Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Publish Content More Frequently
- Free content can help you bring readers back to
your site - Make Use Of The New Browser Push Notifications
- Practice Retargeting To Be On
Your Visitor’s Mind and View - Email Marketing That Adds Value
- Offer good customer experience and user interface
- Keep a featured section for popular posts on your
website - Engage customers through social profiles
- Craft Thought Leadership Content
- Community building
- Conclusion
Introduction
If you look closely at the analytics of your website, you might notice that the number of returning visitors is lesser than that of new visitors. This means that your website is good enough to attract visitors but not good enough to convert those visitors into subscribers and customers. Some of the reasons behind a low returning visitor count are: bad content, inconsistent posting, poor user experience, incorrect targeting.
In this article, we take a look at a few clever ways for helping you bring back visitors to your website after their first visit.
1. Publish Content More Frequently
At the end of the day, content is what internet users are looking for on your website and you need to provide them with that. Content that adds value to the reader’s experience and suits their interest is what keeps pulling them back to a website constantly and when the quality (and frequency) of the content drops, so does the customer retention rate. This approach is used effectively by Hubspot.
Brands that publish more than 16 blog posts per month receive almost 3.5x more traffic than those that publish 0-4 posts in a month.
Your goal should be to publish content that relates to the target audience, provides them with the answers they are looking for, and stands out from their current source of information. Remember, the higher your website’s authenticity and authority, the higher the number of returning visitors.
Takeaway: When creating content, do not forget that both quality and quantity govern the traffic on your website. It’s not about creating one viral post and then waiting for another similar breakthrough. Consistency matters. If you do not update your website frequently, your audience will lose interest.
2. Free content can help you bring readers back to your site
One good way of pulling visitors to your website is through creating free content. The appeal of free valuable content is strong – especially when you are offering exclusive ebooks for free download or sharing your content templates and email funnel as freemiums. Your audience will come back again to check for such free exclusive content, strategies and videos. Even free trial of your SaaS solution can help retain visitors. A free trial CTA by Shopify helped boost its revenue by 10x and increase the number of users.
You can even gate your free content to capture email addresses. The common strategy is to use a pop-up like this to offer free content in exchange for the visitor’s email address. That way you can send mails or newsletters offering similarly valuable content and templates for free to get them to re-engage with your site later on.
As Neil Patel points out, If You Give Away Your Best Content, Your Business Will Grow by 290%.
Takeaway: Create free content for your audience. This can be the blog, infographics, videos, ebooks and whitepapers or surveys. Content that they wouldn’t find anywhere else are highly valued and sought after. Gate the freemiums to capture email addresses.
3. Make Use Of The New Browser Push Notifications
Most online users are not willing to share their email addresses with you, fearing spam and a flood of unwanted mails. However, they might say “yes” to browser push notifications, as it doesn’t require any contact details.
With these web push notifications, you can send out regular reminders and updates about your website or blog to the readers directly on their browser, forget mailbox- it’s a win-win situation for both you and the users! Not only is this method effective and non-intrusive, it also helps you connect with your audience even if they are browsing through your competitor’s website or scrolling through YouTube cat videos. By sending a push notification with an exciting offer or article, you can easily grab their attention and pull them back to your website.
Takeaway: Through push notifications, you can drive visitors to your website without being pushy.
4. Practice Retargeting To Be On Your Visitor’s Mind and View
Another effective approach for bringing back visitors to your website is by retargeting them through digital channels such as the social media. Through a retargeting ad campaign, you can highlight valued aspects of your business to people who have previously shown interest in your website (i.e. returning customers). Since these ads are targeted, they get a higher click through rate and result in excellent return on investment.
SEM observed a 50% increase in the number of repeat visitors through retargeting.
However, you should be careful not to make the visitors feel like they are being spammed by the same message and ads over and over again. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that your retargeted ads offer something new to the visitors each time that they view them.
Takeaway: A simple ad campaign through social media can be effective in getting repeat visitors to your site.
5. Email Marketing That Adds Value
If a visitor has left behind their contact information (particularly their email address) then it is because they want to receive information from you and not just about sales and promotions, but information that provides value to them.
