It’s no secret that it costs brands much more to attract new customers to their business than it does to maintain loyalty from existing customers. In fact, businesses have as high as a 60 or 70% chance of selling to repeat customers, whereas this statistic is much lower when it comes to attracting new customers. Despite knowledge of the advantages of customer retention, many brands are making the wrong moves, particularly in regards to website design.
Over the last few years, global e-commerce has grown considerably faster than before the pandemic, with many brands focusing on online sales as a result of the limits placed on physical retail. Whilst more people than ever before are choosing to buy online, this also means that competition for online retailers is also extremely tough. Web design is a key opportunity to ensure you stand out from your competitors. When you are offering the same or similar products or services, the impression that your website creates and the experience it provides may well be what ensures that customers come back to you, rather than turning to your competition.
To stand out from the crowd, build brand loyalty and increase repeat sales, brands must ensure that web design is a key focus when it comes to e-commerce.
So what makes a good website design and what should your approach be to keep your audience and improve customer retention?
Utilising Web Design to Keep Existing Customers
User Experience
User Experience (or UX) should be at the centre of your online customer retention strategy. Consider this, you would always aim to provide the best possible customer experience in a physical shop, so the same should also apply to your website in order to develop brand loyalty and grow customer retention.
In the same way that you might consider the physical layout of a shop, ensuring each section is clearly labelled and it’s easy for customers to find their way to checkout, effective website design ensures that it is as easy as possible for visitors to navigate your website, find what they are looking for, and make a purchase.
If website visitors can’t find what they are looking for with ease, they will look elsewhere quickly.
There are a range of elements that can play a key role in good website UX, including:
- Simple menus and easy navigation
- Mobile friendly design that ensures all content is viewable on any device
- Simple contact forms
- Easy to use check-out
- Eye-catching and engaging CTAs
- Chat boxes
- Fast loading speed
Effective web design always puts the customer first, which means UX front and centre. Remember, when it comes to UX design, simplicity is always best – overcrowded menus with too many options can complicate the user journey, making for a bad user experience.
Consistent website design builds brand loyalty
Customers will usually choose a business they are familiar with over one that they are unsure about, so any inconsistency in your brand, including your website, can be enough to lose a customer’s trust and reduce the likelihood of repeat custom. Consistent web design ensures that the same style and structure is used across all pages of a website in order for site visitors to feel comfortable as they browse. For example, it’s important to make sure each product or service page uses the same navigation and layout, making use of product videos, images or animations, combined with key information and customised icons.
A design based on familiarity builds trust in your brand and encourages repeat customers.
Content is king
Effective website design is centred around high quality content, including product information, blogs, infographics, product videos and animations, and a wide range of other digital media. Great website content attracts the right audience to your website and engages them to make them more likely to take action (including following through on a purchase). Ensure that you are publishing content that provides solutions to customer challenges, and answers to their questions, ensuring that they place their trust in your brand and what you have to offer.
To best utlise your content, your website layout should be designed in such a way that content is the main focus point, and is easy to navigate to.
SEO
In order to retain customers online, it’s vital that they can always find your website. Whilst the importance of web design versus website content has long been debated within the SEO industry, in a recent Google SEO office-hours hangout, John Mueller, senior Google webmaster trends analyst, made clear that website design and technical SEO play an important role in influencing organic search results.
There are many web design elements that affect not just how you showcase content on your website, but how search engines crawl and index your site, and ultimately, how many customers visit your website. Simply put, as well as helping to keep customers on your website, web design is also important in bringing them there in the first place and ensuring they can find you time and time again.
Tracking Customer Retention and Learning from Analytics
To be effective in retaining customers via your website, it’s important to use website analytics to learn about traffic to your site, and how many of your visitors are returning. Some of the most important metrics to take note of to better understand your website’s retention rates are:
- The number of returning website visitors (and the percentage of returning website visitors to total website visitors)
- How frequently visitors are returning to your website
- The number of pages viewed by returning website visitors
- The conversion rates of returning visitors
This data helps you to learn more about how successful your web design is in improving customer retention, providing insight into where you need to make changes. For example, if customers are not finding their way to certain pages or your bounce rate is high, you may need to take another look at UX to understand why website visitors are not finding what they are looking for.
Website Design Services to Develop a Loyal Customer Base
Remember, if you are not focusing on the importance of website design in increasing customer retention, your competitors are, so it’s vital to invest in website design services to elevate your website appearance and user experience to stay ahead of other brands offering the same products and services as you.
To ensure your customers visit your website on a repeat basis and develop loyalty to your brand when it comes to their purchasing habits, contact creative designers, Bluechilli.