Brands are focused on leveraging their websites as a source of engaging with their customers and generating leads.
47% of B2B marketing customers reported that the most likely way they find sales information was to go straight to a business website.
Having a fascinating web design is the key to improving website engagement, but along with that, multiple other factors are important for website conversion optimization.
What are those factors and how do they influence your visitors’ journey or behavior in your sales funnel?
This article will discuss the meaning of website engagement, strategy, and the different factors that can help to boost website engagement, read on.
What is Website Engagement?
Website engagement means how well your overall brand can delight and retain the mindshare of the customers.
It is about whether your customers are finding any value by measuring certain activities such as downloads, shares, clicks, and more.
It has a lot to do with constructively engaging the customer’s time through experiences at multiple touchpoints for their benefit. The higher the website engagement, the more likely customers would become more loyal.
Why is Website Engagement Important for Marketers?
In the old days, websites were just pushing good chunks of content that are not highly targeted to the end user.
But Google and other search engines sophisticated their algorithm to focus and rank only quality content delivered to their readers.
Even readers by themselves quickly leave the website if they do not find any valuable content and solution to their pain points.
The thumb rule to boost user engagement is: Deliver quality content to the right users at the right time.
The competition in the online market has become stiffer and to reach a decent volume in the market, your content needs to be highly interactive and beneficial to the target audience.
To achieve better user engagement, you should follow three vital rules:
#1. Analyze: You should use some tools such as Google Analytics to track your website usage.
#2. Monitor: It is very important to monitor your visitor`s behavior, and what type of content they are looking for mostly on your website.
#3. Automate: Implement multiple strategies to direct visitors to the right categories and help them find a solution to the pain points that drove them to your site.
Strategies to Improve Website Engagement
#1. Include live chat for real-time assistance
Have you ever given thought to what frustrates visitors coming to your website?
A long wait time to get a response.
Long response time is one of the major reasons for a bad customer experience. 59% of customers are more likely to buy when brands respond to their queries in under a minute.
The impact of long queue time can be greatly reduced by implementing live chat. It helps you to engage site visitors in real time when they land on your website.
There is no better site engagement tool to provide instant assistance to your visitors and customers than a live chat.
Brands offering live chat report a 34% improvement in user satisfaction rates and a 2.6x improvement in user care costs.
#2. Minimize Page Loading Time
I cannot emphasize enough the significance of evaluating your website load time. It does not matter what your site developer tells you, keep this very simple rule close to your heart “ your page load time should be less than four seconds” and not a second more than that
However, unless you understand how this metric functions and, more specifically, the factors that impact it, you may find it difficult to improve.
To reduce your bounce rate and increase visitor website engagement, your web pages must load quickly and seamlessly.
A website that is optimized for speed not only improves the user experience but can also help to boost your search engine rankings.
#3. Make Content Readable
Keep your content in a scannable, easy-to-read format. Use white space to keep visitors at ease with reading.
Sometimes websites have much great content but are displayed in small fonts, which makes them tough to read. If visitors cannot read your content because the format defeats your goal, they are not going to engage with the content and they will have to leave your site as soon as they arrived.
Readable content is easy for your visitors to consume and understand. The content is skimmable, written at a suitable reading level, and uses succinct sentence structures and straightforward word choices.
When content is easy to read, there’s a better chance that your user will continue reading hence improving website engagement.
#4. Craft Engaging Web Copy
Some web copies are dull, and boring and work to put visitors to sleep very quickly. Other web copies are engaging, use a tone that captures users` interest and keeps them engaged with your content and website.
What type of web copy does your website serve your visitors? Getting the right balance when creating copy is not easy. That is the reason quality copywriters are paid good money to create good copies.
Study your website copy carefully, is it focused on your brand or your visitors? It has to be about the customer.
Every single line of copy on your website should help your visitors achieve or learn something beneficial to them.
#5. Use Pictures
Product pictures with zoom functionality are important for e-commerce websites. However, you can always go a step further.
How about pictures using pictures of people interacting with the product? How about encouraging people to post images of themselves using the product on social platforms?
The right picture on your site can be worth a thousand words or clicks. Website imagery, whether a photo, review, screenshot, or chart, makes your website more enjoyable, easier to understand, and more likely to generate a response from those who your products are meant for.
Not many visitors will stick around for text-only content. That’s why your website should be a pleasing blend of copy and images that successfully tell your brand story, support your brand visibility, and inspire your visitors to act.
