How to Get More Returning Visitors with follow.it

If you’re like most other websites, you want to increase your traffic. And how do you do that? By trying to get as many new visitors to your site as possible, right?

Well, yes, new visitors are always good. But: the key to growing website traffic is actually something else: getting former visitors back to your site

That’s because it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one. 

Unfortunately, the reality for most websites is that 70% of visitors never come back. That’s a pity, as it means missing out on a lot of future traffic. 

So: how do you make former visitors come back to your site?

Apart from offering great content that creates loyalty and engages with the audience, it’s necessary to start using the right tools.

One of such tools is follow.it. It is a free service which allows your visitors to follow you, and then alert them when you publish a new story, so that they come back to your site. 

And why is follow.it the best tool for that? Because they made a science out of it, and optimized every step in the funnel, i.e. they implemented processes which ensure that:

 

  1. Chances are maximized that people can see that they can follow you
  2. Most of them will decide to follow you
  3. A high % will turn into active subscribers
  4. The notifications will get delivered (i.e. in inboxes, not spam folders) 
  5. People open & click on your stories
  6. You can optimize everything with detailed analytics

The best part is that the process is fully automatic, so all you need to do is to continue creating great content for your audience – follow.it will make sure that they come back to your site. 

 

The subscription tools


You can pick from various tools – provided by follow.it – to allow visitors to follow you. Obviously, a standard tool which is still very effective is the subscription form, for which follow.it allows you to easily adjust it to your website’s layout: 

 

Also, if you already have a subscription form on your site (e.g. because it came with your theme), you can still use that one – it can easily be “plugged in” to follow.it. 

To get your subscription form, go to follow.it’s value proposition page and enter your website URL in the green box. 

In addition to a subscription form, you can place follow icons on your site. For example, you can place them after posts or next to your other social media icons. 


Many options for readers


One of the key reasons why follow.it goes beyond the standard newsletter service is that they provide followers with new, unique options to follow you. 

For example, they can filter your “feed” and define that they only receive selected stories. 

This option makes especially sense if your site is publishing a lot of stories every day. But also for not-so-frequent posting sites, it can be a useful feature for readers. 

In addition, they can also pick the delivery channel(s), i.e. how they will receive the stories: 

You may ask yourself: what’s my incentive to do what is good for my readers? Well, it’s simple: if you do what your readers like, you’ll ultimately also get more followers! Makes sense, or? 🙂

A choice of delivery channels also makes sense from another perspective: your visitors can follow you via several channels, making it more likely that they see your updates!

To get a taste of it, go to Zippy Logo’s feed page on follow.it and click on “Follow”.
Please follow me 🙂

 

Cool analytics

You can only improve what you can measure, and that’s why follow.it provides you various statistics to get a deep insight into how well you’re doing in terms of a) acquiring and retaining followers and b) sending out notifications and getting them back to your site. 

 

Final words

The tool is free at its basic plan, which offers a lot, and they also have several plans with more advanced features, such as higher visibility of feeds in follow.it directory, email alerts if a user subscribed or unsubscribed, access to why reasons unsubscribed etc. etc. 

In addition to that, follow.it has a great pipeline of future features. You can upvote the ones you’d like to have implemented soon 🙂

Note: If you’re a Feedburner user, follow.it is also a great Feedburner alternative as they cover all that Feedburner used to cover, and more. 

So: if you want to get more visitors coming back to your website, start using follow.it today! 

If you have any comments or questions, let me know below.

 

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