How to Build a Community to Increase Customer Retention

There are many different strategies for driving traffic to your site and increasing customer retention. While you could spend large sums of money on advertising and marketing, there are other solutions available. Building your own website community is a great method of building loyalty and repeat traffic.

What’s an online community? Basically, a community is a group of regular visitors that frequently discuss topics and regularly interact with each other. Instead of just randomly commenting on blog posts, these visitors are actively engaged in what’s going on.

Here are some tips to help you begin to build an online community in order to boost customer retention and keep visitors coming back for more.

Create a Community on Your Website

The first step is to create a community on your website. This can be done by adding a forum to your site. If you use WordPress, this is relatively easy. You can create a sub-domain and install a forum theme on the sub-domain. For those without WordPress, there are many great forum templates that you can use.

You should build a forum that is relevant to the product or services that you carry. Promote the forum as you would any other website. Use proper SEO to help drive traffic to the forum. Include links from your main site to the forum and discuss your forum on social media.

Respond to Every Blog Comment

Along with creating a forum, you should respond to every blog comment on your blog posts. Again, if you’re using WordPress, this is easy. You choose to receive an email notification every time a new comment is left on your site. This also applies to your forum.

Every time someone leaves a comment, if it’s worthy of a response, then respond to the comment. Try to respond as quickly as possible. When a visitor sees that you actively respond to comments, they’re more likely to come back and leave other comments.

Create a Subscriber List

You can include an opt-in form on your forum for users that wish to register. In fact, you might want to think about requiring user subscription in order to post a comment on your forum. If you have quality content, users will want to subscribe.

Don’t bombard your subscribers with useless emails. You should keep this subscriber list separate from existing email lists. Have one list that is exclusively for your community subscribers. The emails that you send should be relevant to the forum and the community.

Integrate Social Media with Your Community

Combining the best of both worlds, you can integrate your social media business profile with your online community. How does this work? Through your business profile, create a social media community. Make this a mirror reflection of your online website community. Follow the same principles—responding to comments promptly and encouraging people to leave comments.

Create Exclusive Content for Your Community

Creating exclusive content that you only share with your community members will help increase loyalty. Your members will appreciate receiving content that’s not available elsewhere. Make sure the exclusive content is valuable and informative. You still need to focus on quality when creating this content.

Building a community can be a lot of work, but it’ll pay off in the end. You’ll find that you have a large number of regular visitors and steady traffic to your site. This can help you boost sales, increase customer retention, and compete with major players in your industry.

You don’t need to necessarily be at the top of the search engine rankings to remain competitive. Use these suggestions to begin building a community. For even more internet marketing tips, click on this link to learn about my beneficial done-for-you lead generation system.

Tips for Managing Blog Comments on Marketing Content

When you create a landing page or release a blog article as part of your internet marketing approach, it’s sometimes a good idea to allow comments. This can help increase engagement and could lead to more subscribers for your mailing list. At the same time, you could end up with lots of spam comments.

How do you manage your blog comments to increase the effectiveness of your marketing content? There’re a few simple steps that you can take to prevent a free-for-all.

Use a Trusted System for Your Comments

You shouldn’t allow just anyone to comment on your blog. This can quickly lead to spam comments, random messages, and internet trolls. Before long, your comment section could be packed with comments that’re completely unrelated to your content.

Use a trusted system for your comments. This means a system that requires a login. There are two main options – social media plug-ins and third-party plug-ins.

Google Plus, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter have plug-ins that you can place on your site for your comment sections. This helps to cut down on the random noise-makers that plague open comment sections.

Another option is to use Discus or another third-party comment plug-in. These plug-ins also require a login. By ensuring a user has some type of profile, there is less of a chance of anonymous comments.

Community Only Comments

If you find that you still get anonymous, irrelevant comments, you could restrict comments to community members. Before someone could leave a comment, they’d need to sign up to your community and join your mailing list.

Restricting comments to community members can help increase the quality of your comments. Though, it can also decrease the number of comments your content gets.

Don’t Allow Comments

You don’t have to allow comments. While comments help create an engaged community, provide feedback, and allow you to answer relevant questions, they can also be distracting. If you feel that your comment section is more trouble than its worth, you could remove it completely.

There’s a downside to removing the comment section. A recognisable brand won’t see a major impact by removing the comment section, but, a smaller business may find it more difficult to build trust with their customer base.

Choosing the Option That Works for You

How do you choose the right option? You basically have four options — you can use a social media plugin, use a third-party plugin, restrict your comments to community members, or not allow comments at all. Each of these options has their own advantages and disadvantages.

Social media and third-party plugins can help you build a community. They’re more open and allow a greater number of users to comment on your content. This can be beneficial for businesses that are still establishing themselves. They can also lead to irrelevant comments and discussion unrelated to your content.

Community only comments can restrict unrelated comments. Though, they also limit the number of comments you get. This could be a suitable option — if you already have a large community established.

The final option is to not allow comments at all. This is mostly reserved for major brands that don’t need to engage with their customers.

Weigh the benefits and drawbacks of each option. The decision should be made before you begin releasing content. You may even use different options for different types of content.

For example, on landing pages connected to a PPC advertisement, you might choose to include social media or third-party plugins. For blog posts, you might want to restrict comments to community members.

These tips will help you make better use of your comment section, depending on your marketing strategies. This only covers a portion of the considerations you should make. For extra help and tips for internet marketing, learn more about my done-for-you system.