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Retention

DEPENDENCY

You want the visitor to reach the state where they become dependent upon your web site for the service you offer whether it be information or the sale of a product.  This is a "phase transition" from a state of NEGOTIATION to a state of DEPENDENCY.  This is when the visitor imparts responsibility onto your web site.  So if you offer advice on how to fix plumbing leaks then the visitor now views you as being responsible for any references to plumbing leaks. 

LATENCY AND RECENCY

Latency is the average time between visits for all of your web site visitors.  Recency is the time between the most recent visit and the last visit.

For example the average time between return visits on your site is 3 days.  Latency = 3. Those customers who have not visited within the last 3 days have a recency greater than 3. 

Where RECENCY is greater than LATENCY there is higher probability of you losing those visitors for ever.  You should attempt to re-engage them through email shots, invitations and special offers.

RATE OF EMAIL CONTACT

How often should you email your known visitor audience?  This is in dispute.  Some say you should email them as frequently as possible i.e. every day.  Others say that is too frequent and will irate some of your visitors.

The relationship between LATENCY and RECENCY described above should be used as a trigger point for most email communications.  Visitors returning to site within the average latency value do not require additional stimulus.  Those visitors with recency beyond the average latency do need to be targeted with promotional emails.

Regular newsletters and reports do not need to be regulated based upon latency and recency values.  These should be sent whenever relevant fresh news and report data is available and needs distributing.

If you have constantly updating information or prices then an email alert service is a great way of retaining visitor interest.  Allow your visitors to enter search terms that relate to their interest and provide an alert service that emails them at regular interest when content on your site changes containing those search terms.

PRIVACY AND TRUST

In order to establish trust between the web site owner and the user, the web site privacy policy should ensure that visitor contact details, account login details and order records are securely stored.  User ids and passwords should ideally be stored in an encrypted fashion on a database rather than merely held in easy to read text files.  Email addresses and locations should also be stored within a secure database to prevent hackers from stealing these contact details and using them in spamming techniques.  Personal data other than contact details is regulated by data protection laws within your jurisdiction.

BOOKMARKS

Visitors will freely decide whether to bookmark one of your web pages or not.  Encouraging them to do so rarely succeeds.  Having a page bookmarked is an ideal way of retaining visitor traffic.  The bookmark will be highlighted with a default browser icon.  This can be highlighted by using a small image called a favicon.ico file.  This is a small 32x32 pixel image which you place in the root directory of your web site.  Once there it is automatically loaded up to the visitors web browser and is an ideal way of making your bookmark stand out.

There is no direct way of knowing which of your pages have been bookmarked but the  Direct Traffic report on your web server stats will include all bookmarked pages.  Visitors will be accessing these pages directly rather than through a search engine or pay per click advert.  These pages have high value to your visitors and you should ensure they are always available.

INVITATIONS

Email invitations to your web site can be used to re-engage return visitors.  This could be an invitation to view a video, take part in a poll, read an article or take advantage of a special discount. 

Invitations should be SINCERE.  Do not shout at the audience but invite them as you would invite a guest into your own home.  Make it sound like a one to one invitation.  Do not make it sound as if you are calling out to a crowd.

Following an email shot keep a record of how many emails have been bounced back to you.  A bounce occurs when either the email address no longer exists or there is a fault on the recipient's email server.  If an email addresses has bounced three times then withdraw it from your future email shots.

NEWSLETTERS

Subscription to news letters should be voluntary not forced upon the visitor.  Newsletters should contain worthwhile articles to read and follow the established method of rating content used in media publications. 

Each news article could be rated on the following 5 levels:

Accessible - how easy the article is to understand.
Believable - how believable the news content is.
Comical - the amusement and entertainment value within the news article.
Dramatic - the dramatic value within the news article.
Evidence -  how much evidence is provided within the news article.

USER ACCOUNTS

A user account incorporating username and password login method are the standard method of identifying an individual.    Once logged in their use of your web site can be intricately monitored by storing values of each action they take in a database. 

