People land on your website, hang around for a couple of seconds and then leave without visiting other pages. Sounds like a familiar issue?
You work really hard in building the content and designing your website, but if those aspects don’t drive visitor engagement, it will be of no use. You need to work more on your customer engagement strategies if the users are not pulled in or compelled to take any action.
Visitor engagement on your website provides the chance to collect data about the visitors and prospect new customers. You can easily use these data for making strategic business decisions and improve parts of your website that influences your customer’s online journey.
What’s working and what’s not, what are those aspects of your website that are attracting the visitors, which factors making them leave your website, all these are very tough to understand.
To provide you some guidance, here, let’s discuss about some easy ways that will help to improve your website engagement rate.
1. Content must be engaging
If you are looking to engage with your customers, acquire new ones and decrease the bounce rate of your website, then first start changing your content. Your website content may range from blog posts, testimonials, product description, and videos to case studies, FAQs and other old content.
Here are some smart techniques on how making your website content more engaging:
I. Optimize website content for search engines
II. Refresh the old content with new designs, statistics, images and copy
III. Make the content easy to understand and read
IV. Try to use more images and videos to make your website attractive
2. Add live chat software to engage proactively
You can add live chat software on the website to proactively engage with the customers. It offers quick response in real-time and higher customer satisfaction which can generate more conversions. The website visitors’ online experience increases exponentially when through live chat they quickly get answers to all their queries instead of making a call and wait being on hold for speaking to a customer support agent.
With the user data provided by live chat, you not only know how many chats you receive per day or which chat agent chatted with how many customers but it also provides deeper insights like it allows you to know the demographics, geographical location, past visits, behaviour of the visitor on your website. All this info will help to improve the overall user experience, make better decisions for business growth and increase customer satisfaction.
3. Your website should be easy to navigate
Allowing the visitors to easily find out what they are looking for on your website is the easiest way to keep them engaged. While designing your website navigation bar, keep one thing in mind: it should be easy and simple. People are impatient and they are not going stay on a website for a long time if they don’t find things easily. The navigation bar should be consistent throughout the website and each section should be titled properly in an obvious manner.
Some tips to follow while designing the navigation bar:
I. Put the navigation bar at the top of the website to get maximum visibility
II. Don’t make the navigation bar congested by using too many buttons
III. Double check to ensure that each section is redirected to the correct page
4. Website should be mobile optimized
Make your website mobile optimized because recent studies show that, nearly 1.2 billion people are now accessing the web from their mobile devices. Apart from that, as per Google’s latest algorithm update, it enacted significant penalties for those websites who failed to meet the basic standards for mobile friendliness. So if your website is not mobile, responsive, then you are going to have a tough time in your business for sure. Your content which looks great on the desktop, may be unreadable on a mobile device. A visitor who is visiting your website from his smart phone, will not stay on your site if it does not open or work properly on his device.
Another thing in particular should also be kept in mind for mobile visitors: remove all the nonessential elements from the website for example, unnecessary side bars, graphics, ads or popups. Also make sure that all the call to action or contact us forms are working properly otherwise, visitors will simply leave your website being frustrated.
5. Make your website lightning fast
People hate to interact with a slow website, this is perhaps the reason why webpage speed is now an official google ranking factor. If you really want customers to engage then your web page loading process should be really fast and efficient. If the website takes too much time to load, then visitor engagement will suffer no matter how excellent the content is or how well structured the navigation might be.
6. Be social
Allow the readers to share pages from your website on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or other social media channels to ensure higher website engagement. Seeing others to like your page or tweet recommending your product or service will increase the trust level and they may want to give it a try. Social media not only encourages further sharing with a level of trust involved, but also helps to build a group of loyal users and long term readers.
Here we have covered several areas that can increase the engagement rate on your website. Many of these ideas are very simple to apply, but often overlooked while making the customer engagement strategies. You should focus on how continuously you can improve user engagement on the website as it will help you to achieve the business objectives and serve a purpose to the company’s growth.
