Beyond Stickiness: Nine Magnetic Ways to Keep ‘em Coming Back for More Pt.2

As we discussed yesterday, you have three seconds to hook visitors on your website. Snap, snap, snap - and they are gone. Without further adu, lets jump right into the following methods of increasing stickiness on your website.

Make Your E Mail Communications Valuable but Not Too Valuable

As the barrage of e-mail communications (e-zines, tip of the week, etc.) escalates it is absolutely critical that you differentiate your e-mails/newsletter from all the others cramming your customers’ inboxes. It may take several messages before they learn to distinguish your messages from the other e-mail noise. How can you make your brand stand out? Here are some ways to differentiate your messages:

• Be brief but valuable. You want to make your message valuable enough to induce people to read it immediately, yet short enough so they don’t save it to study later. If they save it they will probably never read it.

• Reward people for reading your e-mails. Reward those who take the time to read your message immediately. These rewards could be a coupon for a future discount or a hot tip about some free information that you’ve uncovered especially for them.

• Add a human touch. You could also make your e-mails valuable by including a humorous segment, a great quote, a useful idea or tip, a super bargain, a moneymaking idea, and something personal to humanize your messages.

Your goal is for your subscribers to anticipate your next post … to hunger when they haven’t heard from you in a while. This subtle reward process will make your posts a welcome event rather than an annoyance. You are building your brand awareness in your new subscribers’ minds. When they think of you, you want them to be thinking, “Oh, goodie!” instead of “Oh, no, not them again!”

Get Permission to Gather More Information to Serve Visitors Faster

The sites that are the most valuable to me are the ones that have earned my trust to the degree that I’m willing to give them deeper levels of personal information. For instance, my bank, my Quicken files, and my E*Trade account have all asked me to fill out in-depth personal profiles. Because they are a vital part of my business, I’m happy to do so. Having once invested time in creating a file of personal information, I am extremely hesitant to leave and start all over again with another online service provider. Knowing this, companies like E*Trade are willing to offer people a bribe of up to $75 just to sign up. Once a company has you in its Web, you usually stay there.

Amazon.com has the right idea with their one-click shopping. Why take the extra 60 seconds to buy a book elsewhere when you can buy it from Amazon with one click of your mouse? Any amount of personalization will make your site stickier.

Design a Frequent Visitor/Purchaser Program

Who hasn’t heard of frequent-flyer miles? They work. They create brand loyalty—or, to use a new-economy word, stickiness. By rewarding your most loyal customers with accumulating rewards, you increase the chance that they will come back again and again. They have something to lose if they don’t come back.

One online leader in this industry is Netcentives. Through its ClickRewards program it has pioneered a way to reward your customers for their loyalty. Here is what its Web site says about the program:

Online customers want to be rewarded for their loyalty. With so many choices available, who can blame them?

ClickRewards is the only Web loyalty program to reward customers with ClickMiles ™, a digital currency redeemable for frequent flyer miles, hotel stays, car rentals and merchandise. Customers simply make purchases or other transactions on a ClickRewards merchant site, and immediately start accumulating ClickMiles.

By creating a powerful promotional network of the Web’s top merchants, including E*Trade, barnesandnoble.com and Gap Online, ClickRewards turns curious visitors into buyers and buyers into loyal customers. Member customers make a point of shopping with ClickRewards merchants because they know their patronage is valued.

Merchant implementation is easy. The ClickRewards account team helps market, promote and manage the rewards program, making it the easiest, most cost-effective relationship marketing tool available online.

Your growing business may not yet be large enough to take advantage of such a program, but you should at least model what they’re doing. It’s obviously working.

Reduce the Distance between Your Visitors and a Live Person

The more and faster your visitors can interact with real people, the stickier and “quickier” your site will become. This plays to the strengths of the Internet—speed and interactivity. If you can connect with your customers during their feeding frenzy, the more likely you are to make the sale. Unfortunately, this may go against the nature of the ideal hands-off, money-while-you-sleep kind of business that you’d like to create. As you design your business, you’ll have to balance these two competing demands. Do you want to make money fast? Or do you want to make money without hassle? I’ll bet you answered both, didn’t you?

Get People Together and They’ll Reward You for It

As your site grows, you will attract like-minded people; by default, you can become the central meeting point of a virtual community. Arthur Armstrong, author of Net Gain, has this to say:

Virtual communities are groups of people who share common interests and needs who come together on-line. Most are drawn by the opportunity to share a sense of community with like-minded people—regardless of where they live. But virtual communities are more than just a social phenomena: what starts off being a group drawn together by common interests ends up being a group with a critical mass of purchasing power—based in part on the fact that in communities, members can exchange information with each other on such things as a product’s price and quality.

One of the leaders in creating virtual community software is phpBB. This free forum software is available to anybody wanting to setup and run their own out-of-the-box community bulletin board.

Some benefits of setting up a virtual community:

• Introduces like-minded people
• Fosters an open user forum and knowledge base
• Reinforces purchase decisions
• Concentrates group buying power—auctions, surplus
• Answers service and support questions
• Overcomes buyer objections
• Shares product-usage tips

There is, however a downside to building a virtual community: If your service isn’t up to par, there is a forum for your customers to complain to each other and spread the word even faster. Before you build your community you’d better make sure that you build up your customer service.

Now we’ve come to the final item on our stickiness/quickiness check-list. I’ve placed it last because its nature is fundamentally different from the others. The first eight points have to do with making your site addictive—creating reasons for people to buy now and in the future, again and again. The final item has to do with making your site contagious—creating a buzz that spreads like wildfire.

Study the Principles of Contagiousness

How can you create an explosion of traffic at your site? No amount of advertising can create word-of-mouse power. But you can help it get started. The Internet term for this phenomenon is viral marketing.

The term was actually coined by the venture capital firm of Draper Fisher Jurvetson to describe the phenomenon of a company it funded in 1996 called Hotmail. Aside from having a great name, Hotmail was hot because of the way it was marketed. It spread like a virus, going from zero customers to over 40 million in only three years, increasing its subscriber base more rapidly than any company in the history of the world. As Business Week reported, the idea for Hotmail came about as almost an afterthought:

The two principals, Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith . . . went to see Draper Fisher furvetson, but the investor was unimpressed by their idea for database software for the Net. As they were packing up to leave, [the venture capitalists] asked: “Do you have any other ideas?” Sabeer said they’d noodled over a scheme to offer free, advertising-supported E-mail over the Web. A week and a half later, the venture capitalists ponied up $300,000, and Hotmail was born.

The key to Hotmail’s phenomenal growth was the free price tag and the fact that every e-mail contained the following tag line and an implied endorsement by the sender:

Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

The more the service was used, the faster the word was spread. In 1998, Hotmail was sold to Microsoft for $400 million! Not a bad return for a free product.

That is the payoff for having the most successful virally marketed business idea in history. Therefore, i think we can all learn something from the hotmail story!!