In our times, no company big or small can survive without a robust online presence and a website converting new customers into loyal ones. Customer experience is the crucial aspect you need to think about as a startup or a solopreneur, from visuals to UX and from blog content to customer support tools.
What to Choose: A Website Builder or a Professional Website Designer?
If you are just testing the waters of entrepreneurship, a website builder is usually the answer to almost all your questions. Website builders are useful, affordable, and easy to use. Experts recommend them, especially if you start with a small budget, you work with an unproven concept, or you are alone in your venture. After your idea proves profitable and you gain a significant pool of loyal customers, you can up your game by building a professional website with the help of a designer.
Why Is It Vital to Foster and Boost Customer Loyalty?
One of the first things you should know about starting a business is that returning customers are the bread and butter of any online business, be it service providing or e-commerce. According to HubSpot, more than 75% of customers say that they want a website’s design to help them find what they want quickly and smoothly.
But it is always more than just website design. Modern customers are tech-savvy enough to recognize a poor website template when they see one. They also tend to forget about your website (and business) if it is not mobile-friendly or to storm your company with poor reviews if your customer support mechanisms are less than great.
In fact, for online customers, the second most important criterion after the quality of the product/service you offer is the quality of your customer support strategy, according to research.
Your website has about 7-8 seconds at its disposal to make a memorable impression and convince visitors to become loyal clients and promoters of your new business. As we said in the beginning, customer retention is the winning strategy in the long term. According to the Harvard Business School, retaining existing customers is five times cheaper than attracting new ones. Moreover, a 5% boost in customer retention can lead to an up to 75% increase in profitability.
The question here is the following: how do you choose the best and most affordable website builder for your startup or solopreneur adventure AND attain all these standards of website quality?
How to Choose the Best Website Builder to Grow Your Business and Customer Loyalty
So you decided a website builder is a right for you at the beginning of your entrepreneurial adventure. You are confident in the quality of the products/services you offer. It seems it is time to select the best platform to build your business and keep your customers happy.
Decide What You Need according to What You Know
You are probably going to build your website in your free time.
Unless you are a master of coding, you should look for a website builder that allows you to choose from more than 100+ available, responsive, and adaptive layouts. For example, by choosing Ucraft free templates and themes, you get enough adaptive designs to make your website flawlessly transition across various screen sizes and devices, from desktops to the latest smartphone. Keep in mind that multi-device experience is something that search engines hold very dear.
Another critical feature of a good website builder is drag-and-drop design, accompanied by block design, multimedia integration, curated vector icons, intuitive editing, and modification settings, etc. The more comfortable and faster you build a responsive website with a professional look, the sooner it will generate traffic, conversions, and customer loyalty.
Security
In a world witnessing increasing rates of cybercrime, tracking, confidentiality violations, and even personal data theft, your customers are paying attention to how you ensure their online safety. Look for a website builder that offers free SSL encryption. This feature will help you narrow down your search a great deal, as not many builders are capable of providing this type of protection.
Customer Support Integration
The integration of customer support on the website of a business is vital. Trained website designers have a wide range of solutions, scalable to a wide diversity of platforms and devices. Can you achieve the same level of professionalism when it comes to customer support integration on a website you build yourself?
The answer is yes, but it depends on what website builder you choose. Most of them offer free plans. However, you should opt for a plan bundling a wider area of features and settings, customer support included. You may want more than a contact page or an online contact form. Consider a chatbot, live chat support for your customers, Zendesk chat, Messenger, or LiveAgent integrations.
E-commerce Support
You may only sell one product as a startup this year, but how about in three years. E-commerce integration is crucial for both attracting and retaining customers. You have probably heard about CRM plugins for website builders and maybe set your mind to one. Just make sure it offers multiple payment options and delivery solutions. Moreover, since you gain customer loyalty by keeping your clients happy, make sure your e-commerce plugin and website allow for discounts, coupons, vouchers, the use of promotional codes, 2+1 offers, etc.
SEO and Analytics Tools
Website design and Search Engine Optimization best practices go hand in hand, and your website builder should help you with both. You may not know what this is all about, so your builder should meet your needs by making the setting of SEO features, on-site optimization, and website analytics easy and straightforward.
Bottom Line
You retain customers, as we said, by making their experience with your website a pleasurable, comfortable, and engaging one. For this reason, your primary concern should be reaching the ideal balance of attractive design, security, website performance, UX, cross-device responsiveness, SEO tools, marketing tools, e-commerce versatility, and customer support channels. Your website builder should be affordable and easy to use to spare you time, effort, and upfront burdening investments.
More importantly, make sure that the website builder of your choice comes with 24/7 customer support for you, as the specialists over there have to teach you the ins and outs of website making in case you hit a wall. Helpful tutorials and resources, together with fast means of two-sided communication, are crucial when selecting your website building platform.
