The dilemma of returning users
You’ve spent a load of money on a new website. You’ve invested a lot of resources in designing the website, making sure it looks and feels great. You’ve engaged your IT team and development agency to install all the latest features to maximise performance and user experience. You’ve painstakingly crafted every word of content on your site ensuring it’s informative, engaging and sticking to your brand voice. When you go through your monthly analytics reports you see a ton of new users flocking to your website. But there’s one big problem - your users aren’t coming back to you. Sounds familiar?
The issue of low returning users is quite common. For non e-commerce, content rich websites, returning visitors are a strong indicator of success. It shows that your users find value in your content, trust your voice and consider you an authority in your domain. So why aren’t they coming back? And more importantly, how can you change that?
In this article, we’ve highlighted some strategies and tips that you can implement to help you keep your audience and tip the numbers in your favour.
1. Ensure your content is compelling and relevant to your users
As simple as it may sound, content effectiveness is an aspect of a website that is often overlooked when trying to solve this problem. Conducting a content audit and carefully poring over the actual words on your site just isn’t as glamorous as redesigning your site or auditing the user experience (not that those aren’t super important as well) but it is extremely valuable. And when I say a content audit, I don’t mean checking sentence grammar and whether or not your commas are in the right place - I mean stepping back, putting yourself in the shoes of your user and asking whether your content is actually clear, useful and doing the job it’s supposed to do. Here are some questions you can ask yourself when doing a content audit: -
- Does this content clearly explain what we do and why it matters?
- Would someone completely new to our organisation understand this without help?
- Does the content match user intent, i.e. what someone was actually trying to find when they landed here?
- Are we saying the same thing in multiple places, just in different words?
- Is this page actually helping someone make a decision or just filling space?
Asking yourself these questions would help you step outside of your own internal perspective and evaluate your content the way a real user would experience it. Often, because we are so immersed in the work we do and the language we use internally that we forget we’re not writing for ourselves, we’re writing for people who don’t live and breathe our organisation the way we do.
2. Create and publish new content on a regular basis
It may sound simple but if you want your users to come back to your site, give them a good reason to. If your website stays the same for months at a time, even if it’s well designed and well written, it quickly becomes a “one and done” experience for most visitors. Regular content creation helps solve this by giving people a reason to re-engage with you. It also signals that your organisation is active, evolving, and still relevant. And don’t just focus your creative efforts on new blogs and publications, relook at some of your key service and information pages and update them to reflect who you are today.
Tips:
- Set a realistic publishing rhythm you can actually maintain and pencil in a date every 3 months to look at/update your key service and information pages (About, what we do, who we are etc.)
- Turn everyday questions from your users into explainer articles or FAQs
- Map out what your users are trying to do - understand your organisation, explore a service, look at your previous work, take action etc. Then create content that directly supports each stage.
- Update and expand some of your best performing articles/pages.
The goal with this is not volume for the sake of it, but instead building a steady flow of useful content that keeps your audience engaged beyond their first visit.
3. Offer a clear next step
I can’t tell you the number of times I have been on a website, found something interesting or useful, and then just…left.
Not because the content wasn’t good, but because I had no idea what to do next. There was no clear direction, no suggestion of where to go, and no natural next step that kept me engaged. So I did what most people do, I closed the tab and moved on.
A lot of websites do a good job of bringing people in but lose them after the first interaction. Users shouldn’t have to figure out where to go or what to do on their own. If they’ve read your content, there should always be a clear, natural next step that helps them continue their journey.
The next step could be:
- Reading a related article or guide
- Exploring a relevant service or page
- Downloading a resource or report
- Signing up for updates or a newsletter
- Getting in touch or making an enquiry
The goal is to make it obvious and relevant to what they’ve just read and the page they are on. A good way to think about this is to think of your website as a journey or experience where each page naturally leads into the next, creating a sense of flow and progression that keeps the user moving forward without feeling lost or stuck.
Tips:
- Outline the purpose of every page and think of the next logical step
- Add contextual CTAs instead of generic ones. Instead of a ‘contact us’ at the bottom of every page, try matching the CTA to intent. Some examples -
- Reading a service page → “See related projects”
- Reading a publication → “Download the full report”
- Browsing careers → “See our current vacancies”
- Reduce the number of decisions a user has to make i.e, don’t overwhelm them with too many calls to action. Stick to 1 primary CTA and where relevant a secondary option.
4. Improve brand recall
In the first three points we outlined improvements you can make on your site. Now we’ll look at what you can do off it to bring users back to you. Brand recall is something for-profit organisations focus a lot of their marketing budgets on. It’s essentially about how easily someone can remember you after they’ve seen or interacted with you - your name, what you do, and why it matters. It’s important because most people likely won’t act the first time they come across you. They might read something, find it useful, and move on. But when they encounter a similar need again, the organisations they remember are the ones they return to.
For NGOs and nonprofits, this is just as relevant, even if it’s not always framed in the same way. Whether you’re looking to build support, share knowledge, or position your organisation as a trusted voice in your space, being remembered plays a big role.
If people can’t recall who you are or what you stand for, it becomes much harder to bring them back and win their trust. Your users are far more likely to revisit your website, open your emails, or engage with your content if your organisation feels familiar to them. And in a crowded sector where many organisations are working on similar issues, recall becomes a key differentiator. It’s not just about the work you do, but whether people can connect that work back to you and see you as the authority in your domain.
Tips:
- Show up consistently where your audience lives. This can include posting content regularly on LinkedIn, contributing to industry newsletters or blogs, taking part in webinars/panels, attending conferences and events and collaborating with organisations in your space.
- Keep your messaging consistent across all platforms and channels
- Make it easy to keep up with your work. Ensure regularity with newsletters, social media posts, email campaigns etc.
5. Use social media effectively
Continuing on from the point above about improving brand recall, one of the most simple and effective ways of keeping your organisation’s name at the top of your audience’s mind is through social media. Whether it be LinkedIn, X, Instagram or Bluesky, it is important to show up consistently and with purpose.
In my experience working with clients, one of the main reasons social media activity becomes inconsistent is because there is a belief that every post needs to be carefully planned and strategically developed to a high level of detail. While planning absolutely has its place, placing too much emphasis on it can make the process feel overwhelming and ultimately lead to posting less often than required, which is the opposite of what is needed to build a social media presence.
A more practical approach is to treat your website as your main source of content and use it to feed your social channels. This could mean turning popular blog articles into carousel posts, breaking down reports into clear data driven insights, or simply pulling out key points and resharing them in a way that is easy to consume.
By posting content and updates regularly, you’re creating more touchpoints for your audience to come across your organisation in a natural and familiar way, rather than relying on them to actively remember or seek you out. Over time, this steady presence helps reinforce your messaging, keeps your work visible, and increases the likelihood that users will return to your website when they are ready to explore further or take action.
Tips:
- Build content from what already exists on your website by repurposing blogs, reports, case studies and key pages into social posts that naturally point back to your site.
- Focus on clarity over complexity and share simple insights or takeaways that spark interest and encourage users to click through for more detail.
- Make the next step obvious by linking to relevant pages with a clear reason to visit, such as reading more, exploring a service or downloading a resource.
- Review analytics regularly to understand which posts actually drive clicks, then double down on those formats and topics.
Ultimately, increasing returning users is less about quick fixes and more about creating a website experience people genuinely want to come back to. If your organisation is struggling to turn first-time visitors into returning users, Liquid Light can help. We work with NGOs, nonprofits and purpose-driven organisations to create websites and digital experiences that not only attract users, but keep them coming back. To see if we can help improve your website, get in touch here.
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Siddhant Patni
Account Manager
