How Website Design Services Impact Brand Loyalty

In the modern business world, your digital presence may be the lynchpin of your entire business model. Ecommerce retailers, digital service providers, and similar online businesses all need a high-quality website to attract and (more importantly) retain customers. As such, they need similarly high-quality website design services.

Website design is a huge factor in the customer experience, as it decides whether or not your website is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and provides information in a clear and straightforward fashion. If your website is poorly designed and doesn’t provide these things, customers are unlikely to return on a frequent basis. In this way, website design is also a huge factor in brand loyalty.

In this article, we’ll delve deeper into the connection between good website design services and brand loyalty, explaining the different aspects of design that may impact your brand loyalty. Read on to discover more. 

Building Efficient Customer Journeys

The word ‘design’ relates to both the aesthetics of something and its function. While they may seem entirely different — especially when it comes to website design —  there’s actually a significant connection between the design of your website and how fit for purpose it is. The connection mainly applies to the navigability of the website: how easy it is for a user to find what they want. 

Navigability is something that high-quality website design services will take a lot of care with. The architecture of your website, the look and location of the website menus, and the number of clicks it takes to achieve something all factor into how fast or slow a customer’s journey from home page to product page is. 

A fast journey means a simple, streamlined customer journey and a good customer experience, which in turn helps build brand loyalty. You want to make navigating the site as simple as possible, as frustrated customers who cannot find what they are looking for on your site may go to your competitors’ sites instead.

Ensuring a Solid Technical Foundation

One in four consumers would abandon a website if a page took more than four seconds to load. That’s not a lot of time — in order to hold a consumer’s interest, and retain their loyalty, you need to ensure the more technical aspects of your website are working optimally.

Even if you’re unable to access top-tier website design services, there are a few simple ways to optimise your website load times. Optimising images is a great first step. Ecommerce companies likely have to upload thousands of product images to their website, and while high-quality images are appealing, their high resolution could result in slower loading times. Unless you think high-quality images are also key to maintaining brand loyalty, it’s a good idea to prioritise speed over image resolution.

Another customer-focused technique for speeding up your website is to minimise redirects. Essentially, redirects are when your user will be directed to a page different from the one they want to go to. There are various reasons your website might need redirects, but too many can significantly slow load speed. It’s important to take the time to go through your website to reduce the number of redirects where possible, usually by fixing broken links or reducing links that send the user away from your website.

Support and Maintenance

Maintaining brand loyalty is all about consistency. You need to be consistent in your marketing messaging, in the quality of your products, and your website needs to provide a consistent customer experience. Should you experience outages, or your website displays inconsistent design and functionality, it will likely ostracise loyal customers.

This is one of the key connections between good website design services and brand loyalty. A good website designer will offer support and maintenance options, even beyond the initial development of the website. Before you establish a working relationship with a website design or firm, make sure you have the option of expanding your site in the future, and that someone will be on call to maintain the website should things go wrong.

Personalisation

Research by McKinsey suggests that 71% of consumers expect some level of personalisation when interacting with a company. In order not to fall behind the competition, this expectation needs to be factored in when designing your website. 

As with the other factors we’ve mentioned, most website design service providers will understand the modern consumer need for personalised experiences, and go to lengths to include personalisation in your website’s design DNA. However, the first step in personalisation is data capture, so you also need to ensure certain aspects of your website are designed to track customer behaviour. Otherwise, you will be unable to personalise their experience effectively.

Offering value is the core of most of the personal touches you can add during website design. For example, if one of your loyal customers visits a particular product page multiple times, sending them a discount code for that product would help maintain their loyalty over time. 

Alternatively, you could populate the homepage with images and quick links to products the consumer might like. This streamlines their journey and again serves to reinforce their loyalty.

Access Expert Website Design Services From Future Platforms

If you need a digital product like an app or website to take your business to new heights, Future Platforms can help.

Our expert team has helped build apps and websites for a number of high-profile clients, including Ralph Lauren, BT, and Domino’s Pizza. Each project was a resounding success for the client and helped them maintain both their excellent brand image as well as increase their revenue.

If you’re looking for high-level website design services, don’t hesitate to get in touch: contact our team here.