Attracting and Retaining Visitors To Your Website

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With the advent of the internet, and ever since the dot com era, businesses establishing themselves as e-commerce companies have risen exponentially. As more and more businesses enter the market space, it has become increasingly crucial for companies to stay ahead of the curve and not get lost in all the noise of the competition. Because of the plethora of information available to the consumer in the age of the internet, consumers’ buying power has increased by many folds. This essentially means that the savvy consumer is now well aware of all the alternatives and substitutes of a product available to them, should the product they initially want not satisfy their needs. Businesses must know a thing or two strategies for attracting and retaining visitors to their website.

Many e-commerce businesses can experience a high “churn” rate as well as have immense difficulty attracting and retaining visitors to their sites. Websites that struggle with attracting and retaining can follow in the footsteps of some of the highly trafficked websites. Some noteworthy strategies are funnel acquiring-activating-retaining.

What is the most effective way of attracting visitors to your website?

The Entertainment Park

Companies that fall under this category are those that essentially gamify the process of interacting with the customers. The idea is to engage with the customer and keep them immersed through games as well as challenges that act as a source of entertainment. The purpose of games is to position the product and business favorably in the minds of the consumers. Through a series of challenges, these websites can ensure that visitors keep coming back for more. The primary competitive edge that websites within this classification enjoy is high traffic in addition to success in creating a well-positioned brand image. Prominent examples of entertainment park websites include:

Kellogg’s Website allows visitors to customize their product package
GTE Laboratories contains a “Fun Stuff1” equipped with web versions of nostalgic games such as Minesweeper
Karakas VanSickle Ouellette Advertising and Public Relations’ site encourages visitors to partake in a “Where’s Waldo” style game where contestants look for Pierre Ouellette for a chance to win a T-shirt

Why Buyers Are Loyal to Some Brands

The Club

These websites keep visitors surely engaged by providing a sense of belonging and community. They can interact with like-minded people- who are also coincidentally interested in the same products as them. Usually, visitors are asked to sign up for a new account on their first visit to the website. Once signed up, the visitors are then assigned avatars, usernames, etc., creating a new persona for them to use online. The upside to using this tactic of attracting customers is increasing loyalty amongst its consumer base. Prominent examples of web clubs include:

Snapple enables visitors to meet and interact with other visitors through personal ads that match people considering their mutual interest, e.g. favorite Snapple flavor
Zima has a loyalty club called Tribe Z; members of which have exclusive access to certain parts of the website
Apple’s EvangeList provides a platform for die-hard Apple fans to come together and exchange news, ideas, etc.

The Gift Shop

Last but not least, these are websites that offer freebies to their visitors, such as digital prints, photos, apparel, etc. Typically, these gifts are traded for interaction with the site, such as providing demographic data. Examples of sites that use this attractor include:

Ameritech’s Claude Monet exhibition allows visitors to download paintings
Kodak also offers downloadable stock images
MCA/Universal Cyberwalk lets visitors take a virtual tour of Universal Studios’ new ride based on Back to the Future. As a result, visitors may scavenge for a hidden coupon that will let them skip the line at the park

Check the following reference articles to learn more about attracting and retaining visitors to your website:

Richard T. Watson. (n.d.). Web strategy: Attracting and retaining visitors – Electronic Commerce: The Strategic Perspective. Pressbooks. Retrieved July 28, 2021, from URL

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