Keep customers returning to your website and build brand loyalty

Keeping customers coming back

Apart from offering value for money and providing good service, the key to luring customers back to your website is to ring the changes and keep it up to date. The web is very much like a newspaper, and nobody wants to read old news. The web was built on freebies and, perhaps understandably, many visitors expect to see some free or at least bargain offers. Highlight these on the home page: 80 per cent of visitors never get beyond the home page.

Branding

With so much choice and confusion on the web, it has become apparent that visitors do tend to bookmark sites that they have found useful and easy to understand. Keep your website active and topical and you'll build considerable brand loyalty. Amazon.com is one of the world's best known and valuable brands but is still making modest profits. Successful online branding is much like offline branding: image and design must be consistent; speedy and friendly customer service is paramount; and no opportunity should be lost in spreading the brand name onto other sites by means of links and newsy items.

Monitoring visitors

Once your site starts attracting visitors it is helpful to know how they arrived at your site. If you use Google Ad-Words, then part of the package is a web analytics tool that does show in limited detail from where visitors arrive and whether they are new or returning. Most ISPs provide a free visitor hit counter, but if you want to know which page, how long they stay, which search term they used, etc, then you need to install a more sophisticated tracking tool. Most, but not all, require a banner of some size to be displayed. To avoid that - and for very large visitor numbers - you will probably need to opt for a paid service. Avoid on-view counters: 'you are the 21,342nd visitor since January'.

Newsgroups, blogs and mailing lists

If you ever find you have time to fill, dip a tentative toe in this water. There are thousands of newsgroups out there grouped according to community interest. Your ISP may provide some feeds or try the most well-known, Usenet. With 120,000 newsgroups and 2 million items posted every day, you can probably forget about running your business. Theoretically you can find a group that shares some of your interests, into which you can splice your offering, and maybe generate extra links and custom. Google runs some as well. Moderation, or lack of it, is the problem as it can become a free-for-all (postings are all anonymous of course). Blogs are expanding much faster than websites, with some claiming phenomenal readership and feeds.

Mailing lists are more tricky. Yes you can buy millions, but with spam being a bigger threat to our sanity than global warming, I would urge you to com pile your own. Gather names off your website and customer base, but make sure that customers can opt out - unsubscribe - easily. Use the e-mails gathered to send out soft-sell, informative, short monthly newsletters. The ISP I favour, Zen, has an excellent monthly e-newsletter with perhaps 20 genuine news items no longer than a short paragraph, each with links off each item direct to the full article. It's a good way of keeping up to date with the technology race. There are bureaux who will handle your e-mailing for you so that each recipient gets a uniquely addressed letter. A bureaux will also handle 'unsubscribes' and failed deliveries.

But a warning. Section 22 of the 2003 Privacy and Electronic Communications Act makes 'the transmission of unsolicited communications by means of electronic mail to individual subscribers' illegal. The first court case in March 2007 awarded British Pounds 750 against the sender for a single e-mail. Strangely firms do not count as individuals under the Act, so do not have the same recourse under the law.

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