The end of every visit to your website should be considered the beginning of the next one. You don’t want visitors and customers to just walk away happy, you want them coming back for more!
Stay engaged with your visitors
The best visit to your site is an engaged visit. In real life, when the conversation dies, that’s the guest’s cue to leave. Same for your website. Keep the conversation going, and give your guests plenty of ways to continue the conversation, even after they leave.
How:
- Newsletters. Create a regularly emailed newsletter and encourage visitors to sign up for it without annoying them to do so. In other words, don’t display a pop-up asking them to subscribe before they’ve even had a chance to see if they like your content. Instead, gently invite them to subscribe in a way that allows them to explore your content first. For instance, Salesforce has its subscribe button front and center, but it doesn’t utilize a pop-up requiring visitors to sign up or close it before reading the content.
- Free content. Providing ultra-useful content in the form of free ebooks, whitepapers, tools, etc., will bring visitors back again and again to see what else you may have for them. Hubspot is the king of this tactic, providing an extensive Resources Library full of ebooks and other useful free resources.
Invite them back for more
Guests don’t come back without an invite. Go out of your way to make sure your site visitors know you want them back and you’re prepared to make it worth their while.
How:
- Remarketing. Search engines and even social media networks offer a variety of paid ad options that allow you to specifically target people who have already visited your website, enticing them to return. If you’ve ever noticed an ad for a business you recently checked out online, that’s remarketing in action. Here’s an example of a remarketing ad you might see after viewing a specific product on Amazon.
- Special deals/coupons. When someone orders from you, give them an incentive to order again with special deals and coupons. We have a few commonly owned restaurants here in the Canton, OH, area that do this particularly well. If you haven’t been in in awhile, they’ll send you a coupon for a free item or special pricing. Here’s an email one of our team members received from Baja West Coast Kitchen:
Some people will always be just one-time visitors. You can’t help it. They come and they leave. But you can turn many of those visitors into returning guests by making sure they feel special.
If you treat visitors as if they are just passing through, chances are that’s all they’ll ever do. However, visitors who feel like guests on your site will always come back for more. Guests are a lot of work, but their business is worth it!