7 Ways to Keep Your Customers Coming Back For More

After all, what's the use of spending all that time and money on securing top rankings on search engines, setting up a network of affiliates and building a huge content rich site if nobody stays once they arrive?

That's the hard way to learn the value of "sticky" content. The easy way is to keep reading this article. The information we are about to share with you will show you how to use content to turn visitors into shoppers ... and shoppers into repeat buyers! The holy grail of Online Marketing.

Put these tips into practice, and I would be surprised if you can't sit back and watch your sales start climbing almost immediately.

1. Take charge of your content

It's important to spend a just a few minutes thinking about how often you really need to update your content. If your site sells reports on property trends or money advice, then your visitors will rightly expect new content about these topics on a fairly regular basis. If your selling cement and bricks, then it probably won't need to be changed or refreshed that often!

If your site isn't going to need content changes on a regular basis, then think about writing most of the content yourself. Nobody knows your product as well as you do, so who better to write about it? Of course, you'll want the content to have a strong focus on the features and benefits of your product or service, in order to ensure your customer reads it.

I know your here to learn more about keeping customers online, so "7 Ways to Keep Your Customers Coming Back For More" is a great article for me to offer you; think about the articles and content that you can offer your web site visitors - what do they really want to know?

Now I know that it is often difficult to write fresh, search engine friendly copy; or you might not have time to do it, or just think that someone else can write better copy than you! So if you need any help, just get in touch with black and white marketing.

2. Tell your visitors "What's New"

Let's face it . . . nobody spends even close to as much time hanging around your wonderful web site as you do (it's a sad fact that most web site visitors only spend a few minutes on ost sites!).

So it's important to show them what's new and exciting on the site. It could be a product, service, lower delivery charges or new articles; whatever it is, let them know about it.

You could use a banner, prominent text or a "NEW" icon next to your fresh, new stuff or simply use the date to show when the content was created.

If you don't already, then consider creating an opt-in e-mail list and send anyone that signs up a shiny newsletter each month - straight to their inbox. Then if you do have new content or special offers you can tell them immediately.

3. Get your visitors involved

It's a well known fact that the more your visitors interact with your site, the more comfortable they become they become with it and your business; the more confortable with you they are, the more likely they are to buy from you!

Try setting up a suggestion box for new requested features of your products. Run a competition, asking them to come up with ideas on why your products are so great and why they use them - this can give you new testimonials too!

Conduct an online survey. Start a blog or forum - all great ways to get customers to interact with you.

4. Check all of your content

We are not just talking about the text here, but everything on your site - every word, image, link and email address.

It is all relevant and up to date? Is your best selling product or service this month prominently displayed - if it is, you can drive more people to it and thus more sales.

Always ensure your catalogue is up to date, the last thing you want is for your customers to get an email from you telling them that the product they just ordered is now no longer available!

I'm sure you have seen poor web sites with out of date content, missing images or broken links. I know it drives you crazy, you don't want to do that to your customers to you?

The classic mistake is where web site lable something as "Coming Soon" and it never arrives! If you know it's not coming anytime soon then remove it.

Check images load and load quickly.

5. Check out free content providers

You may not know this but there are lots of places where you can get fre content for your web site. Do a search for your web site theme, you should quickly be able to find articles from article directories that that allow you to publish the articles on your site free of charge! You can find articles on any topic imaginable!

The quality of this free content varies massively so choose carefully. Try some of these:

• Article Dashboard
• Everyones Articles
• Article Gold
• Article Directory
  

6. Never throw anything away

Well, never delete it or remove it from your servers anyway.

Archiving your content to make it available to web site visitors turns your site into a goldmine. I'm sure we have all tried to look for information on old products and been unable to find it, or grateful when you find a site that has details on that 20 year old SLR camera you have!

A study by online usability guru Jakob Nielsen showed that an archive of past content increases a site's usefulness by about 50 percent. And since you've already produced the content, it's no hassle to simply index all those articles in an archive. And, believe us, your customers will be glad you did.

As your archive grows, your web pages do, you get more inbound links and it all adds to the credibility to your business, if for no other reason that your customers will be able to see how long you've been around. With all those extra pages and extra credibility, your customers should be hanging out at your site a little longer, making them more comfortable with you and more likely to buy from you.

7. Look, listen and learn

So now that you have spent all this time getting your site as up to date as it should be, you need to find out what kind of impact you've made with your web site visitors!. Of course, if you've done everything right, you'll start seeing results right where it counts, more enquiries or better still orders.

Whilst getting those sales in is the most important part of running any business, by making changes to your web site might not always see these results immediately, there are other key indicators to show you the success of all your hand work.

Invest some time in going through your server logs (probably provided free by your Web host), and see how much time people are actually spending looking at your content. If, for whatever reason, people aren't using your "Weekly Updates" page, you probably shouldn't waste too much time writing content for it.

You will see what pages people are visiting the most often, this will tell you that wat pages you need to ensure you update often. You will find out which pages people land on first (it isn't necessarily your homepage!).

Like everything else in business, having a web site is just a channel to your market, you need to keep an eye on the bottom line, and if certain pages aren't been visitored, and these are important for your sales, then find out why! Always ask yourself "Are these pages helping my sales?" If you can answer "Yes", you know your on the right track to success.

Conclusion

Keep your site current and your content fresh, unique and relevant, and we guarantee your visitors will start spending more time there. And the longer they stay there, the more dramatic the impact will be on your profits!

If you want to talk to us about any element of your web site, whether you want a better ranking, need us to write content, or want to know how to make more revenues online, then get in touch with us via this handy form.