10 Proven Methods to attract and measure return website visitors

How ?

1. Content

I can’t stress enough that content is king.  It is the key reason that people come to your site and why they will return. 

• Offer them useful information and lots of it - Too much is never enough.  But you need to make sure it is well organized and easy to find and navigate. 
• Keep the website up-to-date – Show the currency of content that is frequently updated.  Point out the popular pages.  People will return if they know that information is kept current and will always be curious about the opinions and way other website users interact with you. 
• Use a blog - Add news as much as possible, but a blog is even better, as it offers a more informal, conversational style which can create a more personal relationship with your audience and have them return for more. 
• Randomise or Cycle – sample different new and interesting bits of info each time a user visits the site and they are less likely to get bored with it.  It can have the secondary benefit of making it easier for users to digest a large number of product or service offerings.  When using randomized or cycling content, take care not to detract from or compromise the integrity of your pages.   Perfect for this type is imagery, customer testimonials, featured products and services or interesting quotes.
• Show users what’s hot – give a list of new or popular pages/content
  

A content management system is the key, as it will make updating content easier and allow you to distribute the load amongst multiple staff.  Use of browser cookies can enable randomized or cycle content.

2.  User Participation

People are social animals.  Users like to interact, comment and have their say.  Give them an outlet and they will return for more.   This is the way that Web 2.0 works. 

• Enabling people to comment on your blog entries - is a good way to encourage contribution, and this adds to your search engine result.  You can always vet information that is contributed to the site.
• Encourage feedback on pages – enable them to rate pages or submit feedback easily.  You don’t have the publish the feedback, but it can provide some great info on usage patterns
• Encourage feedback on issues – host a web poll or petition
• Build a community – features such as an online discussion forums create a real attraction for return visitors.  Though you’ll need to kickstart your discussions and also get involved in them, because people tend to avoid empty forums and only stay on busy, active forums.

3. Offer Killer Applications

Not many website offer an “application”, but those that do hold the secret for capturing return visitors.  If your website is “useful”, that is, if it offers something a little more than information, then people will return.  It could be an online database, directory or interactive online application such as a useful online calculator.  For example, the Moen Glass website gets a high number of return visitors, as it enables its customers to generate quotes online.  This can be more convenient, quicker and easier than dealing with reps and is very popular with the company’s regular clients.

4.  Pull Methods

Use RSS, podcasts and video content (such as YouTube) where possible to broadcast your news.  These are great user driven “pull” strategies.  Both webmasters and people will subscribe to RSS feeds to get the latest info that they want from the categories that they want.  If they are good enough, you may see your articles used or linked to from on another relevant site.  RSS, in particular, will increase your relevance with Google, and when users know your site and see your search results when googling, they will return time and time again.  Make sure that you make the relevant site URLs obvious. 

Competitions are also a great way to get people to return to your site.  Try to involve the website and its content in the competition.  For example, around Christmas time we often “Find Santa” competition, hiding an image of Santa somewhere on our website, so that the first person who finds him wins a prize - one of our products.

5. Bookmarks & Addresses

Make it easy for people to bookmark your pages.  Make your web addresses easy to remember and to type in and stand out in people’s favourites list and people will be more likely to come back to them.

If your site is a portal, you might want to invite users to make it their homepage.  You can create a button which when they click on it, configures their browser to visit your site every time when they open their browser.

6. Use Push Methods

Use email and SMS – but take care.  Offer an opt-in email newsletter subscription or notification service of some kind.  Once you have your list – use it.  When something is updated, tell people about it.  Avoid using it too much or making too many emails automated as it is not as effective as it used to be.   After a while, people may get sick of your emails and simply bin them upon sight, they may even associate the annoyance of the emails with your company’s brand.  Make sure when you do contact them that you actually have something there for them to see, if you don’t users can get very annoyed and frustrated.  Push methods can sometimes be seen as spam and do more damage than good.  But if the communications are clear, then they can still be effective.  It is important to ensure that it is easy for people to adjust their preferences at any time.

7.  Login

You’ll probably wonder why this is not further up in the list.  Webmasters often used to think if they created some sort of login area that people would return to login.  It is certainly the case if they think that they can get something that they can’t get anywhere else.  But most sites offer a couple of pages of member only content and the ability for members to update their details.  Most of these things are designed to help the owners of  the website and in reality offer only the benefit of convenience to the user.  The truth is that it is actually more of an obstacle than an attraction.  Once people have logged in once, they are unlikely to simply return.  You have to offer something really compelling to get people to bother logging in.  For example, the Optometrists Association website offers members to be able to check their Continuing Professional Development points and history.  This is the “killer application” of the login area.  If your extranet does not offers killer applications or lots of member privy information, then try to offer as much as you can without people logging in.  And it is important that all of your applications feature integrated login to make sure that your site members only have to log in once.  There is no bigger deterrent to participation than having to use multiple logins on the one site.

8.  Personalise the User Experience

Personalising your site to users and using user profiling can help visitors to feel more comfortable about returning to the site.  Good user-centred design and audience-specific organization of content will help users to self-identify and can help enhance the user experience.

An example of this include the Youth Whittlesea website has a style picker which changes the whole sites colour scheme to reflect their own personal taste.  When they return, the site uses their chosen scheme, but they don’t need to login to do so.  Another example is the National Tertiary Education Union website where users can bookmark their favourite pages for later use.

9.  “URL Dropping”

Take every opportunity to show people that your site is important is worth revisiting.  The trick is to point to particular pages on your website in your everyday communication.  I call this “URL dropping”, and like name dropping, it has its place.  

Here are some everyday situations where you can do this:

• Your email signatures
• Powerpoint presentations
• Discussion forums
• Blogs
• Offline newsletters & Brochures

To get the best results, you need to make sure that your web addresses are human friendly.

10. Referrals and Recommendations

Web 2.0 provides a whole range of opportunities for viral marketing and social networking.

• Encourage social bookmarking – use links for sites such as Digg, to enable people to easily tag your pages on hotlists and shared bookmarks. 
• Email a friend – allowing users to email content from your site to people that they know

When people feel compelled to recommend sites to others, they confirm their own impression of the usefulness of your site, so they are also more likely to return themselves.  The more your site becomes popular, the more likely the users are to frequent it.

Measuring Return Visits

Most statistics packages provide means of measuring return visits. 

Google Analytics has some great customized reports on visitor loyalty.

Look for the visits per visitor ratios.    A ratio of greater than 1.5 is a really good result.

Another thing to look for is the length of time that a visitor spends on your site and the average number of pages viewed.  These key performance indicators can tell you how useful and relevant that your site is.

With some clever track-back code, you can also determine (subject to your site's privacy policy) which people have read and opened your email notifications.

Conclusions

We employ all of these techniques to get the best results for our websites and they average high visitor return rates as a result.

Our content management system, Freestyler, is excellent at delivering dynamic and interactive content.  The system has the built in ability to serve randomized text and images.  It includes a range of interactive templates for integrated blogs, discussion forums, e-news subscription, RSS, podcasting and video.  Freestyler’s applications feature an integrated login system which makes it easier for visitors to login once.  The system is compatible with statistics packages that can show you the effectiveness of your returning visitor campaigns.

Our services and software ensure that your website will always be more than just an online brochure.

Comments

There are no comments.

Name *


Comment *


Verification code *


Regenerate code