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B2B Marketing

Tips for Designing your Website for Retention

Internet marketing sometimes focuses so heavily on bringing in new customers with SEO that it neglects the aspect of keeping those customers. There are three important goals that a successful business webpage needs to meet. It needs to:

  • Bring in new visitors
  • Achieve a high conversion rate by which new visitors become paying customers
  • Compel both new visitors and existing customers to return

The Power of Returning Customers

While SEO can never be neglected completely, the statistics for successful companies will show that a large percentage of their visitors come from direct traffic where the customer either enters the web address directly or uses a bookmark to go straight to the site, bypassing any kind of search engine. No business can survive on new traffic alone without the loyalty of repeat customers.

Tactics for Getting Repeat Customers

To convince customers to come back to the site and thereby increase retention rates, a page must offer something compelling that’s worth returning for. Web pages that are fresh and continually changing offer something to come back for. A regularly updated blog can serve this purpose very well provided that it’s well written, timely, and entertaining. Regurgitating the same information, however, may boost SEO rankings, but will do so at the cost of retention.

Interactive features are a powerful option that can increase retention in a variety of ways. Sites that run a regular sweepstakes or other type of contest give visitors a reason to come back and see what they might win today. Companies can also reward returning customers with coupons, gift certificates, samples, or other freebies.

Customizing Sites for the Customer

While there are some elements of a company’s web page that must remain static, using customized content is a very effective way to draw customers back. Elements like this literally turn the web page into a unique experience for every visitor. Consider sites like Amazon that suggest future purchases based on items that the user has added to his or her wishlist or previously purchased. Customer who are looking for a new book but don’t know what direction to go in can log in to the site, browse the suggestions, and find something new that suits their tastes.

Tracking previous actions and creating a profile for individual users will open up a world of possibilities in this area. Suggest special coupons, perfectly target marketing campaigns, and increase the success of promotions by finding the best audience for each product with this feature. Customization programming like this benefits both the user and the company, as it allows for the collection of very specific data about the customer’s interests.

The bottom line with customer retention is that the page must offer something new and compelling that’s worth returning for. Divide the department’s marketing focus equally between SEO for new customers and fresh content for existing ones to get the best overall results.


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