“I’ve noticed from my google analytics, that returning visitors to my website are dropping off. How can I change that?”

There are just 3 things you need to do to make sure that your website visitors keep coming back.

1. Keep adding regular fresh content that is interesting to your visitors.
2. Tell them every time you’ve got new interesting content.
3. Make it easy for visitors to come back

This means you need to have a blog within your website where you have the main article and an email newsletter tool where you have a snippet of the article with a click through to the main article on the website. And of course you need a sign up box so that people can subscribe to your newsletter.

Think of your website like an island that you want people to visit and your newsletter as the ferry that brings them there. The cost of the ticket to get on your ferry is their email address.

But it’s not enough to get people on your ferry (your newsletter list). You need to tempt them to step off the ferry and walk about on your island (read the rest of your interesting article and have a looky look around your website while they’re there.

When you set up your blog and newsletter to work in this way, analytic tools and stats will have more meaning and you can then see how many people stepped off the ferry on to your island. In tech speak, the number of people who stepped off the ferry is your ‘click through rate’.

But what if you have a high open rate and no click through rate? Well an open rate is actually meaningless. Because of the way ‘opens’ are measured by email marketing tools, ‘open’ don’t necessarily mean ‘read’. As you know, if you get your emails through Outlook or Apple Mail, you have the preview pane open showing you the email as you select and click through your emails. This registers as an ‘open’. But that doesn’t mean you’ve ‘read’ it.

So that’s why ‘click through’ is the more important measure as it measures engagement. A person clicking through a link means they’ve stepped off your ferry and on to your island, which means you’ve given them another taste of what it means to be your client and help them decide that now is indeed the time to take up residency on your island and become a paying client or whatever your offer is.

So now, when you analyse your stats in your mail management programme, the articles in your newsletters that got the most click throughs are the most popular and therefore are good topics to write more about.