Increase the number of returning visitors

Nadejda Milanova

Nadejda Milanova · 04th April 2022·WordPress

Updated on 05th July 2022

Increase the number of returning visitors

Many website owners focus on new visitors and forget about returning visitors. But looking at the benefits of bringing your returning visitor rate up can help you understand your customers and what marketing campaigns work best for them. Here’s why:

  • You can see how successful your marketing campaigns are by seeing how many returning visitors you have.
  • Returning visitors are your loyal customers, so you can better cater to their needs.
  • The more returning visitors you have, the stronger your brand is—hence putting in more effort to bring your rates up is a clear move.

A study by Barilliance found that returning visitors add 65.16% more items to cart than a first-time visitor. The statistics also show that there is a 75% higher chance of making a purchase from a returning visitor. If you want to know the average percentage of returning visitors, it varies from industry to industry, but the general range is 30%. The sweet spot is when you have 50% new and returning visitors. What are some ways you can increase your returning visitor rate?

How to Get Returning Visitors to Your Website

1. Start an email list

Emails are a great way of connecting with your audience and bringing them back to your site. By starting a newsletter, you can engage with users, help them remember your brand, and then promote offers to boost sales.

With email marketing tools like Constant Contact, it’s very easy to start a newsletter and automate workflows. You can check out our in-depth guide on how to create an email newsletter.

Once your newsletter is up and running, how can you get visitors to sign up for your email list and turn them into returning visitors? The best way to get visitors to sign up for your email list is by offering them a free gift in return.

2. Get People to Follow You on Social Media

Traffic from social media accounts for 31.24% of all website traffic, so if you want to increase your visitor retention rate, then social media is your friend. One simple way to get your website traffic on social media is by asking followers to join a group in platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn.

You can also promote the group through a slide-in popup to grab the attention of your website visitors after they scroll to a certain percentage or have spent some time on the page.

RafflePress is the best WordPress giveaway plugin for growing your social media followers. That’s because they let people enter your giveaway with actions like following you on social media, sharing a tweet, getting social referrals, and more.

It’s super easy to use and offers a drag and drop builder with a wide range of customization options. You can follow our detailed guide on how to run a successful giveaway on your WordPress website.

One more tip for growing your following is to add a social media feed to your site using a plugin like Smash Balloon.

With Smash Balloon, you can easily embed an Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube feed anywhere on your WordPress website.

This is a great way to share your social media content with your website visitors and get them interested in following you. The sentence becomes a little more concise, and the word "this" is pretty vague.

social media

3. Create a newsletter list

Do you have an email list? If not, then you should start building one. Email lists are a great way to increase your returning visitor rate. Newsletter subscriptions are a feature available on most websites that allow you to send messages out at regular intervals. This is a good idea if your audience is primarily interested in your website’s content and you need a way to let them know about it?

But how can you attract new subscribers? You can use tools like PushEngage, which is a plugin for WordPress, to collect them and turn them into returning visitors.

4. New content

It’s always a good idea to publish new content on your website. If people like your content, they will come back to visit you. This will increase your returning visitor rate and help you start seeing a growth in traffic.

How often should I publish content? It really depends on your content production timeline and capacity. For example, if you can produce 16 posts a month, you should be publishing more than 4 posts. I’ve seen this time and time again with companies that publish more than 16 posts and get 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish less than 4 posts. To find new content ideas for your blog, you can look at the demographics report from MonsterInsights, which helps you identify what your users like and then start making posts based on their interests.

That said, there are other ways of generating content ideas. To find novel ideas, you can spy on your competitors. After you’ve created your content, you can promote it by sending out a push notification, posting it on social channels, and sending an email newsletter to subscribers with the latest news.

5. Repurpose Content

Along with creating new posts, you can also boost your returning visitors by repurposing your existing content into micro-content pieces. Repurposing is converting any content into different types of content for different platforms.

6. Start a Loyalty Program

Offering exclusive deals and rewards to your loyal customers is a great way of ensuring they keep visiting your website. It might seem like a trivial thing, but your customers will appreciate it and come back more often. The loyalty program shows them how much they mean to your business!

Ads

One of the best ways to keep your visitors coming back is by giving them a marketing experience that makes them feel like they’re always wanted. To create this experience, we used retargeting ads. Here’s how they work:

Retargeting relies on tracking cookies. Basically, the site places a cookie in the viewer’s browser and then displays ads based on their behavior. The cookie recognizes that the viewer has been to the site before, so it shows them ads related to their interests or abandoned shopping carts.

Our ads work as reminders for people who have been to our site before. You see these types of ads all the time on Facebook or Google. Whenever they visit another site that you’ve purchased an ad on, they’ll see your ad somewhere with a reminder of whatever article or product they were looking at before. This will lead them back to your site and hopefully convert them from an attractive prospect into a valuable customer.

Conclusion

Congratulations on reading our quick guide to captivating audiences. Using any of these simple tricks, you can get people to keep coming back to your site and you’ll enjoy lots of engagement and conversions. And that’s it. Have a great day.

Nadejda Milanova
Nadejda Milanova

An experienced Content creator in the field of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and WordPress. A true proffesional with a Master's degree focused on journalism.

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