5 Easy Steps To Improve Your Customer Retention During COVID-19

5 Easy Steps to Improve your customer retention during COVID-19

Since early March the coronavirus labelled Covid-19 has had a huge impact on the British economy — affecting both small and large businesses in its wake.

As an SEO specialist / Digital Marketing professional with several years of experience, I have been offering a lot of support to companies recently. With this new knowledge in mind, I have put together five easy steps to improve your customer retention during coronavirus and gain more traffic.

 

 

Develop your Sales offers

One important tactic right off the bat is offers. New discount offers and deals are essential when nurturing or enticing customers right now and providing offers that blow your competition out of the water is crucial.

Check google trends, discount forums, social media groups and other sites to find out who is offering new deals in your industry and their method of communicating this information.

Another great tool here is survey polls that you can easily introduce to your social media output. You can ask your audience simple questions such as: “What concerns do you have about Covid-19”. You could also ask more focused product-related questions i.e. “How will you use (insert product name) during the pandemic”.

When communicating these messages, it is important not to exploit the needs of your audience. Show both empathy and understanding and communicate in a friendly and supportive tone with your customers. Ultimately, everybody’s money is tight right now, so a helpful tone and helpful discounts can go a long way in boosting your ranking and profits.

 

 

Utilise your existing content

Get the best possible exposure online by making SEO channel as your top priority. Determine what coronavirus-related searches are trending and then apply this to your site’s content.

As for eCommerce businesses, it is more important to make sure that onsite SEO is your priority in order to get the best exposure online.

You should also create engaging and informative content on how your site appears for coronavirus-related queries. If you build and analyse the top coronavirus related user queries, it will be much easier to find important solutions that are not yet being offered by your competition.

 

 

Provide Covid-19 announcements and updates

Customers want to know what you are offering and how this has changed. Because of this, it’s always worth communicating that you are still in business and how your service has changed. This should be communicated on your home page, giving your customer an understanding of how their purchasing decision will be affected.

This influences search traffic greatly. In fact, Google has introduced a new way for these special updates to be highlighted on Google Search results. Sites can either have structured data on their web pages or submit a COVID-19 announcement in Search Console.

Once the data has been added, the COVID-19 announcement will appear in the organic search result.

 

covid-19 SERPs

 

 

Update your ‘Google my business’

It’s essential to keep your site and account up to date and make sure that Google has the most accurate information to share with potential customers. Google My Business is a great tool for this.

The following information can be shared with Google My Business:

 

  • Opening hours, temporary closures, etc
  • Announcements for Covid-19
  • Updates related to how the business is being managed as it relates to safety and hygiene
  • Address changes and telephone number changes
  • Websites changes and category alterations
  • FAQ’s and pickup or delivery changes

 

You can also create ‘Google my business post’ specifically for Covid-19 to highlight changes within your business or any sales offer that you want to promote. To find out more, take a look at this.

 

 

Provide coronavirus-related FAQs

Providing coronavirus-related FAQs can be extremely helpful in clearing up any potential questions or concerns. In addition, this can convert leads into sales by providing needed answers in a simple manner.

Common coronavirus-related questions can include:

 

  • What delivery options do you have?
  • Do you have a touch-free service?
  • What are your payment options?
  • Where can I pick up my items?

 

I would recommend that you use a FAQ schema markup, which provides a list of frequently asked questions and answers on a given topic. By using FAQ page structured data, you can make your content eligible to display directly on Google Search results and the Assistant, which helps users to quickly find answers to frequently asked questions.

For more information visit how to implement FAQ schema.

 

Implementing the schema correctly could increase your traffic by 20%.

Other relevant schemas for Covid 19:

 

  • Opening hours specification
  • FAQ Page
  • Search results page,
  • QA, How to page

 

 

Pitfalls and Don’ts

Pausing your online business!

Do not disable the whole site or put your customer in a queue. Doing so will affect the crawling rate of your site when it comes to search engine bot.

Instead, you should limit the functionality of the website so that your customer can still browse and read about products they intent to buy.

For more information visit Google recommendation for Covid-19.

 

 

Misleading Content

Definitely, don’t post content that adds to the current panic, as this might hurt your brand’s credibility. If you do decide to provide information related to COVID-19, make sure it is well-researched, accurate and valuable.

 

 

Conclusion

The coronavirus has created several obstacles for businesses. However, creating and testing new offers during these difficult periods is useful and more important than ever. Of equal importance is updating your business information and changes to google to ensure that customers are aware of these alterations to their buying experience.

Let me know if you have found this content useful.