At Snap, we have a digital marketing secret to share with you today: your most valuable customers aren’t the ones who spend the most on a product, offer, or service. They aren’t the customers who open every single promotional email you send out or the ones who refer their friends to your site. No, your best customers are the ones who keep coming back to your products, offers, and services—and not your competition’s—time and time again.
Your SEO might be stellar, your PPC unmatchable, and your social media marketing the best in the biz. But as great as these marketing tools are, if you’re losing more visitors to cart abandonment during the buying process than are actually converting, some aspect of your user experience needs to be improved.
Where Do I Start?
In order to gain a loyal following, you need to examine your current strategies, sites, and processes for gaps or flaws that might be stopping visitors from becoming return customers. At Snap, we’ve identified 6 aspects of every website that can turn away potential customers and limit the ROI of your digital marketing efforts:
Load Time
As marketers, we’re tasked with capturing and retaining visitors on our websites. It’s a challenging job, especially considering the short attention span of the average viewer. Those first few seconds of a visitor’s time are crucial, so you need to make them count. Don’t let visitors spend their time waiting for a data-heavy page to load, or you’ll lose them before your site even fully makes it onto their screen.
Page Layout
Put yourself in the shoes of the average visitor: if you struggled to find information or products on a website in a clear, timely manner, you would search for the same information somewhere else with a clearer funnel, right? With this in mind, make valuable information like your company’s address, FAQ, products, and email contact easily accessible to avoid confusion and the infamous click-and-leave syndrome.
Optimization
Depending on your primary consumer base, SEO and CRO best practices will look different for your site. Are your customers mainly young people? Then your website must be mobile-friendly. Are older, less tech-savvy people your target market? Clear funnels are the way to go. At the end of the day, optimization is about people first. To get the highest ROI for your digital marketing, keep them at the forefront of your efforts.
Ads
So ingrained in our culture that they’re essentially unavoidable, ads are everywhere—even blockers won’t keep you safe on the internet. In order to create ads that make the most of your social media marketing, they must be unobtrusive and inoffensive as possible. Nothing will make a visitor hastily close out of your website like a flashy pop-up ad that fills the screen and demands interaction.
Autoplay
Many modern sites like to present autoplay content as a feature, but this function doesn’t work nearly as well outside social media. The abrupt sounds and video can startle visitors, causing many to exit your site rather than spend time figuring out how to pause the offending video or sound.
Content
These key points have one overarching message: avoid anything on your website that could be considered distracting. This extends to your content! If your website copy or blog posts are riddled with grammatical errors, seem less than thorough, or are just generally uninspiring, you aren’t doing your site any favors. You might have an excellent team of content writers, but it never hurts to take a step back and examine your content with fresh eyes.
What Are My Next Steps?
As you move forward, consider the following to ensure that every visitor to your site becomes your best customer.
Make the Most of Your CRO and SEO Services
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) and search engine optimization (SEO) are two of the most valuable tools in your arsenal when it comes to brand exposure and search engine rankings. These tactics give local businesses more of an advantage because they don’t require an entire team of experts to yield positive results. Focus on aspects of your site or brand that will contribute to your exposure and rankings: keywords, searchable phrases, solid PPC ads, and great content might be your key to seeing the visitors pour in—and convert.
Build a Responsive and Searchable site
A mobile version of your website is no longer optional, especially considering the prediction that 50 percent of all searches will be mobile by 2020. Snap’s responsive web build process is a great resource to utilize as you work on building a responsive, easily searchable site!
Improve your brand consistency on all channels
In some ways, your brand plan is more important than your business plan. Your branding strategy affects every single interaction, digital or in-person, that you have with consumers. If you have a distinguished brand or product voice, take a second look at it and make sure that all visitors to your site receive the same experience, no matter how they find you.
Win Your Best Customers With Snap
Building and strengthening your existing website, brand message, and user experience requires time and resources, but the ROI is worth it. Whether you need a web design, social media, or marketing expert, the Snap team is ready and waiting to help you take your brand to the next level and create lifetime customers!