By Minal Bopaiah
Subscription sites take note! Your direct traffic visitors are far more valuable to your bottom line than site visitors who land on your site via social media or search results.
According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, site visitors who visit your page directly tend to spend more time on your site than visitors who arrive via social media links or search results, as the graph below illustrates. And as all savvy subscription marketers know, the more time on site, the more likely you are to convert a prospect.
This data has various implications. One, you may want to re-examine your subscription funnel for direct visitors. Are you presenting them with overlay offers when they arrive? How often? Only once, or does it refresh after a period of time? And do you have a “Subscribe” button on your homepage and/or navigation bar? Foreign Affairs found that a good number of conversions came through its “Subscribe” button for visitors viewing multiple articles on their site.
Also, “direct” traffic was defined as anyone who visits a site by typing in a URL, bookmarking a page, or clicking on a link in an email or chat conversation. This supports data from our 2013 Online Subscription Benchmark that found that email marketing was one of the most cost-effective ways for subscription sites to acquire subscribers.
Therefore, subscription sites should value direct traffic over and above all other sources, and email marketing over all other channels. They’re both your best methods for converting and retaining subscribers.
