Internet consumers are agile, informed and impatient. One quick internet search provide a vast range of competing outlets which have exactly what they’re looking for and compete strongly on price.
So how do you get customers to stay, to buy and to return ? Here are our top tips:
1. Make sure your homepage is ‘outstanding’
First impressions count – your website needs to stand out, to give a stylish and efficient demonstration of your company and what it offers.
This is not the place for long winded descriptions of your products or services – keep the language simple, approachable, and invitingly presented. The purpose is to keep your visitors on the site, learning about your company’s products and services. New visitors need an easily decipherable message about who you are and what they can do on your website. Returning visitors, need logical steps to especially popular or useful pages as well as notifications of new developments or current items of interest.
2. Know your customers
Using comprehensive analytics software packages, like Google Analytics, you can track and analyse seemingly unlimited details of visitor patterns and behaviour. How do your customers find you? Which country are they from? What time of day do they visit? Which pages do they dwell on and which do they leave immediately? By studying this data, you will start to build up a vivid picture of who your customers are, what they like and more importantly what they don’t, so you can tailor your website to be inviting to them.
3. Know your competitors
Research, research, research. Unless you’re selling the elixir of life which grows only in your back garden, you’ll have competitors – so you will need to keep tabs on what they’re up to. Success on the internet is about doing things better than others in the market, making the experience for your potential customers as engaging, efficient and satisfying as possible. What better way to start than to educate yourself on what others in the field are doing well and where they could be doing something better?
4. Stay on top of it
Websites are never finished. The most successful are commonly those which are nurtured and respected as an integral part of the business. A high street shop owner would of course be ill advised to have out of date styling and décor in their store but the difference is that if a customer is put off, on a high street they can’t necessarily instantly go to a competitor.
Fresh and relevant content updated regularly is what we all look for when searching online and it’s no different for search engines. Updating a site regularly with fresh content hugely appeals to search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo and, as these are your potential conveyor belt of customers, it’s a necessity to be as appealing as possible.
5. Build a mobile optimised version … now
With a recent study by American banking powerhouse Morgan Stanley predicting that, based on the current rate of change and adoption, the mobile web will be bigger than desktop internet use by 2015, having a mobile optimised version of a business website is fast becoming an essential.
Normal websites don’t always look right on mobile devices and can be time consuming and confusing to navigate. By having a mobile optimised version which is a slimmed down, single column width version, anyone visiting the site from a handheld device is automatically redirected and able to view clearly laid out information, together with mobile-convenient features like click to call buttons, maps to your location etc.
