Guest post written by Keith Smith
Keith Smith is co-founder and CEO of BigDoor, a company which uses game mechanics to increase user engagement, loyalty and monetization.
I hate to break it to you, but your online customers aren’t as committed as you think they are. They’re just as happy to get into bed with some other brand as they are with you. That’s because the Internet has largely killed brand loyalty - and what’s left is a nomadic and promiscuous audience that rarely gives its devotion to a site or brand for very long. This has been a hunch of mine for some time; I even started a company focused on solving this problem. But it wasn’t until I began crunching the numbers that the enormity of this problem came into full view.
It’s not just you: promiscuity is a problem for most sites.
Over the past three years, people have become more and more loyal to the Internet, with over 80% of users logging on daily. What about loyalty to individual sites? Out of curiosity, I turned to my friends at Compete, pulling data on the top 15,000 U.S. Web sites and took the median performance of those sites for a single month. The results were staggering:
- Users visit these sites less than 2 times each month.
- Users spend less than 8 minutes viewing only 7 pages per site.
- These sites receive a median Loyalty Score (% of daily active users ÷ monthly active users) of less than 6%.
Compare that to the successful outliers: Google.com has a Loyalty Score of 68% and Facebook walks away as the winner with 72%, and one could easily argue that user loyalty lies at the core of their success. That success comes with an engaged, viral, and ever growing audience — followed by billions of dollars.
Most Internet marketers focus on getting users, not keeping them.
Internet marketers have long touted the fact that switching costs are nonexistent on the Web. It’s this mindset that has led the entire industry to focus on acquiring users. What they need to start figuring out is how to keep them.
This year, Internet marketers will spend $50 billion to acquire users and almost zero turning them into loyalists. There are countless ad networks, affiliate networks, and online marketing companies and many of them are mature, sophisticated, profitable, and extremely important to the Internet’s ecosystem. Yet many of seem to ignore the importance of loyalty in the digital marketing ecosystem.
Improving online customer loyalty
So, how do you keep your customers faithful on an increasingly promiscuous Internet? I’ve outlined a few strategies to get you thinking less about chasing after page views and more about earning customer trust and gaining loyalty.
- Publish valuable content (and keep on publishing): One way to encourage people to visit your site again and again is to consistently publish interesting and useful content. I’m talking about engaging blog posts, videos, how-to articles, or anything else that might appeal to your customers. If you’ve got something worth talking about, they’ll be more likely to bookmark your page, subscribe to your RSS feed, or share your content with their social network. The second part of the content formula is to have a consistent publishing schedule — setup an editorial calendar and stick to it.
- Improve your site’s usability: Another way to keep your customers coming back for more is to improve the usability of your Web site. If your site is the least bit confusing or cluttered, people won’t think twice about abandoning you for a competitor. A clean design and customer-focused copy invites people to investigate what you have to offer. Not only does Dropbox have an easy to use site, but it takes its usability a step further with helpful videos and entertaining drawings.
- Provide excellent customer service: Excellent customer service after the sale is just as important as before. A simple follow-up email or thank-you letter can cement a long-term relationship with your customer. Handling customer complaints is also critical because it’s just too easy to make complaints public (think The Consumerist). On the other hand, if customers have an exceptionally good service experience, they will likely share the experience with friends and remember it the next time they’re ready to buy.
- Foster online communities: Having a positive and helpful online presence builds goodwill and trust with customers. This can involve monitoring Twitter and Facebook traffic and jumping in to answer questions and direct users to helpful content. You can maintain a community on your own site, but increasingly customers are gathering elsewhere to ask questions. It’s useful to participate on sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers and chime in on questions that pertain to your industry.
- Add gamification to your site: Gamification is a way to incorporate game mechanics into your site in a way that engages users and encourages loyalty. Actions like registering, commenting and sharing with a social network can all be rewarded with game mechanics such as points and rewards. As users interact with the gamification platform, they’ll be more likely to return to your site to earn additional points or spend virtual currency. Gamification isn’t as simple as it sounds. You need to take a careful look at your customers and know what motivates them. If you run a sports site, you could design a series of collectible player badges. Or if you have an online magazine, you can create a quest that guides users around the site and introduces them to new content.
Internet promiscuity is something you can’t afford to ignore. Every minute you avoid the problem, you lose customers to another site. The five strategies I outlined are only the beginning of what you can do start encouraging customer loyalty. Make a few changes and your customers will be less likely to chase after the next sexy brand that comes along.
