Nurturing Relationships With Your Website Visitors: How To Keep Customers Coming Back
by: Mary Anne Donovan
I had a really wild experience the other day. I was on my bank's Internet site, wildly trying to ascertain whether an important money wire had been deposited into my account. It hadn't. I thought perhaps it could be somewhere in the system, so I wanted a warm body to either calm my fears, or establish what my priority was going to be on that day.
One of my biggest frustrations with websites is trying to find contact information when I need it, and of course, even for those sites that have it, there are few standards for where it might be located. These are the instances where I feel alienated, drifting in an impersonal cyber world that for all I know may be populated with nothing but cyborgs. Many web sites have lost sales because they made themselves impossible to deal with except through their Internet shopping carts.
Anyway, back to the bank. Lo and behold, there on the page was a chunk of information where I had several choices to actually deal with a human being. One was to send an email, one was to engage in instant messaging, and the third was to click on a button to speak with someone on the phone. I opted to click and my phone immediately began ringing. Now this was service! I picked it up, and although a received a recording, it was just a few seconds later when a REAL person got on the line. Unfortunately, the competent and human representative on the other end determined that my wire was no where in the system, but at least now I had a game plan for what I needed to do that day as opposed to wallowing in ignorance.
This is called relationship, and it is the challenge for today's Internet. How do you personalize an otherwise vast universe where by its very nature people are relegated to alienation and anonymity?
The first, though seemingly obvious thing you need to do is make it an objective for your site – a priority objective. Once you do that, you can consider and employ specific strategies such as:
1. Identify and describe, as closely as you possibly can, your target customer or visitor. And unless you are a Kodak or Motorola, don't pretend to be all things to all people. The Internet is about customization – the days of the Industrial Revolution where one size fits all due to manufacturing economies of scale are gone!
2. Content that communicates. Once you have figured out who your target audience is and what content would be valuable to them, fill your web site with lots of it. And make sure to keep your content dynamic – if a document is out of date, your customer may be lost! This is the easiest way to keep an ongoing dialog with visitors.
(continued...)
Nurturing Relationships With Your Website Visitors: How To Keep Customers Coming Back
Page 2
About The Author
Mary Anne Donovan is both a scholar and a practitioner, a balance
that "gives me the best of both worlds: the theory behind digital
communications and the hands-on experience to know what really works
and what doesn't." She is in her tenth year as a professor of
technical writing and business communications while at the same time
serves as Vice President and Director of U.S. Operations for SEO
Literacy Consultants, Inc., a search engine optimization consulting
and training company. Mary Anne has worked with computers since they
first came out of the closet and into more general application,
starting with computerized quality control systems for Kodak
photographic and printing processes and now with the fine points of
SEO theory and application.
seolc.com
mad@seolc.com
|
|
