Capture more frequent visitors to your subscription website
Designing a good website isn’t easy.
Many interconnecting elements have to be correctly executed to achieve profitability. Even when your website is created, how can you know if it wouldn’t benefit from a tweak here or there?
One good indicator is how many repeat visitors you generate.
If your website is loaded with fresh content, easy to use, easy to read and generally a pleasurable experience, then you’re going to generate repeat visitors.
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Those repeat visitors do wonderful things for a free Portal subscription website, like increasing sellable advertising inventory and enriching your online community.
But if your website has meager content offerings, is confusing, has poor navigation or is rarely updated, it’s likely that no visitors will return, and they certainly won’t subscribe to your premium subscription websites, like your Magazine or Newsletter. Repeat visitor metrics come standard with most web analytics software, so you should already be aware of yours.
One way to help boost your repeat visitor count is to ensure that your subscription website has good “content webification.”
That means offering users content in more ways than text on a screen.
For example:
- Users buy books at Amazon because it offers a selection and an interactive capacity not available in any physical bookstore.
- eBay lets users interact in a way that wasn’t possible from traditional classified advertising or auctioneering.
- ConsumersReports.org makes 48 months of magazine content available in a searchable format, which is very differently from the same content delivered by the monthly magazine.
- Forbes.com offers thousands of new business stories to its users every day with searches and alert services to guide them to the content they want.
- eDiets helps users choose which information program is best for them and then communicates daily, automatically, with timely, personalized information and inspiration.
- AmericanGreetings.com can deliver a gift card across town or around the world in a matter of seconds.
Users today can watch videos, play games or listen to audio on many of their favorite topics, and websites that post new content in these platforms frequently get higher repeat visitor counts.
Be careful with content webification, though. You want to avoid adopting every new web gimmick that comes out.
Staying away from shiny object syndrome when webifying content
If you’re publishing information on tax legislation changes, your audience is probably not going to want updates on their mobile device, or to play a tax code game.
But they may want to listen to audio chapters of the updates if they don’t like to read.
The key is to avoid using technology because it seems cool. Instead, use technology that will enhance your customer’s experience with your products and turn them into frequent website visitors.
Another key to increasing repeat visitor counts has more to do with not driving away visitors than attracting them.
Your website should be easy to understand.
If your repeat visitor counts are dismal, it could be because your website’s labeling and language is confusing.
Your forum, for example, should be called “Forum,” or maybe “Discussion Board,” but not “Soapboxes” or “The Grapevine.”
How many first time visitors to a website will know what “Soapboxes” means?
People don’t visit a website because its areas are cleverly named. They visit a website because it’s loaded with valuable content.
The longer it takes users to find what they’re looking for on your website, the more likely they are to leave your website for a competitor.
So name the areas of your website clearly and give the visitors what they want as fast as possible and they will be more likely to return.
Do you have anything to add? Leave a comment.
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This article was originally published in 2007 and has been updated.
