What You Do For Your Business Online Matters | Part 2: Introduction to Driving Return Traffic and Keeping them on Your Website
Last month, we tackled referral traffic and how it works with your online marketing program. This month, we’ll tackle what you need to know about bringing visitors back to your site and keep them there.
Your Goal in Online Marketing:
Establish Your Business as the Most Relevant and Obvious Choice Online
Your strategy for achieving this goal is to build a social media machine that sends traffic to a great website with a memorable brand and loads of great content.
You’ll measure this by:
- Website Traffic from Referral Sites (Visit last month’s article for more information)
- Return Visits to the Site
- Length of Time Spent on the Website
Goal: Website Traffic from Organic Search
Return Traffic to the Site
Now that we’ve talked about getting visitors to the site through referral traffic, let’s talk about getting them to come back more than once. Why is this important? Because 90% of website visitors are only there to do research. They’re not ready to buy, not until the second or third time they stop by in many cases.
Converting this website traffic into return visits is part of a marketing theory called funnels. The basics are that you cast a wide net and get as much initial traffic to the site as possible – ToFu (top of the funnel) and find ways to incentivize visitors to come back (MoFu or Middle of the Funnel). As visitors dig deeper and deeper into your website content, the more likely they’ll find something relevant that speaks to them and they’ll turn into a customer (BoFu – Bottom of the Funnel). Getting more return visitors is how you work customers through the funnel.
How to Get More Returning Visitors
- Email Marketing
- Social Media
- Retargeting Advertising
Email Marketing
One of the best things you can do is start collecting email addresses. Your customers, your leads, your partners, your vendors . . . a great goal of an early-stage business’s marketing strategy is to grow your email list. Emailing your list regularly with links to your website for more information will keep people coming back to the site regularly to check things out which will help your rankings and will speed up the decision-making process for potential customers. Email is perfect for MoFu communication. Depending on the kind of business you have, you might have to set up several email campaigns to get what you need to move from MoFu to BoFu.
Types of emails you can send:
- Promotions and Discounts
- Low risk offers “Download this for free or cheap”
- Educational pieces
- Newsletters/Community Engagement emails
When you do email marketing as a part of your program, you’re reinforcing your brand, getting them to come back to the site (and maybe today’s the day they call), and positioning your business as engaged, organized and a thought-leader in many cases.
Myths about Email:
- People hate email: Yes, I hate email too, but I still would rather get promotions through email than in the mail or solicited over the phone. If something catches my eye, I’ll look at it.
74% of email users would rather get commercial communication over email. - I will annoy my customers: Nope. If they love you, they’ll love getting an email from your business. If they don’t want to get the email anymore, they’ll unsubscribe and that’s no big deal.
Best Practices:
- Send emails early in the morning, at lunch or later in the day. The best time to send emails according to the latest stats is between 4 PM and 8 PM.
- Don’t purchase lists of emails and email them. Purchased email lists are not effective unless you hit them up one at a time with a personal email of introduction.
Retargeting
Retargeting is a form of advertising that sends digital ads to people that have visited your website before from the same IP address. Retargeting ads are the ones that give you that creepy feeling like the brand or website is following you. You can set-up retargeting through Facebook and through Google’s display network. It requires a separate budget and strategy, but the click cost is low compared to new traffic clicks so it can be an affordable way to do online advertising.
If you focus your retargeting message on MoFu communication, you’ll have more success driving those return visitors to the site.
Social Media
Finally, one of the best ways to drive return user traffic is through social media. People who choose to follow your content, when you share your blogs and link to your website, then you’ll draw those people in to see you again and again and again.
It’s another important reason why a consistent presence and social advertising is so important to a complete online marketing plan.
Time Spent on the Website
What’s the point of any of this if people don’t want to spend time on your website? If your goal in Online Marketing is to “Establish Your Business as the Most Relevant and Obvious Choice Online” then your website is the beginning and the end of your strategy.
Remember the Hub and Spoke Model? Remember the Funnel Model?
