Treat Your Returning Visitors as VIP’s

People generally don’t buy your product after visiting your website for the first time. Most people buy something after visiting a website multiple times.

In this post, I’ll discuss all there is to know about these returning visitors. And I’ll tell you how to attract returning visitors to your website.

Finally, we’ll discuss how you ensure that returning visitors to your website have the best experience possible.

Let’s start by defining returning visitors and why measuring them is crucial. New visitors are defined as people visiting your site for the first time, while returning visitors have visited your website before (in the past two years).

You can use Google Analytics (or another analytics tool) to measure the number of returning visitors to your website. This is an important metric. You should see the returning visitor rate as a metric of your website’s appeal and relevance.

Overall, a good returning visitor rate is around 30%. However, that metric may well vary for different niches.

For any e-commerce site, returning visitors are essential. Very few conversions are made on a first visit, so improving a higher return visitor ratio is vital for your business. The timeless marketing rule of 7 states that a consumer needs to hear about or encounter your product 7 times before making a purchase. All in all, you need to reach your customer multiple times. An extensive study done by Adobe shows that conversion rates are much higher among returning visitors. Other recent research once more showed conversion rates to be up to 70% higher.

Next to higher conversion rates, there are more reasons why returning visitors are important for your business. Returning visitors tend to trust your brand more. They’ll spend more time on your site and share more of your content on their social media channels. Moreover, they will share feedback about your product and help you improve it. We need to cherish our return visitors, as they are the most important visitors to our site.

We’ve established rather clearly that we need returning visitors for our business. So, let’s check out how to attract them:

Create a great website

Make sure that first-time visitors have a great experience on your website. Your UX should be clear, and people should easily find their way around it. Your website should be something worth returning to.

Newsletter

Getting people to subscribe to your newsletter would be a great way to remind them to return to your site. Make sure to add a clear call to action so that people can subscribe and write a compelling newsletter that people will want to read. 

Engaging content

Make sure to create content that people will want to come back for. That means that you should draft original content. Create pieces that add something and that are valuable for your audience. Your content should be opinionated and well-researched. Try to become a thought leader for your readers. That way, you’ll keep creating relevant content that your readers will keep coming back for.

Social media

Social media could also be a great way to improve the number of returning visitors, especially if you do some kind of retargeting, in which you aim your ads at people who have visited your website before. To be honest, I am not a big fan of retargeting myself. While doing marketing at Yoast, we never used tracking pixels to retarget people who visited our websites.

Even without retargeting, social media and social media ads could be a great way to get people to return to your site. Always ensure that the messages you send out via social media align with the messages on your website. 

SEO

If you have a strong presence in search engines and can pop up high in those SERPs with multiple keywords, that will increase the chances for people to return to your website. In their search for information, people will often use similar search queries. If you can dominate the search results for multiple queries, you could get people to visit your website multiple times.

Strong brand

The most important thing you can do to get people to return to your site is to create a strong brand. For your website to be remembered, make sure that your website has some strong branding. Make it stand out from other sites and competitors. Your colors, images, and content should be recognizable. Social media and SEO strategies will be more effective if people recognize your brand. Your audience needs to recognize it to have multiple encounters with your brand. Branding should be a priority.

Make sure to get the most out of your returning visitors by treating them like their VIPs. These visitors are the ones that’ll buy your product, the ones that’ll share your stories on their social media and the ones that’ll give you feedback on your website and your product.

Your visitors should have an excellent experience when they return to your website. They’ve been here before, making them very different from first-time visitors. The best way to do that is to offer your returning customers a tailor-made experience.

Do some research

To treat your returning customers to a tailored VIP experience, you’ll need to do some research. With what intention do return visitors generally come to your site? Do they enter via your homepage or another landing page? What do they do on your site? Which products are they interested in, which pages do they visit, and what content do they read or engage with? Your analytics will probably give you valuable insights. Don’t hesitate to offer an online questionnaire to return visitors and ask them about their intentions for visiting your site. Do some research to figure out what content would best fit returning visitors.

Personalize experiences

Once you’ve discovered what kind of content your returning visitors are looking for, offer them that content. Change some of the content on the page that they enter your site on to make it more appealing and helpful for returning visitors. You can easily create multiple versions of a page with PersonalizeWP. Your returning visitors can, for instance, be guided toward informational content, newsletter subscriptions, or their favorite products.

Check out more examples of personalizing content for different audiences and personas, and learn more about creating personalized content for your website.

Returning visitors should have your attention. They should be the focus of your marketing efforts. Adapting the content of your website to specific audiences will help you to engage returning visitors to the fullest. That’ll increase your conversion rates and your sales! So, let’s get that personalization started!

To get started, try PersonalizeWP for free with an instant demo!

While the free version provides great tools, upgrading to PersonalizeWP Pro unlocks advanced features like visitor profiles and lead scoring. These tools help you target high-quality opportunities and deliver personalized content when it matters most. Let’s get that personalization started today!