Lifetime profit per visitor is another way to think about marketing to your visitors if you have a significant number of returning visitors. It leads you to some profound insights into how to structure your website and your ads.
Visitor life cycle
In the previous post Theming your domaining I used the example of a niche website about bird watching. Continuing that example, lets look at the life cycle of a birder (person who bird watches). A birder will start as a novice and will not invest in anything more than cheap binoculars and clothing to start. They will invest in reading materials especially maps and bird identification guides as well as recordings of bird calls.
As they become more proficient, they will buy better binoculars and more advanced reference materials. They will also buy clothing and footwear for the weather and terrain. Advanced birders will invest in very expensive scopes and will want to travel to more exotic locations.
Scarlet Tanager © Barry Goggin
Whom do they trust?
If you design your website with this life cycle in mind, you will provide various levels of information targeted to each stage of your visitor’s life cycle and correspondingly you can market appropriately to each stage.
By nurturing your visitor through each stage of their life cycle, you also build trust and loyalty. This is essential for repeated sales. As these visitors become more advanced, they advise the more amateur bird watchers and so they are much more likely to point them to your resources and your product recommendations.
By segregating out your site by life cycle of your visitor, you can provide both information and products that are highly targeted. Again this makes it much more likely they will buy from you.
What is lifetime profit per visitor?
By now you probably understand what the lifetime profit per visitor is. By thinking through the natural development of your visitor in your particular niche, you can maximize the amount of money you make per visitor and this is essential when most niche websites get lower levels of traffic.
Visitor retention
Another consequence of visualizing your business this way is that you see how important it is to retain your visitors throughout their life cycle. It makes it critical to identify the reasons why visitors are leaving and try to address these through various retention programs.
Hopefully you see now that how you think about your website or domain visitor can give you real insights into how to structure your website and maximize your profits.
Footnote: Though I am not a bird watcher, nature photography is a passion of mine. The photo above was taken in summer in New Jersey, USA. These birds undergo a long migration and can be found in winter in South America.
