Soapbox: Acquisition is great, but retention is better
Increasing repeat visitors is far more cost-effective and easier than acquiring new ones.
The best strategy is not how do we gain more traffic that lands on our site one time but rather, how do we build more engaged relationships with the users who are already there. Increasing the repeat visitation of your existing users is far more cost-effective and easier than acquiring new ones.
The economic models overwhelmingly favor the investment in retaining a customer over acquiring a new one. So why don’t publishers spend more time retaining their audience?
The industry is filled with “how to acquire new users” but we don’t spend enough time focused on how to maintain the users and audience we already have.
For example, if you can get 4% opt-in across unique visitors over a period of a year, if you have 1 million uniques that would equate to 40k subscribers. Those subscribers are the most loyal and important members of your audience, driving increased engagement and usage from them drive your business.
For a general media site, they are going to see 1% to 3% click-through rates on messages, meaning they can drive significant incremental daily traffic from their most valuable users.
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