Your website is one of your most powerful assets for getting discovered by potential customers and securing new business. But it is also a vital tool for building customer loyalty with existing customers, as well. In addition to showcasing your offering, describing who you are and communicating the value you offer, your website is one of the key tools you have for connecting with existing customers and keeping them engaged.
Here are four tips to use your website to build customer loyalty:
1. Ask customers for testimonials
In addition to helping attract new customers, testimonials also help build trust and loyalty among existing customers.
When you take the time to ask customers about their experiences with your company and their opinions about your product or service, it makes them feel appreciated and important. It shows them that you don’t take their business for granted and that you value what they have to say.
You can take it a step further by reacting to your customers’ testimonials. Use their feedback to make improvements and ensure that their future experiences with your company will be even better than before.
An easy and effective way to collect your customer testimonials is by using the Spectoos testimonial platform. It is a platform that enables you to easily request and collect testimonials from customers and display them in an attractive widget across your web assets.
2. Reward loyal customers
Customer loyalty programs are a great way to increase sales, and keep customers coming back for more. There are numerous creative ways you can reward your loyal customers, and the best ones for your company will depend on what type of service or product you offer and the kind of incentives your customers will value.
Rewarding customers makes them feel special and entices them to continue doing business with you. Common rewards include:
- Free giveaways. Customers can earn these with certain purchases, like “buy one, get one free” or relevant product bundles)
- Points systems. These allow customers to enjoy exclusive discounts after reaching a certain number of points (or dollars spent)
Sephora, for example, has a great and highly effective loyalty program.
Customers earn a point for every dollar spent, and can then redeem their points for merchandise. Sephora also give away free beauty classes, birthday gifts and personalized product recommendations.
3. Use customer experience analytics on your website
It’s essential to have a clear understanding of your customers’ needs, concerns, and desires in order to effectively reach and engage them through your website. When customers have a positive experience on your website, they will be more likely to return to purchase again in the future, and they will also be more likely to become brand advocates.
In order to make sure that your website is delivering the best possible experience for your customers, you should be employing customer experience analytics.
Customer experience analytics provides companies with a precise analysis based off prevalent customer patterns displayed throughout their online shopping journey. These insights help businesses gain a competitive advantage and increase conversion and retention rates among their different customers segments. Customer experience analytics allow you to track and learn information like which areas of your website your customers visit most, what content interests them (and what content doesn’t), what products they’re browsing, where are customers are experiencing difficulties and more.
A great tool for collecting customer experience data and analyzing it is the Clicktale Experience Cloud.
This solution helps you read the digital body language of your customers to identify where aspects of your customer experience can be improved. It also helps you quantify the impact of improving the customer experience on your business and bottom line.
4. Offer valuable content
If your website doesn’t offer valuable content, you’re hindering the possibility of acquiring new customers and retaining existing customers.
In order to produce content that is of value to your audience, you must first develop buyer personas and then consider the buyer journey.
When you develop buyer personas, you can use existing clients as inspiration to get started, and you should determine the following:
- Demographics
- Goals
- Challenges preventing them from achieving their goals
- Ways your product or service can help them overcome those challenges
- Obstacles preventing them from working with you, and how you can break them down
Once you complete this task, you will have a much clearer idea of what general topics are of interest to your readers.
Then you should create inbound marketing campaigns based on your buyer personas and the buyer journey:
Create blog posts and gated content offers for each stage of the buyer journey to help your customers (both potential and existing) solve their problems and naturally make their way through your conversion funnel. Existing customers can go through these same stages again, even after they make an initial purchase from you, so it is important to keep targeting them with relevant content that will keep them engaged with your company and browsing your site.
Providing relevant and useful content on your website’s blog will transform your company into a trusted source of information in your industry, and people will take note and come back in the future for more.
As one of the central platforms for engagement between you and your customers, your website is a crucial tool for improving customer loyalty. So, use it to its fullest potential. Using these effective ways to make your brand and the experience you offer stand out from the others in your online space will help you retain customers for the long term.
