With the explosive growth of the e-commerce market, companies must design, build, maintain, and market functional websites to attract, engage, and convert visitors. By expanding the scope of your website development efforts to encourage repeat visitors, you get a greater return on the time and money you invest in marketing your site. Many of the visitors that come to your site leave without becoming customers, but if you can get them to return, you have improved chances of closing the sale.

You can measure your visitor retention rate by comparing the number of visitors who leave and return to the total number of visitors. The ratio tells you how well your website engaged users. When you have an attractive, site that provides value to your market, more visitors will return to benefit from what you offer them. A high repeat visitor rate (RVR) means that you have succeeded in connecting with your audience. In most cases, a successful website will have an RVR of seventy percent or more.

In many ways, website visitor retention works like customer retention. Businesses spend more to attract new customers than they do to retain existing customers. Similarly, attracting new visitors to your website usually costs more than the cost of having them return. So, by increasing your RVR, you improve the efficiency of your marketing program.

Many people who visit a website for the first time have just begun the shopping process, so they want to gather information to guide their selection. When visitors return, they have a higher degree of purchase readiness, because they have completed their research. Besides having a higher conversion rate, repeat visitors have a greater rate of interaction with a website than that of newcomers. Such communication includes sharing products or a brand on social media, communicating with company representatives via live chat or email, leaving product reviews, or recommending the site to others.

Now that you recognize the value of attracting repeat visitors to your site use the following tips to improve your visitor retention.

Use paid PPC, SOCIAL, SEO, and SEM campaigns to bring more people to your website. As part of the mix, you will increase the number of visitors with whom you connect, and the number of visitors who will return. Of course, you need to make sure that visitors find something useful when they arrive at your site. Otherwise, they will just leave.

Use your favorite website analytics program to compare how many people arrive at your site and leave without any interaction with your total number of visitors. When you have a high bounce rate, you know that your website does not meet the needs of your visitors. When you act to reduce your bounce rate, you improve the quality and appeal of your site setting the stage for more repeat visits. Factors that affect your bounce rate include design, usability, page-load speed, and responsiveness. Following the best SEO practices can also reduce your bounce rate by making sure your site connects with the online search users that have the most relevance to your business.

Make your site easy to navigate, and provide plenty of opportunities for interaction. Deploy features such as wish lists and forums, and add tools that make sharing your content, products, and brand on social media.

With the explosive growth of the e-commerce market, companies must design, build, maintain, and market functional websites to attract, engage, and convert visitors. By expanding the scope of your website development efforts to encourage repeat visitors, you get a greater return on the time and money you invest in marketing your site. Many of the visitors that come to your site leave without becoming customers, but if you can get them to return, you have improved chances of closing the sale.

You can measure your visitor retention rate by comparing the number of visitors who leave and return to the total number of visitors. The ratio tells you how well your website engaged users. When you have an attractive, site that provides value to your market, more visitors will return to benefit from what you offer them. A high repeat visitor rate (RVR) means that you have succeeded in connecting with your audience. In most cases, a successful website will have an RVR of seventy percent or more.

Embed social media tools on your website that encourages visitors to follow your company on Facebook and other social media sites. Followers get notifications of updates that give your visitors a steady stream of information that can eventually lead them back to your site.

Remarketing gets your brand in front of website visitors after they have left. This type of advertising reminds them of their experience on your site and often prompts their return. You can begin remarketing by sending notifications to your followers on Facebook and Twitter. You do search engine and site remarketing using Google AdWords and similar advertising services. You should also implement cart remarketing, a process that reminds people of items they have left in their shopping cart on your site. The National Retail Federation discovered that 26 percent of shoppers contacted by cart remarketing return to complete a sale.

Your website revenue will steadily increase along with your visitor retention rate. Maximize the positive attributes of your site and make interaction easy and fun. When you do, you will reap the rewards in the form of reduced conversion costs and a better return on your online investment.