How to Keep Customers Coming Back to Your Site
Having a site that is sleek and easy to use is ideal, but ultimately you’d like to encourage repeat visitors too. A site that promotes customer loyalty is a site that converts more sales. There are a number of different ways that you can keep clients and potential clients coming back to your site. These include:
Making it responsive
If your site looks great on a laptop, but becomes virtually unusable when you pull it up on a smartphone, it’s likely that customers will be hesitant to return. Because so many people are dependent on their smartphones when they’re searching for information online, it’s crucial that your site works well no matter where it’s displayed. A responsive design is a must.
Asking for referrals
If you’d love for your clients to show your site to their friends, family members, or co-workers, make that your call to action. People are often glad to pass your content along if it’s useful; you just need to encourage them to do so.
Providing value
Sites that promote repeat visits are sites that provide real, usable content. If yours is smothered in sales pitches that people have to sift through in order to find anything useful, it’s likely that a visitor will hit “x” and never return again. However, when your website has blog posts, e-books, or other content that actually enhances a consumer’s life, you’re more likely to get them to return at a later date to gather more information.
Making it easy to share your content
Your site has informative, shareable content on it. Perfect! You’ve completed step one of encouraging people to click around. However in order to grow your audience, you need to make it easy for fans to share what they’ve found on your site with others. This helps to spread the word about your brand, thus growing your audience. Include social media buttons in a highly visible spot on your site, like right next to blog posts. This way when someone reads something they found valuable, they can easily pass the message along.
Browsing online is often a highly impersonal experience. Users passively click around your site and then leave. It’s rare that they get the one-on-one interaction that they’d find should they walk into a brick and mortar store. If you change this experience for them, you can encourage them to return to your site. If someone contacts you via an e-mail form, reply immediately. Make the experience warm and personal for them, thus replicating the in-store shopping experience.
Creating a site that’s populated with timely, interesting content that’s easy to share is essential to encouraging repeat traffic from engaged customers. Over time, this helps to convert sales and increase brand awareness.