The subscribers to your business expect to receive personal emails with valuable insights – not just a monotonous salesy message that gives the feeling of spam. Therefore, when you are looking to pull back visitors, it is important that you email them different types of content that add value. The most important part is to always add a backlink to your website so that the visitors actually come back to the site.
According to Campaign Monitor, you are about 6x more likely to get a click-through from email marketing than from a tweet.
Takeaway: Email marketing can be effective only when you focus on optimisation. If you forget to include a backlink to your website or don’t have an effective CTA, email marketing won’t pull in visitors.
6. Offer good customer experience and user interface
At the end of the day, a brand’s marketing success is dependant on the customer experience. This is what dictates the outcome of your marketing strategies. To make sure that your online presence boosts the growth of your brand, it is important that you give your customers something unique so you can stand out from your competitors and make the customers come back for more. As put by Forbes, customer experience is indeed the future of marketing. Focus on an efficient website design, ensure that the content is engaging, optimise the website for mobile viewing. Make sure that your website is easy to navigate.
Load time is crucial as well. 40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.
Takeaway: Customer experience is the backbone of any marketing strategy. Negative experience spreads like wildfire. Make sure that your website is user friendly, that it takes less time to load and is easy to use.
7. Keep a featured section for popular posts on your website
Having a dedicated section for featured content on your website can boost customer retention. Use this section of the website to display products that require more visibility. By doing so, the ease of accessibility increases. You can also customise this section depending upon the landing pages.
Takeaway: Use your website’s sidebar to let visitors see your most popular posts. This saves visitor’s time and enables them quick access to hot content.
8. Engage customers through social profiles
Use the power of social media to earn new visitors and pull back the old ones. Promoting your website content through social profiles increases user engagement as it makes the content easily accessible. As we mentioned earlier, it is important to publish content more frequently. Through social media, you can increase the visibility of the content on your website thereby driving more traffic to your website.
In fact, social media is the #1 driver of website referral traffic.
Takeaway: Utilise social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. to gather eyeballs for your website’s content. It will not only bring back old visitors but also help you earn new ones.
9. Craft Thought Leadership Content
Practice thought leadership. A thought leader is someone who has established an authority in a specialised field. Take the case of Moz. When it comes to SEO, Moz has created a unique identity for itself through its Whiteboard Friday (include video screenshot). It is a weekly video series which aims at bringing beginner to moderate SEOs to Moz community.
The average Whiteboard Friday post gets between 15-20,000 unique views, outperforming the blog posts easily since most visitors come back especially for the Whiteboard Friday sessions.
Takeaway: With an out of the box content marketing strategy, you can ensure customer retention and achieve credibility.
10. Community building
Use polls, blogs and forums to engage your visitors. By allowing a platform for your visitors to interact with each other, you can encourage visitor participation which ensures repeat visits to your website. Facilitating conversations about your products and/or services and getting honest feedback through community polls, accepting guest posts can help your brand in enhancing customer experience which leads to increased traffic to your website.
Takeaway: Allow room for visitor interaction on your website. Do so through comments, polls, forums.
Conclusion
Getting repeat visitors to your website demands continuous visitor engagement. You can do this by frequently updating your website content, creating specific ad campaigns, using social media, incorporating email marketing, enhancing customer’s online experience. Just keep on creating “value” for your audience, and they will reward you with their loyalty or even purchases.
Got any other ideas to lure visitors back to your site? Tell us in the comments below.
FAQs
How Do You Calculate Returning Visitors?
If you are using Google Analytics to monitor the key performance indicators of your website, you can find the Universal Analytics reports at the top of the interface. There, you can find segments for new and returning visitors and the number of returning visitors during a particular period from that segment.
What Is A Good Returning Visitor Rate?
To find out the rate of returning visitors, you need to divide the number of returning visitors by the total number of unique visitors to your site in a specific period. If the rate is higher than 30%, it shows that the new and returning visitors to the website are reasonably balanced.
Why Returning Visitors Are Important?
Returning visitors are important to a website as it is a testament to better conversion rates and customer satisfaction. The returning visitor rate also tells you a lot about your website's performance. It gives you a clear picture of which pages are working, the bounce rate, and the image of your eCommerce site from the user’s point of view.
