Engaging & Retaining Customers
Knowing when customers disengage helps determine what strategies to put in place to increase engagement through certain key stages of the Customer Engagement Model.
But knowing when to do something is not very helpful if you don't know what to do.
There are three major factors that cause sharp and distinct variations in the levels of customer engagement.
These three factors go hand-in-hand and can be found to influence disengagement through all of the stages.
Causes of Customer Disengagement
Content Appropriateness
Content appropriateness means accurately meeting the content needs of your target audience; in terms of both relevance and quality.
Increasing the quality and relevance of your content assists in transferring your customers from one stage to another and lessens the likelihood of disengagement.
Design Effectiveness
Design plays a key role in delivering your promises to your audience. Whether you use text, pictures, audio, video or other formats, your website's design must match the online behaviours of your target audience if it is to be an effective engagement tool.
Design incorporates presentation and navigation. Ease of use and simplicity are two of the key principles to effective web design for engaging visitors.
Website Efficiency
The technical performance of your website reflects its efficiency which, in turn, is critical to retaining customers.
From the point of view of customers, performance is assessed by how quickly the pages are downloaded into their browsers; and also how quickly they can perform important tasks.
Increasing Customer Engagement
If you're finding customers increasingly disengaging from your website, the first thing to check is the possibility of a mismatch between the content you're providing and the overall communication message of the website to your target market. It might just be that the message they see on the page they arrive at is fundamentally different to the message that invited the visitor in the first place.
An example might be where the initial message offered free delivery (with a call to action for the visitor to provide their email address). When the visitor gets taken to the page, they discover a website message that further refines the offer by limiting it to only people within 10 km of the store.
Similarly, if a visitor has to go through hoops, providing their name, address, drivers license, pet dog's name etc, to get access to something you're offering, it'll result in surefire disengagement. There is a saying amongst the website usability community "Ask them only for what it is you need to carry out the next step... and nothing more."
In fact, in Australia it is illegal to collect personally identifiable information unless there is a clear and specific need. The National Privacy Principles September 2001 even go so far as to say "It would not ordinarily be acceptable for an organisation to collect personal information on the off chance that it may become necessary for one of its functions or activities in the future.".
Fundamental to any website strategy adopted for Digital Marketing, is to ensure that the value provided to visitors and customers is relevant to their stage of engagement.
And where price/performance (the cost to achieve a particular result) continues to decrease, we are now seeing technology take a back seat to more human qualities such as Influence and Trust as vital for your website.
When you're next thinking about online business improvement, think about what you can do to put a human side to your website.
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