How to get repeat visitors to my website

Written by Fernando Maciá

Many times our efforts in Internet marketing campaigns are focused on attracting new visitors instead of building customer loyalty. Remember that a new customer can cost eight times more than a current customer. Find out which strategies ensure that a visitor will repeat his or her visit to our Web site several times.

Increasing the number of repeat visitors should be a fixed indicator in our Web performance scorecard. Visitors who repeat several times their visit through a site end up becoming customers and prescribers of our service.

If we try to match the tastes of visitors when they arrive at our Web portal with the functionalities and contents of our site, we will be able to maintain a long-term romance that will translate into profitability.

Below we will analyze a series of tips that will help us to convince visitors to return several times to our Web site.

Update your Web site: show that your Web site has a life of its own

Update the information on your Web portal frequently. Your site is like a store, if you do not update the product portfolio or the information about them, your business will no longer be interesting for repeat visits. Changing the presentation of products in the showcase, the presentation on the shelves, highlighting new offers, discarding expired products, etc. are tasks that can be transferred to the contents offered by our Web page.

Web sites that are constantly updated are the ones that get the first positions in search engines and consequently are the most visited. The frequency with which search engine robots visit and crawl the information on a given Web site is directly related to the frequency with which the Web site’s content is updated. The greater the consistency in updating content, the greater the probability of having more content in the search engine databases and consequently being positioned for a wider range of keywords.

Another tip, design a Web site from a content management system that allows you to update the contents of your page from a cyber cafe in the Bahamas while you are enjoying your vacation.

The Home Page, the gateway to repeat visits

The Home Page is the first thing your visitor looks at; it is there that we must send him the message that the portal has been updated, that there are new things that were not there since his last visit. A news, tips, articles or events section with headlines that are updated on the home page helps to communicate the freshness of our portal’s content. Designing a carousel of featured products within the home page also conveys the feeling that new products have been added.

Don’t waste your visitors’ time. Eliminate those welcome pages that say: “You have reached my company’s Web site, click on the button to enter”, the same can be said of those home pages that only show the flags of the portal languages. Each of these pages is one more obstacle for your visitor to realize that the page has been updated.

Promoting discussion groups: creating a community

Many experts agree that the Web portals that will be the most successful in their businesses will be those that are able to create community. Making a visitor feel part of a Web portal is the best way to obtain good customers and prescribers. People do business with people they know and trust.

Blogs and forums are becoming a great magnet for Web traffic, a receiver of opinions and a collector of loyal visitors. When a visitor feels identified with the theme of a forum or blog, this visitor will repeat visits in order to see the new “posts” or “entries” of the portal.

Capturing subscribers to remind them to visit us again

For those visitors who have forgotten to return to our Web site, it is advisable to design email marketing campaigns. Some first-time visitors to a Web site may want to subscribe to a portal newsletter. Make it easy and add a button on your website so that your visitors can subscribe to the portal’s database for further information.

Another proportion of visitors tend to subscribe to RSS content syndication platforms where they consult the new content of their favorite portals on a daily basis. Give this growing group of users the opportunity to add your website to their syndication list. Design your news or articles in an alternative format in XML language so that they can be syndicated. Don’t forget to add a button on your portal that indicates that your content can be viewed through an RSS content syndication system.

Surveys: encouraging participation on our Web site

Surveys drive Web traffic. Both users who fill them out and users who want to see the results, the survey topic is always an interesting hook to increase repeat visits. It is advisable that any survey be related to the theme of the page, that it be related to a controversial topic or where a debate can easily be established, and that of course it allows you to see the results in real time.

Conclusion: Adopting an iron discipline

Behind a Web site that gets large doses of repeat visits, there is an efficient content management strategy where adopting a strict discipline is the primary value to be followed. If we decide that we are going to publish new content weekly, then we have to be constant with that level of frequency since we will be giving the message to the visitors that the Web site has new things every week. Remember that a repeat visitor is a potential customer, but a visitor who is disappointed because he was expecting to get new content can become an easy prey for our competition.