Viralogy

There’s nothing more elusive than a first time visitor. Visitors entering your site through inbound links (either via Google/Bing, through advertising or marketing campaigns) are exactly why you pay your marketing team, optimize your website for search engines and why you are currently investing in that crazy little social media fad. Yet once you finally capture your user, are you properly monetizing them? Unless you’re ready to start serving ads to generate revenue, you are likely losing valuable conversions on a typically underperforming category: first time visitors.

First time visitors are a double edged sword - marketers love them (they represent possibility) while website optimization specialists often hate them (they represent low conversion). Most of all, though, they represent a vital part of any business, and one that is almost always neglected.

Why First Time Visitors Are Bad

First time visitors historically perform worse than other segments of web visitors. On average, only 1.4% of first time visitors actually convert into sales. For all of your marketing team’s search engine optimization, social media efforts and viral marketing campaigns, less than 2 of every 100 visitors will even turn into a sale. That’s a tiny amount.

Not only do first time visitors underperform, but there’s relatively little data about them. With a repeat customer, there’s all sorts of demographic and psychographic data at your fingertips. For a new visitor, you have absolutely no purchase data, and no idea whether their intent is to buy, browse or otherwise. This is a big reason that first time visitors are typically stressed much less than repeat customers. For repeat customers you’ve already made the sale once. That first sale makes it much easier to sell the second, third, fourth and fifth time.

Why First Time Visitors Are Great

On the other hand, for most e-commerce websites, first time visitors represent over 65 percent of all users. That means roughly two in three of your users are accessing your webpage for the first time. A first time visitor has also most likely been driven to your website through some form of three-letter acronym marketing campaign like SEO, SEM, CPM, CPC or PPC (all campaigns created in an effort to improve your immensely important ROI). Which means that you may know more about them than you’d think.

New visitors represent a huge growth opportunity. Every percentage point increase in conversions for first time visitors is worth roughly two times that of a percentage point increase for repeat customers, due to the size of the segment.*
*Example: A website has 10,000 daily visitors. Of that, 65% are new visitors and 35% are repeat visitors. A 1% increase in conversions for new visitors (6,500 total) equals an increase of 65 customers. A similar increase in conversions for repeat visitors (3,500 total) only equates to an increase of 35 customers.

Every new visitor lost without a conversion is money walking out of the proverbial door. A new visitor may never come back again. So this may be your last time to convert them into a sale. First time visitors are an untapped resource ripe for the picking.

Why First Time Visitors Are Vital to Your Business

There are no shortage of reasons why it pays to have first time visitors converted into customers. You’ve succeeded in driving these users to your website. You’ve succeeded in showing them what products you have to offer. Yet if you haven’t converted them to a sale, or at least a second visit, how much of a success can your marketing have really been? Making a half-hearted attempt at new visitor conversion makes even your best marketing campaigns go to waste.

In tough economic times, it’s extremely important to maximize all potential resources. You stand to lose a great deal of money if you don’t properly optimize the experience of first time visitors. Even though first time visitors offer low conversion rates and have suboptimal amounts of customer data available, they still hold plenty of potential and contain a surplus of beautiful underutilized data.

What You Can Do to Capture First Time Visitors

I can’t go into too much depth about how to best capture first time users, because that’s a big part of what Dynamic Insights does. If you want a demo of our product, feel free to contact us. However, there are a couple of things you can do on your own.

Offer promotions. Use coupons or other promotions to entice your first time visitors. While being careful not to look spammy, you can give a user a definite reason not to leave your website without purchasing. Whether that means offering free shipping, a discount at checkout, or a free offer, turning a new visitor into a customer may be well worth the minor expense.

Track your marketing campaigns. If you’re conducting your marketing campaigns well, you should able to track which users come from which marketing campaigns. Track those users through your website. Measure trends based on where your users are coming from. Do users coming from one website tend to purchase certain types of goods? How can you maximize profits from those users?

Improve usability. It’s entirely possible that your first time users do not convert due to problems with your website’s usability. If you think this is the case, then it’s really time to start usability testing. Study your navigation, checkout and site organization among other things to improve your customer experience. If all else fails, use the mom test. If your mom (or grandfather, or [insert electronically-challenged person here]) can’t do what you want your user to do, you need to fix the process.

Use your traffic data. If your first time visitors take a look at a few pages before leaving, you have an exciting opportunity to show them what they want while you have their attention. If you’re collecting the right data, you should be able to hone in on what your user wants within a few clicks. Use that to your advantage.

Work with us. Pardon the plug, but Dynamic Insights helps to optimize websites for both first time and repeat visitors. We collect and analyze your customer data and we provide in-depth insights and offer real solutions. By segmenting your users and allowing you to refine your website in real-time, we make it our goal to make first time visitors into first time customers.