Engage Website Visitors: 13 Proven Strategies to Boost the Rate

Stores with daily inventory variations engage customers by giving anticipation of new product arrivals. Companies that hold frequent deals engage website visitors and put their store on the radar for things to watch out for.

With so many websites to visit, it can be difficult to keep users interested in your offering.

How can you pique the interest of potential customers?

When creating a great website, you should constantly keep user engagement in mind.

When visitors arrive at your website, you want them to read your content, engage with your platforms, and click on your calls-to-action.

That is simply user engagement in action, but this concept encompasses much more.

Let us define website engagement strategy and the various factors that can assist to boost website engagement.

I. What Is Website User Engagement And Why It Is Important

Definition

Website engagement is defined as how well a brand can please and retain its customers’ or users’ mindshare. It is about determining whether your users find any value by tracking activity like downloads, clicks, shares, and more.

It has a lot to do with effectively engaging the user’s time through several touchpoint encounters for their benefit. Customers are more likely to become loyal if they are engaged with the website. Return visits and conversions rates will increase.

Simply said, user engagement occurs when visitors to your site value your content enough to stay, consume, and convert.

Types of engagements

Reading & Absorbing Content

User engagement occurs when a visitor lands on your website, reads your homepage, and then begins clicking on to other pages on your site.

The user is eager to learn more about your company and its offers.

The more knowledgeable a person becomes, the more likely he or she will buy from you. As a result, enhancing online user engagement is critical to your business.

Visitor Comments & Discussions

This type of user engagement, also known as active participation, depicts your audience’s behaviors as they complete quizzes, answer polls, take surveys, communicate with chatbots, and otherwise interact with your website’s interactive content.

These aspects not only increase interaction, but they’re also entertaining, giving your visitors an incentive to spread the word and come back for more.

Social Shares

If your blog is popular, visitors may click the Facebook button to share your articles with their friends. The act of tapping your social buttons is user engagement.

Take note of how HubSpot provides a number of alternatives for site users who want to share the brand’s content throughout the web. These buttons will almost certainly increase user engagement throughout the website and the brand’s social platforms.

Watching Videos & Viewing Images

Offering a media gallery page can provide visitors with a wealth of material to examine. Even if it’s only the photographs on your homepage, make sure you enhance the quality of all visuals, since blurry or otherwise low-quality graphics will not work.

Why it’s important

Simply answer a few questions before we discuss website user engagement. How long do visitors spend on your website? Which pages are they looking at? Are your calls to action (CTAs) drawing people in?

The responses decide how engaging your website is and what benefits it can bring to your business. The goal of evaluating your website engagement metrics is to learn how your users and visitors carry out the desired action.

The following are the primary areas where businesses are seeing significant increase:

• Increase sales conversions – When a website is engaging, users spend more time on it. They may not spend money on the initial visit, but they will gradually improve conversions.
• Higher customer satisfaction — A well-designed website attracts visitors and encourages them to explore the various pages and options, increasing their level of satisfaction.
• Average time spent on the website — It goes without saying that if your website is appealing, users will spend more time exploring the pages and menus.

II. How To Track Website Visitors’ Engagement

Begin by defining particular Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and metrics for measuring user engagement on your site.

This chapter will explain about the internal and external metrics that can be used to examine the impact of visitor engagement.

Internal metrics

01. Average time on site

The longer people stay on your website, the more likely they are to purchase from you because they are “engaged” and invested.

Google Analytics gives excellent statistics for assessing the performance of site visitors and their engagement with your website.

The formula for Average Time on Page: Time on Page / (Pageviews-Exits)

Although there is a formula for achieving accurate findings within a high confidence interval, you must consider the following:

• Time on page: If the page is not the last page of the visit, the time is correct.
• If your exit rate is high, you will not obtain a healthy “Average time on page” result. In other words, if you want to rely on average time on page data, you better have a low exit rate. When measuring average time spent on a certain page, Google Analytics takes into account the overall number of users.
  

