You need loyal customers to stay in business. Retaining customers, overall, is considerably less expensive than acquiring new customers. Companies with better customer retention strategies also tend to have customers with higher CLVs (Customer Lifetime Values). Given these statistics, it’s surprising how many businesses, particularly small businesses, focus all or nearly all of their customer service and marketing budgets on new clients. By focusing on quality content, you can instantly decrease churn of active users and even gain a few die-hard fans in the process. The easiest way to do this is with content audit. In fact, many SEO companies actually have content audit templates you can use to see how engaging your content is.
However, certain situations make using a content audit template even more important. Content migration is one of them. When your business changes it’s CMS (Content Management System) it can be difficult for your current customers to stay engaged with what you have to say. If this is coupled with a substantial design change, your customer base can erode quickly without something to stem the tide.
What is Content Auditing?
If you have content that is not engaging your audience, it can really hurt conversion rates. In fact, Google is smart enough to spot bad content. And, when it does, it can actually lower your page rank.
Keep in mind, bad content is not just poorly written blog posts. It is actually your entire website. This includes just a few:
- Legacy pages
- Autogenerated tag pages
- Broken links
- Subdomains
So by using a content audit template, you can take a good look at how the architecture of your page as well as the content on it is helping or hurting your page rank.
Often times a content audit will lead you to realize that you need to migrate your CMS.
Tell Everyone
If you’ve used a content audit template to help you clean up the bad content on your page, and you’ve determined that migrating to a different CMS would help you manage your content better, you need to tell everyone. Anytime you are planning a big change like CMS migration, you must tell your customers.
Send out an email, write a special post, create an infographic of the process for social media or all of the above. By preparing your audience for the change, you can enhance their level of receptiveness. This should be the first thing you do after you follow the steps in the content audit template. You should do this a month to a few weeks in advance of the actual migration, then be repeated a few days before for maximum effect.
Ask for Feedback
If you’re already committed to CMS migration, then a few other changes may be in the works as well. Ask your patrons what they want to see. Ask them what they don’t want to see. By allowing your audience members to voice their opinions and concerns, not only will you have some constructive feedback in the future, but it gives them the sense that you’re taking their views into consideration (and you should).
Offer Consolation
If the shift from one CMS to another might cause snags in your content schedule or you want to take time off to focus on the move, consider releasing a valuable download ahead of time. This way you will stay in the minds of your audience, and they get something to keep them occupied during the move. You can also include information about the move inside of the download. Things you may want to include are important dates, reasons for, changes to expect, and any additional contact or bookmark updates.
By offering your customers a valuable piece of content for free, you not only show them that you know how valuable your website is for them but provide everything they need to get back on track.
Read also: 4 Rules of Successful Website Content Migration
Focus on the After
Even though transferring to a new CMS might not seem like the most exciting thing in the world, you can make it into an event. Depending on what your website offers, you can increase the chance of readers sticking around if you promise them something for doing so. It could be a discount or exclusive offer, maybe a guide or checklist. It might even be a free one-on-one phone consult for the first five people that check in. These types of offers build excitement and can help your audience get over any feelings of trepidation they may have.
Put Your Customers First
Any good content audit will put your customers first. Try to see the move through their eyes. What are the things they might miss? How long might they miss them? What could you do to make things easier in the meantime? If nothing else, make a little extra time to connect with your audience in the days leading up to the jump, especially if more than just a change in CMS is happening. Be prepared for an adjustment period after and incorporate some consolation efforts into your retention strategy, too.
In conclusion, if you can manage all of these things, you and your audience will be stronger for the transition. Simply put, the best content audit template, will help you make your CMS migration much simpler. Why? It’s a good excuse to clean up the dead weight on your website that’s hurting your page rank. Providing your customers with the right platform to read quality content is a great SEO tool, and it will help rank higher in search results.
Whichever CMS platform you choose, it will be a flawless, accurate and fast website migration with CMS2CMS, fully automated migration service. Try Free Demo Migration and check it out yourself.