You have now established your online business, created your web pages and developed your marketing strategies to launch it into the virtual world. But is this enough? How can you ensure that your site has the crucial "boomerang" capability to make visitors return time after time? SEO services research shows that around 80 per cent of first time surfers never return to a web site after their initial visit - yet building a strong brand and loyal customer base, to ensure repeat visits and ultimately repeat sales, is critical to ensuring a company's online success.

So where are online businesses going wrong? Often web failures are really marketing failures, in that they are due to poor understanding of audiences, lack of targeting and insufficient means to build relationships and therefore loyalty. To attract and keep customers, a web-business, like a traditional bricks and mortar business, must first thoroughly understand its target market in order to provide the desired services which keep people coming back. But for online businesses, without the physical and personal contact of premised companies, this can be much harder.

So, what can you do? There are three key questions you need to ask yourself: what information do I need about my customers which will help me get to know them better? How do I go about it gathering it? And how do I use that information to build closer relationships?

One way to assess what information to capture is to work backwards from your goal. Is the goal to sell the customer a holiday online? If this is the case, define which pieces of information are predictive of a sale? For example, a customer’s spending limits, spending patterns, frequency of web purchases, geographical location can all determine their likelihood to purchase.

Or, do you want to build up a database of visitors’ names and addresses, with profiles of their age, gender and occupation, in order to analyse the demographics of your customer base? If you want to hone the tailoring of content, products and services on your site, and develop targeted promotional campaigns, then access to this kind of information will be important. Do you want to be able to attract advertisers to your site and use advertising revenue as a central part of your business model? If so, a means of tracking purchasing behaviour on your site, as well as knowledge about information sought and other sites visited will be key to your profiling techniques.

Also, if yours is a "terrestrial" business extending its presence online, you need to know which existing customers are now accessing your services online, together with their recent purchasing history, so that you can target relevant offers and information online. This is not as simple as it may seem, in the absence of existing loyalty schemes, methods of data capture, compatible data from legacy systems or well-developed customer databases.

Once you have decided what you need to know, the next step is to determine the best way of getting this information. As well as deciding on which tools to use, it is crucial to deploy methods that are non-intrusive. Nothing deters people from visiting sites more than the feeling that their privacy is being breached.

This potential conflict between value of information and customer alienation resulting from onerous and untimely questioning can be dealt with by a number of approaches.

Firstly, site registration is a simple way of capturing key information, but make it easy and quick to complete – do not just assume visitors are web whizzes and offer "virtual" hand-holding for first time users. Some people are willing to give away a lot more than others, so offer optional fields so visitors need not answer questions which they may think are intrusive and personal. Better still, give visitors access to valuable information on a whole selection of information and monitor which buttons they click. You will soon find out where their interests lie.

You can even consider delivering more personalised services and content on a on-to-one basis. Offering an email service that brings news of offers, new products or information to your customers’ attention. For example, on a banking or investment site, "give me access to stock quotes", if taken up, indicates an interest in stock without having to ask about finances. As well as telling you more about your customers’ preferences, sites that customise and personalise the viewing experience statistically have longer visits, higher return rates and higher product purchasing rates.

Remember, you can influence how people act by making it worth their while. In terms of gathering good quality information, think about offering an incentive in return for completing a survey. For example, a networking vendor selling components on its web site could offer a guide to the top ten network failures, or a problem diagnosis tool kit, in return for valuable customer feedback.

Finally, it is worth mentioning the software tools now available that integrate with web solutions, to allow businesses to track visitors to their site, see what they look at, and where else they might go on the Internet. These allow you to build up anonymous profiles of individuals, based on both declared and observed behaviour.

So, once you’ve got the information at your disposal, what do you do with it?

At a basic level, it can be used to streamline the services you offer to your customers. How often do banks ask you to fill in separate application forms for different products or services, yet with an 80 per cent overlap of fields to be filled in? Online vendors have the advantage here in that they can display those fields that are optional for online forms. Similarly, hold any credit card details and delivery addresses you may have collected if they have purchased from your site, and offer them up already complete for the customer to use again or amend as they see fit. It saves them time and they will be grateful.

Use the information you have gathered to build up detailed profiles of your customer base. Data such as how long each visitor spends on your site, in which sections, buying which products, how often, spending how much, where they live, their age, sex and occupation are all just as valuable to developing better relationships online as in the off-line marketing world. Additionally, you can use this information not only to develop new web offers and improve your site, but if you have physical trading presence as well, use this to understand more about – and sell more to – your existing customer base.

Furthermore, tried and tested marketing tools such as creating online special offers, loyalty schemes and discounts all apply equally to web sales and marketing. A number of new online initiatives have sprung up over the past year, such as Beenz. Beenz is a "web currency", which online users can earn by visiting certain web sites, or buying certain goods. An individual is rewarded for visiting a site and looking at a new product by earning some Beenz, which he or she can then store in a Beenz account, and redeem later on the same site if buying goods, or elsewhere on the Internet.

Finally, online purchasing requires trust, but the trust inherent in off-line brands does not always translate into online brands. This makes the role of community, participation and strong relationships increasingly important in generating the trust necessary to generate online sales. So, incorporate interactivity into the site. Offer relevant services such as chat rooms and news groups. You want people to bookmark the page to see what happens there later. Other techniques, such as allowing visitors to write their own book or CD reviews (or reviews of other products in your pages) makes people want to come back and see what has developed and builds stronger relationships.

So the message is simple. To build online customer relationships, the principles, if not the methods, are exactly the same for marketing and selling online, as for off-line. By gathering the information you need first, you can decide which is the most appropriate way to target your customers. This in turn allows you to spend your marketing budget more efficiently to create better offers, develop extra services, target discounts and create a more personal approach – all of which will contribute greatly to cultivating customer loyalty and attracting return visitors. Identifying your customers and their needs in this way will allow you to deploy your resources where they are most likely to provide a good return.