Are you a web stalker? By Bob Apollo I
recently received a LinkedIn message from someone whose profile I had accidently visited, saying something along the lines of “I just noticed that you visited my profile on LinkedIn. Please let me know if there is anything I can help you with.” This is the second time this has happened in the past couple of weeks, and I hope that it doesn’t become a habit, because this feels awfully like stalking.
By the way, my response was to declare that my purpose in visiting their site was because of my research into the ugliest profile photos on LinkedIn, and to offer my congratulations to them as a short-listed finalist. Which amused me, although it didn’t appear to amuse them.
You might want to do something similar if it ever happens to you, because stalking website visitors in this way is clumsy, and discouraging people from adopting it as a habit can only benefit society.
I’ve socialised this with a number of friends and colleagues, and enough of them seem to feel the same way about this overt stalking approach for me to believe that it’s a risky strategy. I believe the same thinking applies to contacting your website visitors. Now, I know that today’s
technology allows us
to capture tremendously useful information about our website visitors and which pages they have been interested in. All I am arguing for is a little subtlety about how we use it.
Web visitor stalking is the modern- day equivalent of the hapless shop assistant (or the bored vendor sales person at an exhibition) approaching you with “can I help you?” The question encourages a negative answer, and may provoke negative feelings if you feel that your personal space
has just been invaded in an unprompted, unwanted and boorish fashion.
There is a better way, and it’s to rephrase your approach so that’s it’s more likely to promote a positive response. I’m not sure that even having them complete a form means that it’s a good idea to reveal that you’ve been perched on their shoulder all the time they have been browsing your site.
Instead of coming right out with it and telling your prospect that you’ve noticed that they have just visited pages x, y and z on your
website, and how can you help them, how about coaching your people to use some variation of the following:
“Thank you for getting in touch. We’ve been working a with a growing number of companies in your space recently, and they often tell us that they are interested in x, y and z - and I wondered if this might be of importance to you as well?”
If yes, great - and even if no, you’ve kept the door open for continuing the conversation in a different and more relevant direction.
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