Make Your Website Design Unforgettable to Ensure Repeat Visits

The question one needs to ask when building a business with a web presence in hand is this "Are my customers/prospects returning to my website repeatedly?". By applying a few tricks to ensure your website is memorable (and supplying an answer to their needs) you are increasing the chance of repeat visits.

If you do not know the statistics of whether you customers are once off visits or any repeat visits then take steps immediately to address this issue as it is paramount to ensure your investment in web presence is doing your business justice. Contact your website host provider or a reputable website design service and they can help you with a report on visits to your site.

What do you see as most important one time visits or repeat visits? Many people just don't see the value in repeat visits but I would like you to take a moment to think back to the last medium to large item you decided to purchase. It may have been a new laptop, whitegoods or anything else that comes to mind...Did you go straight to a product/service and complete your purchase, or, did you to a bit of research on pricing, support, information before making your purchase several days or weeks later?

Studies have shown that most times customers need to be exposed to the product or information several times before moving forward to purchase. Therefore you really want to make your website as memorable as possible to entice your customers to return.

TO make your website memorable and there are a number of ways we can do this.

DOMAIN NAME - First of all your domain name should be easy to remember. It should also give the customer an idea of the service you offer. For example it would make sense to have the word pet or pets in your web address if your business was a pet shop or pet grooming etc. If possible use .com as your domain extension as it is most commonly used.

BRANDING - Secondly spend some time on your business branding. What color scheme represents your business, do you have a logo, photo or picture used with your advertising, shopfront or stationary that you can have on your site. This is where an "out of the box" template wont suffice. Your website design needs to incorporate your true look and feel of your business.

ANCHORING - I find this very interesting... Anchoring in short is about finding a common object, sound etc that you can anchor to the consumer so that when they are out and about in general life and see or hear it, a trigger mechanism will cause them to think of your site. An example most people know of this is like a well known jingle such as clapper lights. Within your own business however, you could for example have a small flash file on main page with a small child eating a piece of turkish delight and saying yum! Next time the shopper is about and sees a pink piece of turkish delight they'll think of your turkish catering service.

AESTHETICS - Your website design must be easy on the eye. We don't want to make it too busy and fancy otherwise the real important message is missed. Have all the information logically available through a navigation bar so it is easy to get around and satisfy the information they need.

CONTENT - Good content is important. Consider what information a customer is looking for before making a purchase. How many times to you go to investigate a cost for something and can't find any information on pricing. It's really important to satisfy their needs. By not having any pricing up you are sending the message that your service value is not worth the cost - so be upfront and at least have a special deal or package available to them.

First time they visit they will be looking for an overview, repeated visits will have the objective to find out more about products, so have a review, comparison page or testimonials page to satisfy their questions.

By applying these few basic principals in your website design, you can go forth and make your website unforgettable.