#6. Leverage Videos
Pictures are powerful, and videos, on most occasions, are even more powerful. You can post demos or create a series of educational videos that relate to your niche.
You can use videos to respond to customers’ questions. How about requesting customers to post videos of themselves using your product?
Research has revealed that videos outperform any other type of content in terms of return on investment (ROI).
Videos are gaining popularity as one of the best digital marketing tools today. Almost 73% of digital marketers and small businesses leverage videos as a tool in their content marketing, and 25% of online stores consider investing in video marketing.
There are many types of videos you can use like explainer videos, 2D animation, motion graphics, intro videos, etc.
Users generally prefer videos because the information offered is easy to see and understand. They find videos to be interesting, easy to understand, and very practical.
Hey! but that doesn’t mean you have to cover the entire website with videos.
#7. Display Customer Reviews
The power of marketing your products through the testimony of other customers is unrivaled. Customer reviews are considered powerful engagement tools because of their effectiveness in “keeping the customer in line.”
Depending on the product, they can help persuade visitors to move forward within your sales funnel to make the purchase.
Do you need inspiration? Then have it when I inform you that Amazon.com thrives on the wings of customer reviews to market its products on its site.
When it comes to the validation of your brand and products, positive customer reviews hold just as much power as the revenue you are bringing in.
They represent success, customer satisfaction, and, longevity. Another important thing about positive customer reviews is that they are a built-in marketing tool.
#8. Recommend Related Items
As customers navigate through your site, always make sure to offer them extra content related to the item they came for.
On a blog, display previous posts similar to the one the user is viewing. On an e-commerce website, display products related to the one the user is reading. You can utilize cross-selling and upselling to keep users engaged.
#9. Personalize User Experience
A personalized website experience engages your users. You can offer your customers a customized experience by:
#1. Using technology to determine what products you should display to users.
#2. Using website design to help users determine the right product.
#3. Showing users options of offers/products which similar users have interacted with.
To create an individualized web experience for each customer, brands use data that they have explicit permission to collect.
Then, they tailor the customer’s experience on mobile apps, digital ads, emails, and websites by using geolocation, website behavior, past purchases, and much more.
#10. Think Mobile
What percentage of your website users are coming to your website using their mobile devices? Google data shows that more searches are done on mobile devices.
In 2015, e-commerce sites in North America revealed upwards of 30% of their conversions occurred on mobile devices.
In Europe, e-commerce websites showed upwards of 50% of their conversions occurring on mobile devices.
At a minimum, your site design should be responsive to mobile devices. But you should go a step further.
Look at what are the absolute must-have features for your site on mobile devices to keep visitors coming and engaged.
Creating mobile-friendly content can help you stand out from competitors and deliver a better user experience to the visitor who lands on your website.
What is Considered a Good Website Engagement Rate?
Most social media marketing professionals agree that a good engagement rate is between 1% to 5%. The more followers you have, the harder it is to accomplish that.
Engagement Metrics for Websites
#1. Average Visit Duration: Average duration of site visits in hours, minutes, and seconds. Longer visits may suggest that visitors interact more extensively with your site, which may mean they find it a rich source of useful information and knowledge.
The more time a user spends on the website, the more likely they are to convert.
#2. Average Page/Visit: Average pages per visit for the chosen period.
#3. Bounce Rate: Percentage of visitors who land on a site and then leave after visiting only one page.
Engagement metrics for mobile apps
#1. Install Penetration: Percentage of mobile devices in the defined market with the app installed (Average).
#2. Downloads: The number of times the particular app was installed, including devices on which the app has been installed before.
#3. Daily Active Users: Unique daily active users (average).
#4. Monthly Active Users: Unique monthly active visitors (Average)
Conclusion
Every business is targeted and optimized for the end user or consumer to whom they are selling their products.
Hence, website engagement is the ultimate context for developing a brand in the marketplace. Site engagement not only helps to sell products, but it also makes your customers loyal and stays with you for a long time.
Improved website engagement always leads to more sales and increase brand awareness which ultimately leads to higher conversion.
In today’s digital marketing world, your website is like your shop display window. It has to look pretty good, it has to have beneficial content, it needs a user journey laced with relevant and regular calls to action, and it needs to be optimized for SEO, oh, I am almost forgetting to mention that it needs to hold your visitors’ attention.
Because not only does your site sell your brand, but it is also a mine of valuable data. And the more attractive your website is, the more data you can use in your favor.
