How To Keep Website Visitors Coming Back?

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen a big question in a recent Alertbox column.  Well worth pondering for folks thinking about the intersection of online and offline organizing.

The question is: How can websites devote more of their budgets to keeping customers, rather than simply advertising for new visitors? Here are some ideas, ranging from the proven (newsletters) to the speculative (mobile services):

• Email newsletters. Getting people to sign up for regular newsletters remains the ultimate way to maintain a relationship. As usability studies show, a newsletter has much more of an emotional impact on people than a brief visit to a website.
• Request marketing. Have users tell you what they want, and then alert them when you have it.
• Discussion groups and other community features. Find ways to recognize particularly active members and thus further connect them to your site. Such recognition might be as simple as placing gold stars on their profiles or might include more substantial loyal-user benefits.
• Affiliate programs. These are alliances with other sites that promote your services to their users in return for a referral fee if their users do business with you. The program works best if the referring site can honestly recommend the destination site to its own target audience. So, even though you have to pay them a cut, the cost isn't boundless the way it is on search engines because you're not competing with all other sites in the world for the right to be listed. If you're the best match for the referring site's audience, they'll want you -- rather than simply whoever offers the highest fee -- because your conversion rate will be better. (In an earlier column, I offer an example in which sales differed drastically depending on which affiliate partner a site chose to link to.)
• Newsfeeds. RSS might work, but I don't know yet as we're not starting our user research into RSS until next week. (We'll present findings about RSS usability at our upcoming conference.)
• Stick your URL onto any physical product you sell in the hope that customers will see it when they need supplies or a replacement.

• A hardware component that's hardwired to connect to your site's service. Without the iPod, the iTunes music store wouldn't be nearly as successful. Mobile features. Search engines' back-and-forth interaction style is clumsier on mobile devices. Conversely, mobile provides added value for services that know their users and understand sufficient context to give them exactly what they need, when they need it -- perhaps without their having to ask. Thus, users are more likely to actually subscribe to mobile services than to seek them out every time they feel the need. Being an icon on somebody's BlackBerry gives you top-of-mind presence and significantly increases the likelihood that that they'll visit your website when they want to do business. (You might even get paid for the mobile service -- but even without payment, it's worth it in search-liberation points.)

In the dot-com bubble days, it was fashionable to discuss website stickiness. Now, stickiness must be reconceptualized for the real world rather than the bubble. It's not a goal to make users spend hours on your site. Let them go about their business.

The real goal is to make users come back, and to have them come directly to your site instead of clicking on expensive ads. The ideas above are just a few ways to encourage repeat business. Further in-depth studies of user behaviors and customer needs should reveal many new ways of keeping users loyal.