Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today, we are going to talk about how to convert your visitors into repeat visitors.

Neil Patel: Well-

Eric Siu: Go ahead.

Neil Patel: Well, Eric, let me ask you a question. You go into Google Analytics, you look at your stats all the time. What percentage of your visitors on Single Grain are repeat visitors?

Eric Siu: Well, I think about 25-30%.

Neil Patel: That's right. Most of you guys will have less than 20% of your visitors being repeat visitors. Majority will be brand new visitors. Yes, you want to convert these visitors that are brand new into customers, but most people aren't going to buy right when they hit your site. That's why most sites don't even have a conversion rate of 2, 3%. You need to get the brand new visitors coming back to your website. One of the easiest ways to do this is by collecting emails. You collect emails using tools, like Sumo, Hello Bar, OptinMonster, whatever it may be. You can end up capturing people right when they leave and then re-market to them as you have new content, new product updates. It's a simple way to get your visitors into repeat visitors, and what you'll find is people in your email list are going to be the highest converting channel out there.
If you look at Overstock, I was talking to the President, and he mentioned to me on one of my phone calls with him that emails account for roughly 30% of their sales. Think about that, 30 plus percent of the sales. That's crazy.

Eric Siu: What Neil is talking about was OptinMonster or Sumo, whatever tool you want to use, or even Hello Bar. What you can do is make it simple. There are tools out there. Make a lead magnet. A lead magnet could be an eBook, for example, or what I like doing is checklists because marketers are ... For me, as a marketer, I love getting all these checklists or these templates all the time because they gave me ideas. I can build off of them. To make these things really easy, you can use a tool like Beacon. That's beacon.by, and Beacon allows you to make these checklists, these eBooks, these things really quickly, and they're nice and beautifully designed, or we can just use Canva, too.
Then, from there, tie it in with something like a Hello Bar or OptinMonster, and then you're off to the races. You have a higher conversion rate because maybe the lead magnet you have is much more relevant to, well, what people are reading, and that's how you get people in and you're using emails to drive them back, and that's how you drive repeat visitors.

Neil Patel: You also want to use multiple channels to get people back. Emails is one. Push notifications is another one. There are subscribers.com. There's pushcrew.com. There's OneSignal. These are all ways to get people who come to your website to keep coming back. Another one that you could end up leveraging is chatbots. If someone's on your website, they're logged into Facebook, you get them to start chatting with you. You can end up making it where you send them messages on Facebook, get them back to your site, and we found that chatbots are still effective, not as much as they were last year, but, in general, when you start pushing out messages using chatbots, you can still get roughly, at least, 40% of the people to click through and come back to your website.

Eric Siu: Then what you can do, too, once you have them on your email list, is really simple. You can use RSS to blog, and, basically, every time a new post comes out, you can just notify people, and then they'll come back. You don't necessarily have to manually push stuff all the time. Yes, the engagement rate is going to be lower into open rates and click rates, but if you just have this stuff, if you're constantly pushing out content and you have a growing email list, you're going to be able to bring people back. Like Neil mentioned, as long as you're segmenting people out, you're going to see that these people convert a lot higher.

Neil Patel: Well, here's one thing about the RSS to blog. Do you do that, Eric?

Eric Siu: I do.

Neil Patel: For email blasts and stuff?

Eric Siu: Yes.

Neil Patel: It's a quick and easy way. I've tested it. It works really well. What are your open rates?

Eric Siu: Low, like 15%.

Neil Patel: I'm getting 30 plus percent open rates. The big difference is Eric and I are both amazing marketers. It's I write my emails and everything manual. When you do the RSS to whatever it may be, it's using what's there, and that may not be the best subject line for an email. For example, I found out the title of a blog post for Facebook is totally different than what you want to send through email, and what I mean by that is the title of your blog post, what does really well on Facebook and goes viral, doesn't always open really well or resonate with your email audience. With some channels, let's say push notification, you're limited by character text. I like doing everything manually, and by doing things manually, yes, it takes more time, but your click through rates in many cases will be double, and it's worth the effort.

Eric Siu: Is there much more to add around this?

Neil Patel: I think that's it. The big takeaway that you should have is if you want to get people back to your site, use a combination of email, push, chatbots, pretty much any new marketing channel that ends up coming out, from creating a fan page and getting people to subscribe to your Facebook fan page, to subscribe to your YouTube channel, to your podcast, whatever it may be. The goal is to engage with people as many times as possible, and it doesn't just have to be on your website because if someone's on your YouTube channel watching a video, you can also link from your video back to your website, but all these different mediums and channels can drive people back to your site. You just have to start looking at marketing as, "Hey, someone's on my website," and most people say, "I just want to get them to convert," but what you need to start doing is, "Hey, I need them to subscribe to something, and then continually get them back to my website and then, eventually, I'm gonna start selling them on products and services once they come back two, three, or four times."

Eric Siu: The final thing I'll add, too, is you got to be remarkable. Read Seth Godin's book, Purple Cow. It's about standing out and being remarkable. If you look at some of Neil's guides on Quick Sprout or some of the guides he invested a lot of money into, they're really well designed, really well put together, and they're long form, as well. That's something that's remarkable because people talk about it, and it becomes the canonical version out there. In fact, if you Google the keyword online marketing, Neil actually occupies, well, the top positions because those are the best pieces out there. How do you go out there, and how do you be remarkable? That's how people are going to talk about you. That's why people are going to come back, because they're looking forward to having you come back. Well, because they know you're going to deliver.
It's just like the people that you ... the ones that listen to this podcast. They keep coming back. It's because Neil and I are very consistent. We keep delivering over and over, and that's how you get there. Also, if you're able to do that, the final thing you can add is don't forget about retargeting. If you want to bring these people back, it kind of goes without saying that, well, you retarget the people that have been to your site already.
There's more we could talk about, but for the sake of the length of this podcast, that's it for today. Before we go, go to SingleGrain.com/giveaway to check out our marketing goodies, and we'll see you tomorrow.

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