Source: crazyegg.com

Pages per visit

The number of website pages visited by visitors during a visit to your website may be a useful measure of how engaged they are with your site. Pages per visit on e-commerce sites often grow as conversion rate increases.

Onsite social interaction

Many websites include options for visitors to share content on social networks. Remember to keep track of how effective these social sharing tools are at driving visitors to your website.

One of the first things you should do is include social media links on your website. The amount of times users click on the social icons can be tracked using social interaction analytics. A Facebook “Like” or a Twitter “Tweet,” for example, may be measured.

Take a look at the data below if you haven’t yet improved your social media networks. According to a new study conducted by eMarketer, people purchase from websites that they follow on social media channels.

External metrics

The web’s currency is links. The more high-quality links that point to your site, the more credibility you will gain. Links are also a strong measure of how much interest a person has in your website. People link to content that either positively or negatively affects them. Just make sure that you create content that is relevant to the site.

The Number of External Mentions

With the introduction of social media, most of the engagement and talk about your business can now take place outside of your website. It is essential to monitor and engage website visitors in these discussions.

III. Tips to engage website visitors

1. Reduce Page Loading Time

We cannot overstate the significance of measuring your website’s load time. Whatever your developer tells you, remember this simple rule: your website load time should be fewer than four seconds. Even a one-second decline in load speed can harm user engagement and conversions.

Google Analytics offers speed suggestions under the heading Site Speed.

You’ve probably encountered slow-loading pages before. You find an interesting website and click on the link, only to be stuck waiting for it to load. You probably leave the website since it’s irritating to wait and wait. According to Soasta’s study, pages that load one second slower can experience a 56 percent rise in bounce rate.

Source: revechat.com

Conduct a page speed test with free tools like Pingdom to see if your site loads in less than two seconds. If not, take efforts to enhance page load speed by deleting unneeded elements. Images can be intriguing, but keep the quantity of images each post to a minimum so that the page loads quickly.

See more: Bounce Rate vs Exit Rate: What’s The Difference?

2. Create Engaging Web Copy

Some site copy is boring and uninteresting, and it rapidly puts visitors to sleep. Other webcopy is entertaining, with a tone that attracts and retains users’ interest. Which type are you? Finding the correct balance while writing content is difficult.

3. Use Pictures and Videos

Product images with zoom capabilities are vital for e-commerce websites. However, you can always go beyond them. What about photographs of people interacting with the product? Allow customers to submit photographs of themselves using the product on social media.

Pictures are powerful, but videos are even more so. You can share demos or make a series of educational videos about your topic. You can utilize videos to respond to customer queries. What about requesting that buyers post videos of themselves using the product?

4. Simplify navigation

What if a large number of your website visitors exit because they can’t locate what they’re looking for?

Many websites are too complex to navigate, resulting in a high bounce rate and little user engagement. Simplify and reorganize your navigation system so that users can easily find the page they require.

5. Display Customer Reviews

The power of marketing through other customers’ testimonials is unmatched. Customer testimonials are regarded as an engagement tactic due to their ability to “keep the customer online,” and depending on the product, they might help persuade customers to proceed with the purchase. Amazon.com is well-known for its consumer feedback on the bulk of its products.

See more: Why you Need a Testimonial Page on your Shopify Site? The Value of Customer Feedback.

6. Suggest Related Items

Always provide additional content related to the product they are viewing as customers navigate through your website. Display recent articles comparable to the one the visitor is reading on a blog. Display products related to the one the visitor is seeing on an e-commerce website. To keep visitors interested, use cross-selling and upselling.

On the Amazon website, you can view personalized information on the homepage. The primary content is modified dependent on how the user interacted with the product search feature:

Internal linking is similar to this website user engagement advice. Simply show relevant posts at the bottom of each page.

See more: 10 high-converting Shopify home pages created with PageFly

7. Communicate Via Email

Do you collect email addresses from visitors? Do you send them emails on a frequent basis? Email is still one of the most effective ways to communicate with potential customers.

