How to make customers loyal and bring them back to your site repeatedly

Regular Updates

Regular updates are essential to ensure that you are seen to be active as a company. Even if the core business product and customer base doesn’t change very much, there are things you can do to keep people, for the want of a better word, entertained. Add new links, change the graphics occasionally, add a cartoon – anything that will make the site a pleasure to use rather than a chore.

If, however, you have regular news, price or product updates, you must be absolutely sure to include this information on the Web site. Accuracy is very important (remember what E-commerce and EDI (Electronic Data Transfers) are all about!), so a disclaimer buried deep in the site that the company ‘reserves the right to change product pricing or specifications’ is not enough. You will get a bad reputation if you cannot fulfil orders as entered.

Of course, you will sometimes be dependent on suppliers yourself, but even if you are not the bottleneck, share this information with your customer. If a user orders something unusual you may sometimes have trouble sourcing it, but your website should first send an order status message (e.g. it is temporarily out of stock) and then a message confirming when it has been dispatched. Rather than being irritated at slow delivery, the customer is pleased because of the service.

A further feature you can use to maintain your company’s awareness levels is to offer an e-mail news service which customers can subscribe to. You send them details of latest products, services or offers as they become available. This sort of service has to be “opt in’ otherwise your company may develop a reputation for spamming.

Discounts

If you are making savings by using the Internet it maybe prudent to pass some of these on to the customer. Most of the big online retailers offer Internet customers special rates – although the additional postal costs sometimes annul these!

Other Activities

There are a number of other innovative ways in generating traffic to your E-commerce Web site (and keep it coming back). Examples include:

Run contests or competitions, ensuring that they are well promoted and that the prizes are worth winning. People generally are interested in getting something for free and this is a sensible way of attracting visitors to your site who might otherwise never consider stopping by.

It is often worthwhile collecting the e-mail addresses of the site’s visitors in order to form the basis of a mailing list that can be used to promote new products or special offers at a later date. It is important if you decide to opt for this, that you obtain their permission at the time of collecting their address that they are happy to receive such updates. One method of helping them to ‘agree’ to this is to offer to place their details in a regular draw for free prizes.

As more and more people use the Internet, so the opportunity to collect their details and specific areas of interest also grows. As a result there are a growing number of highly targeted e-mail lists for rental. If you are clear about the intended target audience of your E-can prove very successful.

Building Customer/Visitor Profiles

It is very important to understand who is visiting your site and to constantly try to develop the content and style in order to maximise its value to your company. There are two straightforward ways in which to do this:

• using analysis software
• using Response Forms
• Using Analysis Software

Use google analytics and google webmaster tool which offer a service whereby you can analyse site usage. These services make software available to analyse the log files which are automatically updated as your pages are accessed by Internet users. Alternatively you can mount your own software on the server to carry out this function.

Using Response Forms

If you need more specific information, you can provide an online form or forms to illicit information about your visitors. These are general created in standard HTML and use CGI or PHP script to post the content of the completed form to your designated e-mail address(es).

You can stipulate that certain fields (e.g. e-mail address) are filled in before the form is submitted (thus ensuring you have some form or responding if needs be). If the form is generating a large amount of e-mail responses it is relatively simple for the receiving company to write a script which will extract the data from the E-mails and allow it to be processed in a database.

Creating the forms is easy, but a lot of care should be taken over their content. They should:

• be concise and clear
• contain no ambiguities
• be reasonably short (no-one likes filling in long forms)
• contain a textbox field for additional comments
• you may want to make them available in more than one language

Some people set up Web sites such that users have to fill in a brief form before accessing the site content. This may well have the effect of putting people off using the site unless:

• it is very clear what the site content is;
• it is made plain that these details will be kept in confidence;
• that visitors wiil not (unless they elect to) receive any e-mails from -the site owners.