Keeping Your Visitors Happy

Every website, whatever it offers to its users, must do one thing and that is keep the visitors happy. After spending days promoting your new website you don't want your users to leave before looking at your content or buying anything from you. It is a complete waste. There are, though, many ways to increase the likelyhood that your visitors stay at your site and maybe even revisit it in the future.

One of the major things you can do to keep your visitors happy is to make it very easy to find what they want fast. Remember, for nearly every website on a topic, there are about 5 others who provide the same service. For example, if you can't find the book you want at Amazon you can try Barnes & Noble or BOL. There are many things you can do to make things easier for your users. One of these is to add a search engine to your site so that visitors can search for what they want. This is actually quite easy to do and you can get one for free from Atomz.

You should also make sure that there are no broken links on your site, all the pictures work and people can access all the pages they will want. If users get an error they are very unlikely to continue to try and use your site. You should also check your spelling and grammar as a lot of misspellings can make people think your site is unprofessional and not continue to use it.

One very important way of keeping your visitors happy is to provide them with several easy ways to contact you. This is especially important if your site sells something as people will often want more details on your system or products. Every site should give the users an e-mail address and an online form for users to contact them. If you are running a business site it is also good to include a 'real world' address and a telephone number.

Just giving your users a way to contact you isn't enough. You MUST respond to users e-mails. Even if it is just an accnowledgement of the receipt of an e-mail, you should reply within a week at the latest. If you can reply to all your e-mails within 24 hours you will be rewarded with user loyalty. This is because the speed you respond to your e-mail is a good indication of how professional a company is. Being quick will impress people. One company I once delt with usually replies to e-mails within 2 hours! If you can provide this sort of service your customers will be very happy.

As you can see, just getting people to visit your site is not enough. You need to keep them happy and deal with their comments and questions quickly and efficiently. Doing this will make your visitors loyal and encourage repeat visits and/or purchases.

© 1999 - 2003 David Gowans