something similar, I find this kind of thing intrusive and it's more likely to make me leave a site than be encouraged to buy something.
I guess my opinion would be that trying to make an intelligent guess about an individual visitor based on their referrer (i.e. what they searched for) ISP etc. would be the best way to use this.
But then, I don't like shop assistants asking to help me either - I often find them pushy and off-putting: if I want help I will ask for it. Naturally, whether people want this kind of 'help' will depend a lot on the individual and what they want.
Interesting way of identifying leads though. Now, I just need to know how to replicate their monitoring and perhaps test it. Does anyone know what kind of technology is involved in setting up such a system?
I guess, if I had gone beyond the index and actively surfed through the site, that could have marked me as a hot lead, but seeing how I just stayed on the main page for five minutes doing not interacting with the site, I wasn't a hot lead.
I doubt most sites that use this sort of system 'qualify' visitors before talking to them - from my (limited) experience of this anyone on the site is potentially a 'hot lead' ;)
