Attracting lots of new visitors to your website is great. But you know what’s better? Enticing them to return. Because if they return, it means they’re interested in what you’re selling so you have a higher chance of turning them into customers.

In a study by Barilliance about new vs. returning customers, they found that returning visitors:

• Added items to carts 65% more than first-time visitors
• Converted 73% more than first-time visitors
• Spent 16% more per transaction

There are lots of other statistics that prove that returning visitors are much more valuable to a business than first-time visitors. You’re probably already familiar with one of the most popular one says that it costs 5x more to acquire new customers than it does to retain current ones.

So, if you’re still investing a big chunk of your time and resources into attracting new visitors to your site and too little on getting them to come back, it may be time to change your strategy.

Use the five tips in this post to persuade more visitors to come back to your site so you spend less money attracting new ones and earning more by turning those existing visitors into customers.

1. Speed up your site on any device

Imagine a user runs a Google search on their smartphone looking for a “flower shop delivery”. Your site shows up in the top results. It looks trustworthy and relevant to their search so they click to visit your site, hoping to browse through your collection and maybe place an order. But the site keeps loading and nothing shows up. What happens next? The user gets fed up of waiting for your site to load so they hit the browser’s back button to click on the next result.

That’s a visitor you’ve made a bad first impression on and a potential customer you’ve lost who is unlikely to come back to your site.

So if you want to prevent that from ever happening, and we’re guessing you do, here’s what we’d recommend:

• Check your site’s speed to ensure it loads quickly, otherwise you risk losing 40% of your visitorswho are unlikely to revisit your site and give it a second chance. Don’t know how to check your site’s speed? Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to see where you stand and what you can do to address the issues on your site.
• Make sure your site displays properly on all devices. Some visitors are checking out your site from their smartphones while on the go, while others are checking it out from their PCs while they’re at the office or at home. Your site needs to be responsive and work properly no matter the device your visitors are using to get on your site.

Need more advice? Read our post to learn more about how you can get your website up to speed.

2. Make your pages compelling and relevant to visitors’ searches

If a visitor lands on one of the pages on your site and finds that it’s in no way relevant to their search, or that it’s cluttered and confusing, they’ll leave in seconds.

To keep first-time visitors on your site and entice them to return, you need to make sure your landing pages meet their expectations.

So, start by making a list with your most popular landing pages, meaning the pages users land on when they first visit your site. Then review each to ensure they provide visitors with relevant content and a great user experience.

At a minimum, you should make sure that every landing page has:

• A headline that makes it obvious what that page is about.
• A meta title and description that are properly optimised with relevant keywords and tell users what the page is about. Learn more about meta titles and description by reading the “Making use of meta data” section in this post.
• A powerful call-to-action that tells users what step they need to take next.
• Content that’s useful and compelling so visitors will want to take action.
• A simple design that makes it easy for the visitor to read and scan the content, and quickly find the information they’re looking for.

For more tips and advice, check out our post on five landing page mistakes to avoid and how to fix them to prevent visitors from leaving your site.

3. Create and share helpful content on a regular basis

Want people to return to your site time and again? Then you need to give them a good reason. Great content that answers their questions, addresses their concerns and helps them to fix a problem or achieve a goal is what entices most users to return to a site.

So, consider starting a blog, if you don’t have one already, and make it a habit to regularly publish great content that’s useful and relevant to your target audience.

Fitbit’s blog does a fantastic job at this. They know that users who come to their site are probably researching the best ways to get moving, eat well and lose weight or get fit. So they focus their blog on just that.

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They have different sections where they share fitness tips and routines, health and nutrition advice, motivation tips as well as success stories from people within their community who are doing a great job at keeping fit and achieving their goals.

When you create useful content that helps your audience achieve their goals, whether that’s to look better, earn more money or become successful at something, then your site will become a destination for them, one that they’ll keep coming back to time and again.

4. Give visitors different ways to engage with your content

People like to consume content in different formats. Some prefer to read while others prefer to listen to podcasts or to watch videos. Take this into account when you create content.

While written content is helpful in many ways as you get to optimise it so it’s easier to find at the top of the search engine results pages, that doesn’t mean you should only focus on that.

In fact, images, audio and video content can also be optimised and indexed by Google.

For example, with video you can simply add a text transcription and place it under the video, like we did on our blog in this post about “Developing your small business brand”

So, don’t be afraid to mix up your content forms and see what works best for your audience.

5. Build an email list

Email is still one of the most popular, affordable and effective ways to keep in touch with your audience. So make sure to add a subscribe box or pop up on your site and/or blog and entice visitors to sign up to hear from you.

This is a great way to get first-time visitors to come back to your site by delivering your content directly to their inboxes. You can achieve this by using a professional email marketing tool.

The key to achieving results with email is to ensure you only deliver useful and relevant content and offers that your subscribers are interested in.

Also, if you want your emails to be taken seriously and also prevent them from ending up in the spam folder, we’d recommend using an email address that’s personalised to your domain name. In this post you can find all the information you need about creating a professional email address that shows you mean business.

Read these articles for tips and advice on how to get started with email marketing:

• Beginner’s guide to building your first email list
• How to build meaningful relationships with customers using email marketing

Wrapping up

There are so many studies that show that returning visitors are cheaper to retain and bring more value to a business than constantly attracting new visitors.

So, if you’re looking for ways to turn those first-time visitors into returning visitors that you can then nurture into buying from you, we’re hoping the tips in this post will help you to achieve your goals.