Retention Tab – annoying or useful?
Remember back in the Myspace days when everything was clip art, glitter, and flashing? Well those days are slowly creeping back, and while a blinking tab in your browser may be annoying, it could also prompt you to go back to a site, especially an e-commerce site offering a new discount or product.
Maybe you’re house hunting and have a tab open in the background, and a new listing pops up – a blinking tab instead of a phone alert might be more your pace. Perhaps you’re following a particular news story and welcome a blinking tab to alert you of updates.
Regardless of your feelings on the topic, a new beta startup, Retention Tab is launching to allow site owners to “guide back their distracted traffic.”
The company explains that “It works by having blinking or scrolling text on the tab. For example “Come back to save 10% !!!” would be displayed after a user has switched to a different tab. Retention Tab is perfect for ecommerce websites however any site will work.”
Retention Tab details
Currently, Retention Tab works in Chrome and Firefox, so the compatibility is limited at launch, but accounts for a large number of browser users – we hope Opera and Internet Explorer will be added, but would understand if IE support is not offered, as is the trend with startups and developers.
The company says that they will install the technology on your site, calling it a “hands off” experience for site owners, but what this entails and what clearance they would need remains unclear, and could be a deal breaker for larger sites which would not grant access to their backend to a new startup.
The terms of service are not yet publicly available, so it is unclear if this will remain a free tool, what they will track on your site or in users’ browsers, but as a concept, this could help with traffic for any type of site.
