Getting more visitors to your website is the first step in a successful online marketing strategy. But that’s just the beginning. Getting repeat visitors (and in reality, repeat customers) is what will make you money. In this article, we’ll go over why you’ll want to cater your site to repeat visitors and a variety of ways to get your visitors to keep coming back for more.

Web visitors who land on your site to putz around for a few seconds and then never return are bad news. If they’re not spending quality time exploring your website, then they’re likely not considering your services either. Attracting website traffic just to see them bounce away without any meaningful engagement or exchange means you’re losing out on a lot of potential money in your pocket.

While we typically think of a successful website as one that gets many visitors, if the site cannot get those visitors to return, then the site’s success can be called into question. Rarely do you want visitors who just pop in and then high-tail it out of there. To have success in online business, we need visitors (and customers) who will keep coming back for more. Although catering to new and returning visitors may seem like two sides of the same coin, there are specific strategies you can use to make sure new visitors turn into repeats, and repeats keep returning. .

How to make sure visitors have a chance of returning?

Is there something on your site that gives people some value even if they don’t buy anything — such as a newsletter, blog or free resources? This is what’s known as a “Lead Magnet” and comes in very handy if your potential customers go through a long buying cycle before making a purchase.

A lead magnet is a piece of valuable, free content that’s intended to attract the attention of potential customers and clients, and encourage them to provide their contact information in exchange for it. Your lead magnet could take many different forms. It could be a whitepaper, an email course, a video tutorial, a discount code or a cheat sheet. The key point is that it should be something useful that potential leads would be interested in trading their contact information for.

In marketing terms, a lead magnet is for further qualifying the buyer. It’s intended to hint at the value that your service or firm can bring to the prospective buyer, by offering the customer something that solves one of their pain points at no initial cost to them. For example, if you’re selling stone masonry services for restaurants and bars, your lead magnet could be a one-pager on how to attract diners to outdoor patio seating, which lists all the ways restaurants can make their patio spaces attractive and memorable.

The idea is to give away something that’s useful enough that leads will feel compelled to provide their details in exchange for it.

Providing a reason to come back, again and again, can be as simple as having great content (such as interesting articles with useful information) on your site. Many users will look for a blog on a website because they are interested in hearing your advice and guidance on certain topics, from a centralized and trusted source. A blog is a great way to engage with your audience by sharing long-form pieces of useful content, showing off your expertise and deep industry knowledge. In this way, we use blogs to increase trust between you and your visitors. If you write useful articles, this will create a better perception of your business and provide visitors with an element of proof that you have the skillset to meet their needs.

Another reason why blogs are so important is that they help to bring in organic search engine traffic. Search engines always rank sites higher if they contain lots of quality content that’s both relevant to a user’s search query and engaging to previous readers.  If your website is struggling to get traffic from search engines like Google and Bing, a blog may be just the ticket to start a trend in the right direction.

BONUS TIP: Make sure to allow for comments on your website’s blog and encourage readers to share their thoughts, opinions, and questions surrounding your blog article topic. Not only will this give blog readers an outlet for their opinions, but it will also encourage visitors to return to your site more often so that they can keep up with what is being discussed in the blog comments themselves.

What are 5 strategies to encourage repeat visits?

Below, I’ve outlined four strategies that you can use to encourage repeat visits to your website.

1. Add social media share buttons

These buttons allow your visitors to share your content with their networks (friends, followers, etc.). If they like your content enough to share it, they are more likely to come back for more! In addition, the act of sharing the content with their peers will allow their network a chance to view your content as well. This organic social sharing makes for a great way to gain new visitors and remind repeat visitors what your website has to offer.

2. Add a Newsletter Signup

Like the Social Sharing Buttons, a newsletter is a fantastic free way to get visitors to come back to your website to view your content. A newsletter signup form is as simple as a one-line input where visitors drop their email address, agreeing to receive your business’ expertise in the form of written content. A great place for a newsletter signup opportunity is at the top or bottom of each blog post on your site. You could even set your newsletter to automatically send emails to your subscriber list when you publish new blog content. A blog is great for attracting new readers but emailing them regularly will keep them coming back for more!

3. Giveaways & Contests

You can increase repeat website traffic by offering something in addition to sales pitches and information, such as contests, special offers, giveaways, or promotions. Giveaways and contests are nothing new to the marketing world, they’ve been a stable way to attract new customers for decades. However, with the rise of social media, giveaways and contests now have unprecedented reach to millions of potential buyers and interested consumers. 

Many entrepreneurs have the misconception that giveaways are completely one-sided, the winner receives your product/service for free and in return you get nothing. But that’s far from the truth. A successful contest or giveaway should provide you with a list of potential leads, people who are interested enough in your product or service offering to provide their email address, some contact info, or at the very least; a follow on your business’s social media account. In this way, you are exchanging one product or service for the opportunity of interested consumers to self-identify themselves to you. 

While contests can be utilized for gaining new customers, it’s also useful to get your previous customers or leads to flair up their interest in your service offerings once again when they see all their friends competing to win your giveaway. 

4. Strategic Retargeting Advertisements

One of the most effective paid options to getting visitors to return to your website is through retargeting ads. These advertisements utilize the cookies that your visitors accumulate when browsing the internet, in particular your website. When they leave your website, you can set up ads to show them your products, services, or any other information you’d like as they visit other websites that support ads, such as blogs and social media. 

Retargeting ads are super effective since they only serve up targeted ads to users who have already visited your site, showing that the user was interested in learning about your business or services at one point in time. You can also set up your retargeted ads to only show for a specific period of time after they visited your site. Allowing you to further customize and optimize the messaging that these previous visitors see and giving you a greater chance of reeling them back in for more. 

Here are a few links to help you set up retargeting ads on Facebook, Linkedin, Google, and more.

5. Create a Customer Loyalty Program

If return visitors are good, then a return customer is even better. Earning new customers for your business can be time-consuming and expensive. Once you have a stable amount of customers in your little black book (or hopefully, your Customer Relationship Management system), it’s time to ditch those customer acquisition costs and focus on the sweet nectar of repeat customers. The best way to get your customers to use your services, again and again, is to install a customer loyalty program on your website, allowing users who book appointments, pay for services, or purchase products to earn rewards, cash back, or discounts. 

Customer loyalty programs can pay off in a big way. A Landscaping business, for instance, could offer a loyalty program where if the customer books 8 Lawn Care appointments in a year, they get 50% off their Fall Cleanup. The goal is to get a customer into the habit of purchasing services from your business and then receiving a reward for their loyalty (in this case, a 50% off discount on a different service offering).

Takeaway: Attracting visitor interest is the first step in encouraging repeat visits.

If you’re just starting out, the more traffic you get, the better. It means people like what you’re offering enough to promote it on social media, found on Google, or your customers are talking about you to their friends. But keeping them coming back for more—that might take a little extra work.

Hopefully, you’re now better equipped with some actionable tips you can take to start increasing visitor interest in your website. As always, many of these tips will require some effort on your part (particularly learning how to effectively showcase your content), but if you’re willing to make the effort, there are plenty of ways you can attract more visitors to your site. A few simple changes—like making it easy to contact you or offering users a chance to sign up for your newsletter or socials—can have a big payoff in the long run.