Bringing traffic to your website can be difficult even at the best of times. Therefore, it’s vital you put measures in place to help you reconnect with visitors once they’ve left your site. Otherwise, all that effort of generating more traffic to your website is wasted.
Ways of getting those visitors to return after they’ve left is the topic we’re covering in this article. After all, no matter how excellent your membership program and how enticing your marketing copy, there’s a good chance first-time visitors to your site won’t be quite ready to take the plunge into membership. Often, they need a few visits before they’re sure that what you’re offering is the best option for them.
Why Work on Bringing Visitors Back to Your Membership Site?
Once a visitor has signed up and becomes a member, they’re sure to return to your site whenever they want to access your content. Plus, you’ll be able to send them notifications via the email address they used to sign up each time you have something to share with them.
However, for visitors who don’t become members, by default, you have no way of contacting them and encouraging them to return to your site.
The Stats: How Many Site Visits Before a Potential Member Signs Up?
Although the numbers vary depending on your source and the type of website being studied, shoppers reportedly visit a website nine times before deciding to buy.
If you’re using Google Analytics to optimize your membership site, you may be able to track this yourself using the Sessions to Transaction metric. If not, it’s safe to assume not all new visitors are signing up immediately.
Membership sites are different than ecommerce stores, of course, but even if it takes potential new members two visits before they’re ready to sign up, it’s well worth putting in the effort to facilitate their return for that all-important second, third, or fourth visit.
If you’re working on getting more traffic to your membership website using SEO and social media marketing, it makes sense to do all you can to encourage new visitors to return to your site at a later date.
So let’s look at how to do just that in our guide on how to increase return visits to your WordPress membership site.
Use the MemberPress Reminders Feature
One pretty cool feature of the MemberPress plugin is its ability to send out automated emails on certain triggers.
For example, you can increase membership retention rates by automatically notifying members when their subscription is about to end or when their payment method is expiring.
However, you can also use the automated email reminders in MemberPress to contact potential new members who’ve abandoned the sign-up process. Perhaps their browser crashed midway through signing up or they didn’t have their payment details on hand. Or maybe they were called away before they joined your site and forgot to return.
For whatever reason, abandoned shopping carts are a real problem in the world of ecommerce, with some studies putting the rate of shopping cart abandonment as high as 80 percent. This could be affecting your membership site, too.
However, by setting up a quick reminder using the Signup Abandoned trigger in MemberPress, your site will automatically send a custom email to anyone who got as far as entering their email address but didn’t complete the registration process.
When it comes to set-and-forget ways to encourage potential new members to come back to your site, it doesn’t get much better than this.
Use an Enticing Lead Magnet to Create an Email List
Another tried-and-tested way to keep in contact with website visitors is to set up an email list. Then, once a visitor has joined your list and entered your funnel, you can send them emails whenever you want.
The best email marketing services make it easy to create a sequence of messages that are automatically sent to new subscribers in the days after they join your list. This allows you to slowly drip useful content to potential new members before asking them to return to your site and sign up.
Don’t forget that in order to encourage visitors to join your list, you’ll have to offer them a reward for doing so. Our guide to lead magnets and email optin incentives should help you come up with an effective reward that turns more of your visitors into email subscribers.
Promote Your Social Media Profiles
Encouraging visitors to follow you on social media is another great way to maintain a connection with them once they’ve left your website.
Whether you’re on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, there’s a good chance a portion of your audience is using at least one of these platforms. If you make it as easy as possible for them to follow you on social media, you increase the chances of them finding their way back to your site, either through direct messaging or seeing something interesting you’ve shared with your followers.
Remember to display a link to your membership site on your social media profile, and whichever platform you choose, be sure to post on a regular basis to increase the chances of your content being seen by your target audience. A free WordPress plugin, like Social Icons Widget, can help you quickly add buttons that link to your profiles on all the main social networks.
Add a Blog to Your Website
The more content you publish on your website, the greater the chance someone will find your site via search engines, like Google. Not only that, but publishing a steady stream of interesting articles gives visitors a reason to come back and see what you’ve published next. Visitors may even subscribe to your RSS feed and follow your blog in an app like Feedly.
Adding a blog to your membership site, enabling comments on your blog posts, and taking the time to respond to readers can also help bring visitors back to your website. Plugins and services like Comment Reply Email Notification or Disqus ensure that anyone who leaves a comment is informed when a reply has been published. This not only reminds them of your site but also gives them a reason to return.
Facebook Remarketing
Another way to reconnect with your audience once they’ve left your website is to use Facebook remarketing. If you’ve ever been to an online shop only to then start seeing adverts for that store on social media later on, you’re looking at remarketing, or retargeting, in action.
It is something you can also easily implement on your website. And you don’t need to spend much to get started, either. Once you start seeing an ROI on your campaigns, such as increased membership sign ups, you can begin investing more in this form of social media marketing.
If you’d like to know how to get started with this type of advertising, check out this guide on how to create Facebook remarketing campaigns for WordPress. It will have you up and running in no time.
Final Thoughts
We hope these tips will help you keep visitors coming back to your website until they are ready to join your membership program.
In addition to using the MemberPress reminders features, creating an email list, and using social media, you can also check out our guides on the best membership site marketing tactics to grow your audience and how to turn more of your free visitors into paid members.
Are you ready to implement a system that brings more of your one-time visitors back to your membership site? Let us know in the comments below.
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