People that started their own businesses know that engaged customers bring a bigger share of revenue compared to average ones. No wonder you may want to get more visitors interested and engaged with your website.
In our article, we’re going to uncover the best ways of engaging old and new customers and making a profit out of it. Let’s get started!
Why Customer Engagement Matters?
In simple words, we can call a customer ‘engaged’ if they spend plenty of time interacting with your website. This includes shares, clicks, downloads, and other activities.
In our technological world bringing customers attention to a specific website is hard enough. All due to high competitiveness – if visitors don’t like your website, they have hundreds more to try. But why engaged customers are this important? Let’s figure that out.
First of all, loyal and familiar with your brand people will likely turn to you when in need of similar services or products. They may also share the information on their social media pages. And don’t underestimate the power of word-of-mouth marketing!
Second, by turning more people into engaged customers you can hope for a bigger profit. Companies that engage visitors may expect an increase in order sizes, cross, and up-sell revenue.
Finally, it’s a great way to raise awareness of your brand. When ranking a website, Google algorithms measure the time visitors spend there and thus give you a higher rank.
Ways of Increasing Users’ Engagement
As we’ve just found out, user engagement is quite important. So let’s move straight to the tips that can help you with engaging more customers.
Reduce loading time. Internet users hate slow websites – and no wonder why. So if your web pages load more than 3 seconds, maybe it’s time to contact your hosting provider or ask devs for help.
Work on website design. If your website is overloaded with ads and banners or has unreadable fonts, visitors will quit it within a few seconds. And it doesn’t matter how unique and engaging the content is. So you might want to spend some time on designing or find a company that provides web application development services.
First of all, make sure that your content looks good on both mobile and desktop versions. A responsive design will help to engage more customers from various devices.
Example of a responsive website
Second, pay attention to the general appearance of your website. Keep it simple and clean, choose readable fonts and make pages visually appealing.
Finally, don’t forget about leaving some free space. This is done to not overload the page with unnecessary details.
Think through the content. What comes next after website performance and design? Unique and interesting content! Define the target audience and create a content plan. Remember, that information you provide must answer their problems and be useful.
The information should be easy to find, so work on optimizing your website for search engines – use relevant keys and practice white-hat SEO.
Create simple navigation. When your content is interesting and helpful, visitors may want to check more articles on the website. And it’s a bit hard to do without easy navigation. Thus, if you’re working on a blog, make sure to add related articles. In case you’ve launched an online shop – show similar products. Also, don’t forget about navigation – add the menu with the most important buttons like ‘Homepage’, ‘About’, ‘Services’, etc.
Interact and encourage interactions. Interacting with customers is a great way to increase engagement. Users expect first-class service and quick issue-solving, so think of providing ongoing support via phone, chats or tickets. You may want to add social networks buttons too, allowing visitors to share your content on Facebook or Twitter. It will not only increase their loyalty but help you with attracting more customers.
The last but not the least feature is comments and ratings – let visitors share their thoughts on your services and products.
Engagement metrics
After all the steps on website designing and promotion are done, you will certainly want to monitor the results. Analyzing website metrics is extremely important, and it helps to understand customer behavior. Unfortunately, there is no unified tool for checking metrics on each and every website. Different tools check engaged time, conversion rate, calculate the number of clicks on ‘Add to cart’ button, etc. We’ve listed the most popular metrics below. For checking them, we suggest such tools as Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. Both are widely popular and have a number of necessary features in-built.
Engaged time. The metric checks time visitors spent while interacting with your website. Note that the tools calculate only the active time when users perform some actions (read, check items, follows links or moves the mouse).
Bounce rate. If your website has a high bounce rate, it means that visitors leave it within a few minutes. The main reasons for that include lots of ads and pop-ups, complex design, low loading speed.
Core actions. These metrics mainly depend on your website type. For example, for e-commercial websites, it may be an item purchase. To check these indications, define what actions are expected and add them to the analytic software.
Visitors. By checking the amount of new and returning visitors, you will understand how successful your marketing campaign or SEO is. Actually, it’s returning visitors who show the level of customer engagement on your website.
Pages visited and recency. The number of pages per user shows us how many website pages visitors checked during one session. Recency measures how much time passed since their last visit. The shorter is the time, the better for your business.
As you can see, there are quite a few ways of making customers more loyal and for engaging new ones. However, before making a bet on a new marketing campaign, make sure that your website is running fast, has easy-to-use navigation, simple yet creative design, and interesting content.
