Upon visitor leaving site, make pop up screen to send email

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Upon visitor leaving site, make pop up screen to send email

Duke_Will

I don't know if this is a lame idea or what but seems to me, a huge amount of visitors to a site where they do, in fact, gain value by reading, once they click away, they are gone forever. Everybody gets information overload and it's hard to always know a site you visited. But, weeks later, you might want to go there again. If you had an email in your email inbox from the site, you could more easily find it. So, why not have something like this.

A visitor clicks away from a page. Another pages comes up and says "Sorry to see you go. Would you like for us to send you an email right now so that you have our website name in your email inbox?" And they would then fill in the box with their email address. You would want it to be such that it would only ask them this question once, if possible, else they would get the page every time they navigated away from a page.

Let me know what you think and how it could be done. I am not a php programmer but I have modified some scripts. Is there a script for this?

ssdog

Well, why don't you implement something like a newsletter, so users would subscribe to your newsletter and receive weekly or daily the newest articles?
My personal opinion is that pop-ups are really annoying, and most users disable them from browser's settings.

root

Sorry to say that "Pop up" idea is an annoyance to web visitors.

If you have a visitor and your site is not what they are looking for, how annoying is it that you get prevented from going when the site offers nothing for you?

Simply put, if you can't say in your site what you need to say, why on earth do you want to be the equivalent of a desperate shop keeper hanging on to the coat tails of the customer pleading for them not to leave?

You are better off not alienating existing and repeat visitors and those who just want to leave.

Duke_Will

\\.\;1274407 wrote:
Sorry to say that "Pop up" idea is an annoyance to web visitors.

If you have a visitor and your site is not what they are looking for, how annoying is it that you get prevented from going when the site offers nothing for you?

Simply put, if you can't say in your site what you need to say, why on earth do you want to be the equivalent of a desperate shop keeper hanging on to the coat tails of the customer pleading for them not to leave?

You are better off not alienating existing and repeat visitors and those who just want to leave.

Because my niche is such that for many visitors, it is highly unlikely he will make a decision the first visit. Secondly, because my niche is composed of a very large percentage of people who are typically older in age and not tech-savvy and therefore, there is a high risk they will not find my particular site again. It has to do with their financial situation. And I note that in that industry, for websites that make an audio/slide presentation (using Camtasia or similar), just about every single one of them employ a popup that says "Wait, are you sure you wish to leave the page?" It then gives a choice of "leaving the page" and "staying on the page." That latter provides them a static page, rather than an audio/slide presentation. My site is static to begin with, it's not an audio/slide presentation, so, this is a bit different. I am just wanting to not lose them to time. They may not remember me a week or a month from now when they make a decision. If I have their email address, they will have me in their inbox, plus, I can drip on them occasionally.

My site is such that a newsletter doesn't seem to work. I put up a link for a "special report" offer five years ago and have had two people ask for it. As for a newsletter, it's just the nature of the niche; a newsletter is not apropos. And, as stated, a "special report" offer doesn't seem to work.

The fact that almost every one of these sites I refer to uses a popup must mean that they work. Because these sites have big bucks, really big bucks, and they can afford to do whatever works.

root

Then your answer is far simpler, have a box that says "Newsletter" and ask for an email address and a button to say "Add me" or similar. Job done.

No need to have a system to stall the process of leaving a site, me personally, I have come across a few sites like that from web searches, found that they are not what I am looking for and when leaving I am prevented from closing the tab to leave. Utterly annoying.

The problem with these pop ups, its not that they work, its that they pester and these sites have in most cases mega bucks to start with, so that argument alone is no justification in the first place.

You also have a web compliance issue with a pop up for blind, partially sighted and disabled users who will find it difficult to get out of these pop ups or layers.

If these other sites were able to jump off a virtual bridge, would you?

IMHO keeping things simple is best option and allows your page to be accessed by more people than just annoying people as you then have to venture in to the setting of cookies, etc just to remember who is in or out.

Duke_Will

\\.\;1274463 wrote:
Then your answer is far simpler, have a box that says "Newsletter" and ask for an email address and a button to say "Add me" or similar. Job done....

I already stated that in this niche, it seems that a newsletter will/does not work.

rtrethewey

Okay, while I would also not recommend doing this, you can certainly cobble together some simple code to do the job. You could use JavaScript to display a pop-up window with an onunload() function that would display the message you describe and send the information to a PHP script that would Email a simple message with your website address. Search on "javascript onunload" and you'll find out how that part works, and the web is full of formmail scripts that could be easily modified to send your message to the user. The slightly tricky part comes in checking whether the user is leaving your site altogether or just navigating to another page within your site. So you'd want to add an onclick() function to all of your internal links to cancel the pop-up. I've never tried to get around pop-up blockers, so I don't know how difficult that is.

And keep in mind that the response rate for anything like this is extremely low in the best of circumstances, so it will be difficult to tell if you're having little response or if you're just annoying users unless you include some kind of tracking mechanism. It would also be a good idea to assure the user that he won't be put on any mailing lists just for requesting your reminder message.

Multimastery

Why not just have a feature where it doesn't stall your visitors after they leave - but rather, catches them just when they're about to leave? What I'm referring to are motion sensor popups (not sure if that's the official term)...but it's where it detects when a visitor motions toward the back button or close button and then presents them a last-ditch offer or optin opportunity.

root

You have to remember that just because you have a newsletter does not mean that people want to have one.

Visiting a web site is purley an opt in situation, if people want to use your site then offer up a news page and RSS feed and allow people to choose and offer a link to allow people to sign up to your newsletter which should be the content on your news feed.

You can't make people do something that they don't want and despite what other developers do or whizz bang ideas of popups you see on the internet, the underlying issue is that most people find popups irritating and an annoyance. Take the path of least resistance, advertise you have a newsletter and sell the idea of subscribing but also ensure that you have a fool proof way of allowing people to stop receiving newsletters when they don't want them, that is the biggest pit fall of newsletters, email addresses tend to be retained and people can get further mailings and some list owners ignore unsubscribe requests as I know all too well myself of having to threaten legal action to get taken off mailing lists.

So I hope you're getting the bigger picture as to why your newsletter is not getting a huge uptake.