Website user engagement is more than merely interacting with a new visitor once. It also affects your ability to entice people to return to your website. You can accomplish this by collecting email addresses to which you can deliver fresh content updates.

The most popular option is to display a pop-up opt-in form when visitors land on your page. You might, however, add a subscribe form to your site’s sidebar. Including an opt-in box at the ending of posts may also engage people who have thoroughly loved your content. The Crazy Egg blog has a registration form at the bottom of each blog.

8. Provide Live Chat

Live chat is another excellent approach to engage website visitors, who may ask questions as they arise. There are numerous live-chat providers to choose from. Live chat testing statistics often show a good improvement in conversion rates.

9. Personalize

A personalized website experience engages website visitors. You may provide your consumers a personalized experience by:

• Using technology to determine what products you should display to visitors.
• Using web design to assist visitors determine the best product or service for their needs.
• Showing visitors offers/products that other consumers have interacted with.
• Clicking the “Fix this recommendation” links open a popup that explains why this item is recommended and allows the consumer to change it.

10. Use a responsive design

What percentage of your website visitors come from mobile devices? According to Google data, mobile devices outnumber desktops in terms of search volume. In 2015, e-commerce websites in North America stated that mobile devices accounted for up to 30% of their conversions. At the very least, your website design should be responsive. However, you should go above and beyond. Examine what features are really necessary for your website on mobile devices to keep visitors engaged.

According to Statista, the number of mobile users globally reached over 7 billion in 2020. This means that Internet marketers must create responsive websites in order to engage both desktop and mobile customers. It may be difficult to navigate your desktop website on a mobile phone.

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11. Host Events And Contests

Visitors can interact with your business by attending events. You can hold both virtual and physical events. The goal is to interact with your potential customers. These events could include seminars, Google Hangouts, a special product display, or a social gathering.

Contests and giveaways are the most effective techniques to increase all aspects of your performance. They are useful for increasing page views, subscriptions, conversions, and website user engagement. Create your freebies in such a way that users receive incentives for certain activities. You may, for example, offer an incentive for referrals, content sharing, social media likes, or testimonials.

12. Improve your internal linking structure

A solid internal linking structure will help users navigate your site smoothly, in addition to improving your SEO ranking. Then you’ll be able to produce more page views per visitor while decreasing the bounce rate. Both are critical for increasing website user engagement. Use relevant anchor texts to link to other similar information on your website.

Kissmetrics has an excellent article that outlines some general rules for this. However, the fundamentals are as follows:

• Anchor text for links should be descriptive.
• They must be precise and hyper-relevant.
• They should visit somewhere new 

In the paragraph above, for example, the anchor word “bounce rate” was used to link to an infographic about bounce rate. This is a good example of internal linking in action. This is also applicable to website user engagement. However, avoid overusing the internal linking approach in a post because it may irritate users (and search engines).

If you have a particularly relevant content piece worth highlighting, you can also mention “Read Also/Recommended for You” links in the middle of the post.

13. Add a prominent search box

Some users visit your website in search of something specific. They’ll abandon your website if they can’t figure out how to get there. Engage website visitors by making it simple for them to find what they’re looking for. Add a visible search box where users can easily find specific content.

Most websites, you’ve surely seen, have their search box on the top left. As a result, consumers often anticipate finding the search box there. It’s recommended to keep your search box design simple, but adding features like a drop-down menu or auto-suggest could increase website user engagement. PageFly is a good example of a plainly accessible search box. Notice how the magnifying glass is so simple, which draws attention to the box.

Conclusion

To conclude, the best solution to keep visitors engaged is bringing different elements together: analyze your visitors’ behaviors using analytics software; reach out to customers with social media tools; back up your analytics results with online programs. Meanwhile, you should be bold and persistent in your content strategy to retain first-time and returning visitors.

With website user engagement being an essential aspect determining the performance of a business, you need to make the most of the above tips. Run tests to see which works best for your website design instead of simply settling on one. As you can see, your focus should be on making your website attractive, interactive, and user-friendly.