Businesses are constantly focusing on trying to find and implement ways to attract new customers to increase their business turnover.
While doing so, quite often business owners and marketing professionals forget that retaining existing customers is a simple strategy that can yield superior efforts. Studies have shown that retaining existing clients is much cheaper and less time-consuming than attracting new ones.
Selling to an existing client has a success rate of 60-70% whereas the success rate of selling to a new client is as low as 5% -20%. In addition, the cost of getting a new customer is 5 times that of catering to an existing one. Hence, business owners and marketing personnel must take timely action and efforts to retain existing clients.
One of the lowest cost yet highly effective customer retention strategies is designing a website that focuses on customer engagement through digital experiences. Businesses need to spend time and effort on website development that offers a great customer experience during every visit.
Right from the User interface to visuals, everything on your website is vital for customer experience and you need to ensure that your website captures your customer's attention in a short amount of time.
Here are such 6 website design tips that the website development team should incorporate during the course of website development:
1. User Interface and Experience – The Basics
For better customer engagement, a website has a clean, clutter-free layout highlighting the value of your products/services, beautiful visuals, and colors that gel well with the company logo.
The ease to browse your website should be one of the most important website design criteria for customer engagement. Ensure that the website loads fast to minimize customer waiting time.
At the same time, make sure that the content on your website speaks the language of your customer and highlights the USP of your products/services that set you apart from the competition. In addition to these, ensure that you regularly update your web pages for new content and blogs to further educate and engage with your customers.
2. Focus on Usability
It should be remembered designing a website is not just the appearance and layout of the website. It is extremely important that the focus while designing a website is on the customer and the user and the experience while browsing the website.
The usability of the website is extremely important. Customers should be able to easily find what they are looking for on the website. Make sure there is a clear path on our website to find something a customer values.
The user experience of navigating your website is extremely important for retention. Ensure uncomplicated and easy-to-use web navigation so that customers can guide and explore themselves.
It is a proven fact that websites with good navigation make users stick around longer, read more content, and ultimately make them buy more. For ease in navigation, website developers should consider the following:
- Use Breadcrumbs for users to go back to where they came from.
- Ensure that a user is not overwhelmed by too many choices in the menu. Keep the number of choices to 5-6 on the main menu
- Content arrangement in a manner that makes skimming the website as easy as possible for a user
- Display related posts for more information in case customers wish to
3. Placing the facility of instant real-time communication
Quality customer experience is extremely important and valued favorably by customers. A Live chat feature is an example of having a facility of instant real-time communication with customers.
Through AI-based Live chat, customer queries can be resolved instantly on a real-time basis ensuring customer satisfaction and ultimately customer retention.
Along with Live customer support, make sure the customer has access to other means of communicating with the brand and customer service on the website to encourage them to provide feedback. Create a facility for the customer to place their reviews on the website as well.
4. Provide for a Mobile experience
Mobile traffic has overtaken desktop and laptop traffic and browsing through mobile phones is going to increase exponentially in the future. Hence, a website design service provider cannot ignore the mobile customer experience.
For ensuring that webpages open on smartphones of different screen sizes, the website should contain mobile responsive design elements and hence use appropriate platforms for ensuring this.
A platform like WordPress could be used to give a mobile-responsive experience. Such a design platform helps users transition from a desktop to a laptop or a smartphone flawlessly. Special care needs to be taken in case you have an e-commerce website.
The images of all products on your webpage should be of similar size, similar resolution, and be mobile responsive so that customers get a similar experience accessing your e-commerce site through any device. Such a consistent experience across devices boosts customer retention.
5. Leverage the power of content
While developing a website that excels at customer engagement and retention, make sure that the website contains all the information about your products and services that a customer is looking out for.
Ensure that you regularly upload blogs providing tutorials on how to use your products and services along with guides. In addition, the website should contain company information, announcements, and achievements of the company on the website for better recognition.
One of the best customer attraction and retention tact is to use customer success stories. Explain how your products /services have added value to your customers through videos and case studies on your website thereby creating a bond with your existing customers.
6. Retarget landing traffic
Generally, customers do not make a purchase the first time they land on your webpage. It is important to bring these customers back to your webpage through retargeting campaigns like Google Ads or Facebook Ads.
Such retargeting of traffic is even more helpful for existing customers where smartly made email campaigns can help your brand remain on top of customers’ mind recall.
This ensures that next time a customer is looking for a product that you make, the customer is easily able to recall your brand.
Bottom Line:
Website Design is extremely important for ensuring customer retention. You need to select the right website design agency that is not only technically competent but also understands marketing aspects to ensure customer retention.