Why Good UX is crucial for customer loyalty

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There’s a lot your website has to do. It has to tell new customers about your company and your product. It has to sell your product or service to them. It has to offer customer support. It has to be a lead generation tool. And now thanks to the dwindling number of people visiting brick and mortar stores, it also has to develop the kind of connection and customer loyalty that was previously done by stores and sales assistants. This is hard for most websites to do. But there is one way that any website for any type of brand can foster customer loyalty and that’s through great user experience. Here’s how.

 

Why bad UX stops loyalty from ever forming

Let’s take a second to consider why bad UX is such a problem when it comes to customer loyalty. After all, if a customer likes your product they will stay loyal, right? Not always. Customers don’t enjoy using a website with bad user experience. In fact, they will probably leave it and go to a rival website that is better to use. Even if it’s their favorite brand, there’s so much competition online that it’s not worth putting up with a site that provides a bad user experience. Without any customers hanging around it’s going to be hard to create customer loyalty, right?

Great user experience helps you get new customers and also keep old ones

Too often, the focus of websites is on converting new customers at the expense of old customers. Many business owners view websites purely as a lead generation tool that keeps the customer conveyor belt moving. But what about current customers? They are the only ones you are going to be able to develop customer loyalty with. That’s why developing a user experience that makes browsing great for current customers is so important. If you can keep your current customers happy, you don’t have to focus so much on generating new ones. Your current customers will just keep coming back.

Great user experience creates brand advocates

The ultimate goal when it comes to fostering customer loyalty is to create brand advocates, a few special people who are crazy about your brand and will promote you to everyone they know whilst vehemently defending you. But are customers likely to recommend you to their friends if your website is awful to use? Nope, in fact they’ll probably tell them how terrible it is. Bad user experience could be stopping you from turning loyal customers into staunch advocates.

Great user experience lets customer identify with your brand

Customer loyalty can only truly be fostered when customers really understand your brand. The only way to achieve this online is to make sure that your brand and message is consistent across every medium and every page of your website. The more coherent the user experience, the better the brand message will get across. And the better the message gets across, the more customers will understand it and the more loyal they will become.

 

If you want to boost customer loyalty through great UX, speak to our web design team today.