Digital marketing is an effective tool for customer acquisition. Social media marketing gives your business a huge reach. Content and email marketing allow you to convince people to visit your website. Landing pages are efficient for when you want to convince people to check your products out. It is great that you have all these options to acquire customers. However, they can be even more useful if you don’t use them for acquisition only. Increased customer loyalty is an equally important outcome of your online activities. Most marketing budgets would not reflect it, however, since the vast majority of businesses spend more money on acquisition than on retention and loyalty. If you want to put more stock into customer retention, your website would be the best place to start.
Make It About User Experience
If you are working on customer retention and loyalty, you have to be able to leave a good first impression. When your customers see your website for the first time, they have to be impressed. They will not want to come back to your website, no matter what you do, if the experience was awful.
How do you improve the user experience on your website? The very first thing you need to do is find areas where you get the maximum effect with the minimum effort. You go for the easiest shots first, as long as you have covered the basics of modern website design. That means that your website has to be mobile-first, friendly, or responsive. It needs to be displayed well on mobile devices. It also needs to offer the core functionalities on mobile devices.
Next, you need to make sure that you have an easy path to the products or services your customers are interested in. You do that with good navigation, internal linking, and search bars. Then you leverage AI and machine learning to offer a degree of personalization. Shoppers like it when the website they visit offers them products they would actually like to buy. That kind of website gets repeat visits.
Improve Customer Satisfaction
Your products or services are the cornerstones of your business. They also play a central role in the development of your digital assets, including your website. But they alone will not be enough to keep your customers getting back for more. Even the biggest and best-known brands with great products have to put money into customer retention.
If you want your customers to come back, you have to ensure that they are happy. Your offering will do a part of that job. The rest is up to you. While user experience deals with making customers happy when everything is alright, customer support deals with making customers less unhappy when things go wrong. You have to give your customers several options to contact you from your website. Including contact information is good, including a contact form is even better. If you really want to excel at customer support, you should also include click-to-call links so people can call you easily from their mobile devices. And you should seriously consider using at least a decent chatbot for instant support.
Boost Engagement and Offer Value
By following the steps so far, you have probably added enough ways for customers to engage with your business. You have also probably started giving them valuable options and information. But engagement and value are something you have to keep improving over time. Staying on top of the latest trends and best practices when it comes to user engagement is very important. The same goes for adding value.
Think about what your customers would like to see and do on your website, and find a way to do it. Your website is a powerful platform, and you can use it to launch discount or sales campaigns, giveaways, and even reward programs. Giving these sales strategies a prominent place on your website will ensure that no one misses your special offers, and it will take you a step further into maximizing the potential returns of these programs.
Finally, remember that you have to listen to your customers for feedback, and test every new feature, element, or design choice before it goes live. Money spent on giving your customers something they didn’t want is wasted money. Giving your customers something they wanted but in a way that doesn’t really work is also a big mistake. So put your customers in the center of your loyalty strategy, and make it all about them.
