How To Increase Brand Loyalty With Accelerated Content Delivery?

The world of mobile devices has made the world more transparent than ever before. An overwhelming 93% of consumers rely on their smartphones to compare prices and evaluate choices while shopping, discovering new brands every day on the Internet through E-Commerce websites, marketplaces, and social media ads. Consumers are now no longer limited to the selections they have in their local malls but can purchase goods and services worldwide.

This overly competitive and saturated online shopping landscape means that brands today need to work even harder than ever to stand out among their competitors. Instead of a one-off sale, brands need to prioritize building lasting relationships with customers to ensure that they return.

But how do you build loyal customers on the Internet? Read on to find out!

Importance of Brand Loyalty

It is no secret that the majority of established brands rely on their existing customer base to keep the business running and generate new revenue. Gaining loyal customers positively impacts your business and sales as it increases customer retention and generates natural brand ambassadors.

The numbers say it all - did you know that on average, 68% of new customers come through word-of-mouth from your existing loyal customers?

Customer retention is often a lot more valuable than finding new customers. Gaining a new customer costs 5 times more than retaining an existing loyal one while a mere 5% increase in customer loyalty can account for a 25% - 95% increase in profit.

How to increase brand loyalty?

Now that we know how important it is to nurture loyal customers, let’s move on to what brands can do to skyrocket brand loyalty in the online world.

Create robust and consistent branding

A consistent brand experience is essential in building loyal customers. You want your customers to feel the same every time they engage with your brand. On the internet, consistent branding comes down to on-brand media elements and domain names.

You’ll need to ensure that at every customer touch-point (your brand content like images, videos, website design, collaterals, emails, etc) have nurtured a strong and consistent image upon your customer.

Having a brand colour palette and guidelines are just but one of the few ways to create a robust brand identity. A designer who adheres to the brand colours can help you to display your brand aesthetics on the website, but imagine the reaction people get when they click on the visual and the URL changes to something that is different.

Although not immediately visible, custom domains are important for overall brand building. Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers can then help you to solve this problem by offering you a branded CNAME to ensure optimal brand performance and consistency.

Be responsive on all devices

Responsive design is key to a successful website. With numerous devices now used to surf the internet, your website needs to look on-brand and professional all the time.

Logos, visual elements, and all brand content should look the same on all devices and on all browsers. A logo that is stretched out of proportion or “cropped” out of the browser window doesn’t inspire trust does it?

Responsive images allow for optimal page loading times on any user’s device type, window size, orientation, or resolution. A responsive image does not rely on the default browser resizing to display images on various devices: it would be a huge waste of bandwidth to deliver an image prepared for a 15-inch laptop screen on a low-resolution four-inch smartphone screen. Instead, responsive images are prepared in various resolutions to serve all form factors in an optimal way.

Plus, you’ll need to know your audience. Are you an E-Commerce business whereby customers browse your sites on mobile devices? Or perhaps a Banking and Finance business where most of your customers log into your websites on desktop computers? Prioritize the device where most of your consumers engage with your website and then ensure that it also works for all the other devices. It is worthy to note that having a mobile responsive website is important as the Google search rank algorithm prioritizes these sites over non-responsive sites.

We have a responsive design checklist you can use to check for the responsiveness of your website.

Deliver fast and seamless digital experiences

Research shows that 47% of website visitors expect load times under two seconds, and if your website takes more than three seconds to load, you could be losing nearly half your visitors.

Website speed affects revenue — tweaking your site to load content one second faster leads to a 7% increase in conversions. In other words, if your site brings in 100K each day, speeding up your site by one second brings in an additional 7000 daily!

Not only does website speed affect conversion, but it also reduces the trust that consumers have on the brand. No one likes waiting for a website to load, and with the plethora of choices, your customers will go elsewhere.

Image Optimization for Faster Websites

Images account for the majority of a website’s page weight and a large part of speeding up your site goes to image optimization. There is no point in serving a large original image on the client’s web browser or mobile application if it’s only to create a small thumbnail. Instead, all image sizes (thumbnail, preview, and full size) should be generated server-side and then delivered to the client side accordingly. For the average broadband connection, server-image upload accelerates loading time by up to 1200%. Automated on-the-fly image optimization that delivers compressed, pixel-perfect images is the way to go.

The reason is simple: no one wants to sit and watch a page load, so faster websites lead to happier and more engaged visitors. Furthermore, after spending lots of time and effort to create a robust and consistent branding, you’ll need to ensure they do not abandon your website!

Accelerated Content Delivery for Increased Brand Loyalty

Image CDNs can help you to do all of the above and more. It provides you with a custom CNAME to create robust and consistent branding. It automates image optimization and makes them responsive on different devices, and accelerates brand content delivery via CDNs.

Why are CDNs important?

As online businesses get traffic from visitors from all around the world, brands will need to ensure that speed is consistent worldwide. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) can boost your website content and increase global brand awareness and loyalty in a snap!

Did you know that you can save up to 60 percent bandwidth and cut the number of requests from your website in half by implementing a CDN solution? It’s true. Without a suitable CDN, you’re missing out on your full website performance potential. Here’s how CDN works:

• Your content files are hosted across an extensive network of servers (PoPs) physically located around the world.
• When a user visits your URL, the server closest to them geographically will serve up the site for them.
• The bandwidth is spared across multiple servers to reduce the load on a single server.

Limitations of single CDN setups

Single CDN setups do have some limitations though. It’s important to understand a few caveats about CDN performance. For starters CDNs can, and do, experience outages from time to time.

Businesses that put all their eggs in this single CDN basket are at risk of disastrous consequences should their particular CDN provider’s network experience an outage. How will a customer trust a brand with a website outage?

Additionally, the speed of content delivery and the quality of user experience depends heavily on the proximity of a CDN provider’s PoPs to its web-users.

Hence, to provide full global coverage, a CDN provider needs to have a significant amount of edge servers strategically distributed around the globe.

Truth to be told, at this point there is not a single CDN provider that can guarantee an equally well-performing and reliable experience in every corner of the world.

Sure, top-tier providers like Akamai, Cloudflare, Fastly, etc. perform incredibly well in a large part of the world, but there will always be ’blind spots’, depending on the strengths of each provider.

The Solution? Upgrade to Multi-CDN!

To mitigate these global access issues, companies are turning to Multi CDN technology. As you might have guessed, a Multi CDN setup uses multiple CDNs from different providers simultaneously to achieve better, more stable website performance.

A Multi-CDN strategy, which Cloudimage offers, is an improvement over the typical approach, where organizations subscribe to multiple CDNs based on performance requirements.

A proper Multi CDN setup provides global performance enhancements and faster websites, but most importantly, it ensures uninterrupted, continuous website uptime - critical for building brand loyalty.

Receive a no-obligation complimentary website performance report to see what Cloudimage can do for your business.

Key Takeaways

On the internet, creating robust and consistent branding, ensuring responsive websites, and delivering fast and seamless digital experiences are crucial components in nurturing loyal customers. Fast websites that work every single time signal trust and reliability to your customers, providing them a better experience whenever they engage with your brand.

Get in touch with our friendly Scaleflex Heroes to find out more about content acceleration over multi-CDN, improving customer experience and loyalty today!