If you want to land a second date, what you do before (and during) your first date makes a difference. Knock your new beau’s socks off straight away, and you likely won’t be half a block away before you get a text message to arrange another get-together.
The same applies when you’re courting people into becoming repeat visitors.
The same applies when you’re courting people into becoming repeat visitors.
First impressions matter
If you don’t create an excellent experience for your customers when they initially come to your website, the chance is good that next time they might navigate elsewhere for the goods or services they need.Being sticky on a first date? Yeesh, not so good. Being sticky on a first website visit? Now that’s a very good thing. After all, how often do you convert a visitor into a customer after their first visit to your website?
It’s hard enough to drive leads to your website—through customized email promotions, remarketing campaigns with Google Ads, helpful social media posts, must-read downloadable content offers, and more—which is why it’s absolutely crucial to make sure you aren’t losing all of those potential leads once they arrive because of issues with your site.
Get the most out your website traffic and encourage people into keep coming back as repeat visitors for more by following these three essential strategies.
1. Minimize load time
Onscreen, Marilyn Monroe had a reputation for scene-stealing with charm. Offscreen, she was known for being chronically late. Even though her directors and suitors would universally gripe about her tardiness, for the most part, they put up with it. Unfortunately, you can’t expect the same sort of patience from your customers. Nobody wants to visit a slow loading website.That’s why, when it comes to abandonment, load time is a significant factor. Every second matters.
According to Kissmetrics, a one-second delay in page response results in a 7% reduction in conversions. What does that mean? Well, if you use your website to bring in $10,000 daily, then a one-second page delay potentially could cost you $250,000 in lost sales annually. Learn more about how to improve your website performance »
Pro-tip: Don’t forget about your mobile users. If your site wasn’t built using responsive design best practices, your website visitors who use mobile devices might be experiencing slow load times.
These days Marilyn Monroe is always on time, thanks to her estate’s web developers. The movie star’s official website loads quickly (in about one second), which is ideal since researchers have found that 47% of consumers expect web pages to load in two seconds or less.
2. Make it easy
Companies usually build websites to reach existing and potential customers online, but along the way, sometimes well-meaning marketers forget that customers—and meeting their needs—should be their priority, and then they lose their focus and end up building websites that don’t produce results because the content focuses more on the company and its goals.Content marketing best practices are crucial for getting around this problem. It’s hard to go off track when you set customer-centric goals upfront. Learn more about why it pays to customize your content around your target audience’s needs »
Unless you have a limitless marketing budget, you can’t tackle everything all at once. So, to keep your work manageable and start seeing results right away, focus your website improvement tasks around what would make the biggest impact for your customers.
For example, if you hear a few customers ask the same question, it’s highly likely that there are a slew of other people in your ideal target audience that have similar issues, too.
CHECKLIST
To figure out if your website’s content is as compelling as possible and solving your target audience’s primary problems, consider these questions:- What is your bounce rate like? Are you being too specific with your keywords and missing customers? Too vague and getting the wrong leads? Which keywords are you targeting? Are your pages optimized for those terms?
- Is it easy to find the content that most new leads come to your website for? Are the section labels in your navigation intuitive? How simple is it to browse your way to your site’s most popular pages? Does it take the fewest number of clicks?
- What kinds of things have your customers asked you about lately? Does your current website provide answers to these questions?
- What does your competitor’s website look like? How are they meeting customers’ needs online? How can you do it better on your site?
- Is the copy on your most important pages written in your brand voice, clearly and concisely, with up-to-date information, and in an easy-to-scan format?
You can’t go wrong if you focus on how you can use your website to help your customers and make your content decisions based on that. Unsure how to get started on an overhaul? Sign-up for a website audit and get a professional opinion—for free »
3. Provide value
If your company counts solely on new website traffic to generate revenue, that gets outrageously expensive quickly. Getting a steady stream of customers via pay-per-click advertising and other efforts can work, but focusing more on increasing repeat business is one way to get a better return on investment from your website.Value-add example: Facebook proves its usefulness to its users through a variation of what we like to call “delighting buyers.” Learn more about using delight to sell »
Take Facebook, for instance. One metric their team uses to monitor the ubiquitous social network’s success is active daily users. Though that’s not quite the same thing as monitoring repeat visitors to a website, what goes into keeping their users coming back is Facebook’s priorities. Facebook continually refines interactions on their site to be as user-centric as possible, and they shape their content strategy around the goal of providing what keeps people engaged—and coming back.
There are a lot of ways you can help—and captivate—your target audience with strategic content marketing. From absorbing videos to helpful blog posts, if you establish your website as an invaluable hangout for relevant subject matter resources and informative thought leadership assets, your traffic will be more likely to stick around and become beloved regular visitors.
If you don’t want to lose your second chance with a customer, make sure every customer’s first visit to your website is optimal. Do this by making sure it loads quickly, provides value, and features content is straight-forward, up-to-date, and error-free.
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