Increasing Customer Retention: do it by building a Community

Every on-line marketing’s goal is to drive traffic to the site and to increase customer retention. Some of the best way to do it are really expensive but there are also other solutions available, that are cheaper and sometimes free.

One of them is building your own website community, it will build loyalty and repeat traffic.

But first of all: do you know what is an online community?

It is a group of users and visitors that often interact each other discussing about topics or arguments. The main point is they do not leave just random comments on blog posts, they are actively engaged in your content and web activity.

I want to give you some tips that you can easily follow to start building your community and boost customer retention by keeping visitors coming back on your web site.

TIP 1. Community

The first thing that you have to do is to create a community on your web site. The fastest way to do it is to add a forum to your site, it is quite simple if you use WordPress: you just have to create a sub-domain and install the forum theme. That’s it.

In case you do not have WordPress, there are a lot of beautiful and efficient forum template that you can use.

Your forum must be relevant to your product or service, so choose carefully the right topics. Then, start promoting it as you would a normal website: properly use SEO writing and link from your main site, discuss your forum on Facebook. Exactly the same activity you usually do to drive traffic to your website.

TIP 2. Blog Comment: to respond is a must

The first rule of a successful community is to respond to every blog comment or blog post. Even in this case, if you’re are using WordPress it will be easy. You just have to choose to receive an email notification every time that visitors leave comments: you should response as quickly as possible!

Why is it important to respond quickly?

Because when a visitor sees that you are active, he will feel more engaged and he will be more motivated to keep the conversation. It means that he will be more likely to come back and leave new comments.

TIP 3. Subscriber list

It would be great if you include on opt-in form on your forum to invite users to register. A good solution to require user subscription to post a comment on the forum: if you have quality content, you will see a lot of users subscribing.

Really Important: do not bombard your subscribers with thousands of e-mails. Keep this list separate from existing e-mail lists. Remember that the e-mail you send to your forum list should have relevant content to the community.

TIP 4. Social Media + Community

What does it mean?

Your social media profile and your forum community are two separated universes. What you have to do is to integrate one to the other.

First of all, through your Business Profile, create a social media community. It must be a perfect copy of your forum’s community: follow the same strategy to create engagement, to encouraging people to leave comments and to drive traffic.

TIP 5. Best Content

In this internet-era, users are surrounded by billions of content, so you have to make sure to creating exclusive content, that ONLY you share with your community: this strategy will help increase loyalty because your members will appreciate that they are receiving something exclusive, that is not available elsewhere.

How should this content be?

Two main point:

• – Valuable
• – Informative

But this is only the first step, please stay focus on quality when you are creating it.

I know that creating a community can be really hard and a lot of work, but believe me when I say that at the end it will pay off: you will have a large number of regular visitors and steady traffic.

Do it and you will boost your sales and increase customer retention.