Loyalty, what is it good for! Absolutely everything!

In another post on this site I wrote about the importance of Loyalty to a person wanting to start up an online ki;s apparel business. I said that while she will need to find her niche in such a competitive online and offline market, she will need to create some strong loyalty with her online visitors. This going with the theory that it costs about ten times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep them. For her site I suggested discounts for repeat sales or maybe kids games to attract the children themselves.

One of my clients is an online gluten free business. I am now exploring loyalty features that they can use in their future site upgrades, however I am interested in an advice that viewers have here. Note they do-t actually sell any products, just advertise other company gluten free businesses.

Using Google analytics you can see the average loyalty of sites similar to your sites category. For gluten free, in the food category the new visitor rate is often around 80%. Now that could either mean very poor loyalty, or that users have dynamic IP addresses which Google cannot confirm as being the same visitor.

I do-t know if I should just accept this relatively poor industry rate or really push to increase loyalty. We looked at using a Forum, but kept getting spammed by spammers, regardless of the security features. Even on its best days, it seems that the Forum could just not generate enough continued interest. I am also ruling out a blog for them as there is only one full time employee, and they are usually busy putting up client pages. Since my clien's site is a gluten free lifestyle and living site, with directory and news articles I am looking at what they could add to compliment their business to increase loyalty.

Does anyone here have any advice on this for this kind of site?

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