For example if you want to know how often each user access your online store then you can track this by updating a record you store on a database every time the visit a web page on the store.  You could also ask them for any individual preferences which you could then store on your database and use it to deliver content designed for that user.  If you ran an online pet supplies store this provides you with the opportunity to ask each visitor which type of pet of they own, what are their pet's names and whether they suffer from infections or pests.  This information would then enable you to display products that directly benefit that visitor's pets. 

FOREIGN LANGUAGES

I would strongly recommend the addition of a link to a language translation service on your web site.  These are free services that will translate your web page into a wide range of other languages automatically.

SIGN UP AND CONTACT FORMS

Designing user entry forms is a balance between gathering enough information for your purposes and not asking too much of your visitor's patience.  Ask for the minimum amount of information to achieve what you want.  Be careful in determining which fields are mandatory and which are optional.  Many visitors will be very wary of providing their telephone number or home address.  Age and gender information falls within data protection legislation and must be stored securely. 

Wording is also crucial.  Asking for a visitor's Title can lead to some funny responses from the expected Mr & Mrs to job titles and silly terms.  It is better to use a dropdown including all available titles from Mr to Dr.

When asking for geographic addresses use a standard set of country, state and city dropdowns to prevent misspellings.  You may also consider asking for the language the visitor speaks since many nationals do not speak the language of their resident country fluently.

GAMES

Providing an online game can increase visitor's engagement but unless it is correctly designed it can be a distracting your visitors from the target actions you want them to reach.  They type of game used will attract difference audiences.  A slow strategy game will appeal to older people whereas a faster arcade action game will be more appealing to a younger audience.

There may already will a suitable online game made by someone else that you can simply insert into one of your web pages.  If you include a game on your site then carry out measurements on your web site traffic logs to ensure that the game players are converting into useful traffic.  In they are not then you will probably want to abandon the use of games.

COMPETITIONS

Online competitions must meet the legal requirements that apply in your jurisdiction.  Most competitions must require no purchase in order to enter them. 

Competitions are an ideal opportunity to gather contact details of prospective customers.  Competitions that ask for a slogan, bets idea or photograph are cheap and easy ways of receiving ideas you could use on your site.

FORUMS

Be wary of using online forums to retain visitor traffic.  They have pros and cons.

PROS

a. They allow users to express their opinion.
b. They provide some ownership of data.
c. Users can help each other with advice.
d. Page views tend to be much higher than other web content.
e. Genuine complaints are visible.

CONS

a. Discussions easily fall into arguments and verbal abuse.
b. They require some level of time consuming moderation.
c. They are exploited by spammers.
d. Busy forums are resource intensive on your web hosting account.
e. Forum posts can lead to breaches of copyright of material from other web sites.
f. Personal and corporate allegations made on forums could lead to legal claims against libel and slander.
g. Posted links can weaken the strength of your own internal links. Incorporate no-follow in posted anchor links if you can.
h. Target conversion rates on forums, such as viewing products and advertisements, are very low compared with other web pages.

VIDEOS

Videos are increasingly becoming a major contributor to web content.  They have a much higher engagement rate than text articles because they are easier to absorb by the visitor.

A regular video update allows the web site owner to engage the "lazy" visitor audience on the site.  These are visitors who either can not be bothered to read an article or may just be wiery from their daily activities.  Watching and listening to a video is the easiest way to absorb information.  In fact the sound element may be more crucial than the visual element of a video.  Consider how easy it is to listen to the radio when you are driving home after a hard day's work.  Also consider how we tend to remain on the same news or radio station.  In a similar way, video broadcasts are ideal ways of retaining visitor traffic.

Bear in mind that the video content must follow the same content rules as news articles as explained above on this page.  Both can be a turn-off if they are boring or unconvincing.

POLLS

Polls are quick and easy ways in which your visitors can provide their opinion on a subject.  That subject may be directly related to the way your web site works or it may be in relation to to some off site news. 

Whilst feedback from polls can give you a reasonable idea how happy your visitors are using your site, their genuine opinion will always be shown in the web site traffic logs.  It is not what people say that counts but what they do!

OWNERSHIP

If a visitor feels that they own some form of data on your web site then they will feel more compelled to return to manage their data.  This data would normally be accessed via a user account and stored on a database but could be simply retained by non-expiring cookies. It is this element of ownership of data that keeps social networking sites such as Facebook and photo sites such as Flickr so popular.