Building stickiness around web apps

When you talk about the stickiness factor of your web apps, you're not talking about selling cotton candy online. Instead, you're talking about the ability of your web applications to either tempt or coerce your customers to come back to you again for content or services.

Getting them to come back is the goal of anyone who is trying to build a business online. Repeat customers are golden in the sense that they have already patronized your business, know something about it, and are likely to remember you whenever they are in need of something similar.

So, how do you get them to come back, other than providing an excellent service? This is where the idea of stickiness comes in.

Discounts and deals that have an extended shelf life is one way. Here's an example. When we built an e-commerce system for MaggieMudd, one of the requirements was to be able to manage deals. These were, of course, coming from Groupon, Living Social, Town Hog, and so on. The orders needed to be placed online, the unique voucher number entered, and in the background, the voucher management system needed to take care of the redemption process, discount, and issuance of credit to the customer.

MaggieMudd structured their deals so that folks who purchased an item online with the deal voucher would always have a little bit left over, anywhere from 1 to 5 dollars.  MaggieMudd was not crazy enough to give back cash to their customers, instead, they gave them something more valuable. A digital gift card. The order management system was tied into a digital gift card manager. Soon, MaggieMudd was issuing hundreds of small value gift cards to their deal-based customers. In so doing, they were tempting them back when they were again in need of something similar to what MaggieMudd sold. If you had a good experience, why not go with the guy who sent you a discount?

Sticky apps range from email collectors, that is, when people sign up on your website for a coupon, a newsletter, or as part of an e-commerce process, to customized content. We're presently working on a top-secret "post-it note" application on the MaggieMudd site that will allow visitors to tag and post notes on pages that are interesting, and ask for an email reminder of the page on any specific day that they need it. This is an exciting project, because it means that people will have a way of finding them again at a more relevant time, say, when a birthday or a celebration event is coming up.

There is plenty of opportunity to develop sticky apps in order to gain and retain customers. Facebook, perhaps the ultimate of stickiness, is an important place to develop apps that give your fans' networks the ability to interact with you and the further opportunity to connect with them again. Take a look at our Facebook page to see some of the apps we developed as lead generation tools.