These effective models are dependent on your business having a great website. If your visitors visit and then leave right away, then your website isn’t working as an effective marketing tool. It’s not worth the time, money and energy to have a site if no one wants to look at it or read it.
How to Get People to Spend Time of Your Site:
- Good Brand and Design
- Good Content
- Good Technical Set-Up
Our attention span is currently less than a goldfish. Goldfish have an attention span of 9 seconds. Humans are clocking in at 8 seconds. Branding, look and message go a long way to getting people to remember your business and hiring you.
Human Attention Span: 8 Seconds
Goldfish Attention Span: 9 Seconds
Make a Brand Impression: 10 Seconds
Give your visitor a reason to stay on your site for at least 10 seconds with good design and solid branding.
Good Content
Again, remember your game here is relevancy. What you put on your site should address what people are looking for. The easiest way to find out what kind of content your site should have is to ask a customer!
- What makes your business special?
- What are the top 3-5 things you want people to know about your business right away?
- What information is important in making a decision?
- Is it pricing?
- Is it a location?
- Is it more education on how it all works?
- Is it a complete list of services?
- What kind of content do your competitors have? Not the bad ones, the ones you’re aspiring to?
You don’t have to start with a lot of content, but you need to be able to add new pages and content regularly. The kind of content you should add to your site include:
- New pages
- Blogs
- News
- Videos
- Photography
By the way, if you want people to stay on your site longer, a video is a good cheat tool. You’ll buy more time with the visitor with a video because they stay on the site watching. Another cheat tool is professional, original photography because it can tell the story about your business without a lot of words. It’ll keep people on the site longer, I can take a very simple site look incredibly professional.
Writing Your Content:
- Strive for 500-950 words
- Title your pages using keywords that you think people are using
- Repeat the keyword phase in the first paragraph – this reinforces to the reader that the page has the content they were looking for
- Use tables and bullets to make complicated content easier to read
- Use sub-headers to make your content more readable (use other keywords here if you can)
- Include a call to action in your content
Good Technical Set-Up
- Mobile Responsive
- Site Speed
- Technical SEO Issues Solved
Mobile Responsive Design is a website whose design responds to the screen size of the device. It’s the same content and overall design as the desktop website, but it’s altered so that you’re visitors find what they need on a smaller screen. 52% of website traffic comes from a device so it’s more important that your mobile experience is flawless.
In addition to ensuring a great mobile experience, you have to tackle your technical SEO issues, including site speed:
Site Load Time Before You Lose 32% of your clickers: 7 seconds
Human Attention Span: 8 Seconds
Goldfish Attention Span: 9 Seconds
Make a Brand Impression: 10 Seconds
If you can get your load time down to 2 seconds, then people will visit 5 pages on your site, at least. If it takes too long for page to load, then it’s frustrating and people will leave.
The most important ways to ensure good site speed is:
- Make sure you use appropriately sized photos in the right resolution
- Have an SEO company with an experienced developer remove the unnecessary code that is preventing your site from loading
- Make sure the hosting environment is fast and safe – don’t bargain shop for the cheapest option
Finally, make sure you don’t have any errors! All of these little details about how your site runs add up. Google keeps an eye on all of these items. Google knows that if it sends traffic to a site with a poor experience, people will eventually not trust Google’s search results. They care about the quality of your site.
Your Goal in Online Marketing:
Establish Your Business as the Most Relevant and Obvious Choice Online
Your strategy for achieving this goal is to build a social media machine that sends referral traffic, returning visitor traffic to a great website with a memorable brand and loads of great content
You’ll measure this by:
- Website Traffic from Referral Sites (Visit last month’s article for more information)
- Return Visits to the Site
- Length of Time Spent on the Website
Goal: Website Traffic from Organic Search
Result: Increase in Sales and Business Growth!
Companies large and small struggle with just getting started, but let me leave you with a quote by Seth Godin, a well-known published business and marketing author:
“The cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing.” – Seth Godin