…visitors will return to websites to which they have no loyalty simply because they're familiar with the interface. As soon as someone directs the individual to a competitor's website and the individual determines the competitor's website is less painful to navigate, they're gone. Knowing visitor loyalty -- and knowing how far that loyalty can be pushed before disloyalty sets in -- tells you how much and how well visitors think of your brand. Disloyalty is abandonment of a site; forget what you've heard about shopping carts.

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Contrary to popular wisdom, you don't want a site to be sticky; you want visitors to be persistent. Persistence means visitors will stay on a site until they've achieved some goal of their own. You don't want visitors to be loyal to your brand; you want them to trust that the brand isn't going to be painful to them.

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Any experience that increases both pleasure (the visitor got to know you because they wanted to) and has a favorable outcome (the visitor's goal was achieved) will be repeated….visitor loyalty -- hence interface loyalty -- resulted in brand loyalty increasing at a similar rate.

Interface loyalty has a demonstrable effect on transactions, as stated by Reichheld's Loyalty Effect -- which demonstrates that companies turn over their client base every five years, and the way to combat this is through loyalty management -- a 5 percent increase in retention rate leads to 75 percent increase in customer profitability rate. Visitors who have a pleasurable experience and a favorable outcome will repeat that experience.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/5440.asp