Repeat traffic - don't waste what you've got!

16 February, 2010

• content
• Engagement
• information architecture

Michael Bartlett

Category: Online Marketing

With so much focus on Google ranking and unique visitors, sometimes it’s easy to forget about one of the most important types of traffic to your website - repeat visitors. Repeat visitors, like repeat customers, are a fertile source of enquiry, referral and business. If someone is visiting your site for the second or third time, the likelihood is that they’re interested in your business and want to find out more!

Here are some general tips for increasing your repeat traffic.

Keep your site updated.

This is a general rule that has many benefits, one of which is encouraging return traffic. Blogs, news posts, product specials, company updates, product updates or photo galleries are all examples of the kind of dynamic content that could encourage visitors to return at a later date. Even something as simple as keeping your customers updated when you hire new staff can have a huge influence on your relationship with your clients and greatly increase the chances they’ll come back to your site.

Remember though, the golden rule when creating these kinds of website functions is that if you create it, you must update it! It does far more damage to your credibility to have a blog where the last post was 18 months ago than to not have one at all. Always examine the time required to update these before you commit to adding them to your site, and make sure you schedule time in your week to maintain them.

Engage your website visitors.

In the same way it’s not a good idea to ignore customers that walk into your store, it’s generally not a good idea to ignore customers who interact with your website! Make the enquiry or question process as simple and easy as possible, and always remember to respond to website enquiries.

Nominate a staff member and email address to receive enquiry notifications, and monitor to make sure that staff member is replying to all requests in a timely manner. Even if your quoting or request process takes a day or two to put together a full response to their request, send them an email reply straight away confirming their enquiry and nominating a time they will get back to them with a full response.

Ensure you have depth of content - let them explore!

Don’t give away everything at once! Apart from being generally bad practice on a usability front, giving away all your information on the homepage is a sure-fire way to kill click-through rates. Let your homepage give a general overview of your products and services, but lead your customers to click through and drill deeper into your site to read content. In all likelihood, they’ll have a quick read, then bookmark your site for later (or even send it on to a co-decision maker to check).

Cascade your levels of detail throughout the site so that your customers are always in control of how much information they’re being exposed to at any time. On the other hand, nobody likes a site that is too in-depth with a navigation structure you’d need a map to negotiate, so it’s important to find a balance between detail and brevity. A well-considered Information Architecture strategy is vital to this.

Make it easy for them to share

Every business owner understands the power of word-of-mouth marketing. If a client sees something on your site they like, or wish to tell others about, let them! There is a vast array of sharing and publishing tools available to your average website user, and it’s in your interest to add them to your site where appropriate.

Do you operate a blog? Add a button to let users share your post on Facebook or Twitter. Do you operate a stock-list of products? Allow users to email a product to a friend or spouse for confirmation before they purchase. Do you have large knoweldgebase-style articles on your products? Make sure your print.css files are all in order, so your users can print out the information for review and sharing later.

Try a few of these on your site and see what difference it makes. Work with what you've got to get the most from the customers you already have. Find our more about our ideas on marketing your site to current clients in our section on online marketing.