Top Tips On Driving Repeat Visits To Your Website

Once you’ve successfully converted a website visitor into a paying customer, you automatically know three things about that person. They are as follows:

1. They like your products or they think someone else will like your products
2. They think your products are good value for money or worth spending their money on
3. They trust your site and the process from purchase to delivery

These three characteristics are the reason driving repeat visits to your site from previous paying customers can be advantageous. That being said, repeat visits will only be beneficial if you meet your part of the deal and provide the customer with good quality products and service.

Additionally, returning users (whether they purchased from your site or not) are usually far more engaged on a website than new users; they spend far longer browsing the products on offer, visit more pages in the process and convert at a much higher rate. However, the share of returning users is typically a lot lower than new users. Thus, if website owners worked to drive more returning users to their store, the site-wide engagement and conversion rates should improve.
We understand it can be difficult knowing the best way to drive users back to your site post-purchase so we’ve listed six easy ways we would recommend you do it!

Touch Base With Customers Through Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great tool for interacting one-on-one with your customers and keeping them engaged with your brand. Typically, email marketing is used to inform your customers of any news, new product lines, as well as discounts and offers to encourage them to revisit the site and persuade a purchase. By providing information that cannot be found on the site, it makes the customer feel as though they are ‘in the know’. This helps to make the customer feel somewhat special and increasingly establishes a relationship between the customer and brand.

How to collect email addresses:

Filling out an email address field is commonplace when completing an online purchase. However, sadly it is not as simple as adding these email addresses to a mailing list and away you go. The new GDPR legislation has made it more crucial than ever to ensure no personal data (including customer email addresses) is mistreated. Therefore, it is essential no email address is used for the purpose of marketing without given consent from the individual. Consent can be obtained easily through an ‘opt-in’ box on the checkout page or email addresses of website visitors can be collected easily through newsletter sign ups on the site – often in return for a reward such as a discount off their first purchase with you.

Reward Your Loyal Customers

Relating back to early studies on the correlation between incentive and motivation, people are far more motivated to behave in a certain way if there is a reward involved for doing so. By rewarding your loyal customers, they are far more likely to keep coming back to your site and repurchasing.

Consider implementing a loyalty programme:

Loyalty programmes often come with perks such as discounts and offers, special gifts or free shipping. While online loyalty programmes work in the same way as the commonly stamped physical cards you get in stores, the setup and management are different. For instance, users can either actively sign up to your loyalty programme or you can create a loyalty programme based on ‘expenditure tiers’ which upgrades users to higher level programmes when they reach spending thresholds, and those levels come with better perks and so on.

Offer personal acknowledgement:

If you recognise a set of customers or users that have gone above and beyond in their demonstration of brand loyalty, you can deepen this relationship and appreciation for the brand by thanking them personally either through a direct message, letter, gift or public post.

Launch an ‘insiders’ referral programme:

Referrals are an extremely powerful tool in helping to build a loyal audience. Why? Because people tend to trust recommendations from close friends and family more than they do businesses. If you offer an incentive for referrals, users will be much more likely to sing your praises helping to boost awareness of your brand and consequently traffic to the site.

Tailored Remarketing Ads

Remarketing lets you reach people who have visited your website previously but did not convert, or target previous customers when they are active online. As outlined at the start of the blog post, people who have bought from you previously are more likely to become a repeat customer and those who have visited your website are also more likely to revisit. Therefore, putting these ads in front of this engaged audience is extremely beneficial in driving traffic to the site as well as sales figures.

Marcus Wincott

Marketing Manager

Media Lounge

Losing potential customers at various points during the sales funnel has always been a problem for eCommerce businesses but as marketplaces become more crowded and consumer choice in most retail categories is so vast, remarketing to bring those potential customers back to the funnel has never been more important and has never been easier to execute.

Create a Good User Experience

Your website design and usability are two of the most vital factors that will influence how much time a user spends on your site and whether they’ll return. A clean, engaging design which is easy to use and navigate will go a long way in turning a one time user into a repeat visitor.

Website design:

Everyone will have their own preference when it comes to what constitutes a good website design but one thing we can collectively agree on is that a website should be clear and easy to understand. We recommend opting for a simplistic design with eye-catching colours, readable fonts and white space, steering clear of fancy animation and heavy blocks of text.

CJ Smith

Head Designer

Media Lounge

Producing a captivating design that is also effortless to use is not a straightforward task. We go through several design ideas and drafts until we reach a final piece that works for the brand look as well as the usability of the site – this process is essential for ongoing success

Website Usability:

There is now a certain level of customer service expected from an online store; users expect a website to be fast, work smoothly and be easy to follow. If a website falls short of simple usability expectations, the accessibility of the internet makes it extremely easy for a user to deny the site their time. Thus, it is not enough to simply have a website that looks good. We recommend implementing intuitive menus, clear calls to action and robust search capabilities to make for effortless user experience.

Plus, as of November 2016, the majority of users access the internet on mobile devices as opposed to desktop previously (BGR 2016). So it is now more important than ever that your website is mobile-friendly.

Personalise Your Website

Building on the need to provide a good user experience, personalising your website and offering a unique experience for each individual will make them feel even more special.

New highly personalised plugins such as Nosto allow customised landing pages to show based on the visitors recent activity on the site. By featuring tailored products specific to what that customer has previously looked at is a great way to keep that customer engaged with the site. If you require more information on personalised shopping experiences such as Nosto, feel free to contact our team and we’ll talk you through exactly how this could work for your business.

Showcase New And Popular Products Across The Site

An easy way to encourage repeat visits is to give your users a reason to come back to the site… and to keep coming back. Keeping the site fresh with new content on a regular basis and highlighting your most popular products will stimulate repeat visits.

Popular content is popular for a reason, so as long as it’s relevant we recommend you keep it in heavy rotation. Plus, having a section devoted to your most popular products gives off the impression you have a large audience, and if they enjoy the content, it adds a sense of community amongst your users.

To conclude, follow these six easy ways to increase the number of repeat visits to your site and you can capitalise on the higher engagement and conversion rates of returning users!

If you need more guidance with any of the tips listed, get in touch with our team and we’ll be happy to offer our resources.