From ongoing development of technology the amount of channels now available for communication has increased vastly. A knock-on effect of this is that now people can reach audiences they would have never been able to before, because of this niche services, products and information are becoming more readily available online.

With Search Engine Marketing (SEM), even higher conversion rates can now be achieved from the visitors your website receives. SEM is great for generating new visitors to your website, these visitors are your most valuable asset for current and future success.

So how do you encourage repeat visits and customer loyalty? By treating these customers as individuals, just as you would offline.

Let’s imagine you have a shop front and a customer walks in the door. If you knew their name you would personally welcome them, and if you don’t you would be ready to impress them with your knowledge, advice, products and services. Online you don’t get the opportunity to personally greet people and welcome them, so you have to employ other tactics to treat them as you would offline.

Include a simple welcome message on your homepage, offer recommended products and services. Display additional information and advice in case the customer may want to find out more deatils. If they have registered on your website before then you should display a welcome back message, if they have not, then encourage them to sign up to your website.

This helps build a customer relationship, next you need to help the customer trust you and your website. The following points are steps to help you achieve this:

• Your website should be user friendly – Offline, your customers will have to drive to a shop, find somewhere to park and then browse the products. Now if everything is clearly displayed and logically categorised a customer is more likely to stay and browse. Online, customers have much shorter attention spans and will quickly move to another website if they cannot find what they want. If it is hard to find key products, the website is slow or after using the search box a product is not found, then a customer will quickly leave and move onto a competitor website.

• Prompt, quick, responsive customer service – The speed that you deal with customer requests online is much more important than when offline. Online customers want to find what they need as quick as possible, if they have problems sourcing what they need or have had problems with your website then they will need clear contact methods displayed. Creating clear methods of contact is important, but ensuring that contact from customers is dealt with efficiently and effectively is an important part of building trust and relationships with your customers. When communicating with customers, try to make the message as personalised as possible so they feel valued. If standard messages are used customers can feel unimportant and unwanted. Personalised auto responses to messages are a good idea to let the customer know their message has been received and how quickly you will aim to respond to their request.

• Privacy not Piracy – Privacy statements are a important part of allowing your website visitors to understand what you intend to do with their data. In this day and age everyone is scared of receiving spam and having their bank account cleared out. The banks have not made enough effort to provide confidence and trust to their customers and therefore have been abused with many fraudulent attempts to gain customer details. If your customers are not sure how their information will be used, they may be tempted to use a competitor site that clearly states that their information will not be resold. You should display a privacy statement prominently so site visitors know that their information is safe.

• You have to earn customer loyalty – If a website visitor had a bad experience with your company they are much less likely to return for future purchases. Dealing with complaints as an opportunity to turn around the situation and continue the relationship with your customers is the best approach. has a negative experience with your company, they are less likely to return and the same holds true for online customers. If they feel they have not received good service, they will not likely purchase from you again.

Your online customers are even more important than your offline customers, they require less time and management. You should aim to exceed all customers expectations in hope that they will be impressed, tell their friends and return to purchase time and time again. The internet is great for spreading messages quickly, you need to ensure only positive messages are communicated by your customers, otherwise a bad reputation could quickly become a very hard problem to resolve.

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