You have the prettiest website in your market, your colors are great, and your links work. You’ve even gone so far as to ensure there’s a form on every page. Pretty is great for Webby Awards, but not necessarily for your profits.
Yet, every time you look at your Google Analytics, your website conversions are flat. Nothing is happening on your website.
What’s going on? In simple terms: you have low or no engagement.
While you may have a top notch design and elaborate content, unless this compels visitors to “engage” on your site and take an action, your website is dead in the water. It’s time for some strategy.
In this article, we’re going to talk about why visitor engagement holds the key to conversion. We also offer some suggestions to help you turn this around.
Define Visitor Engagement
Visitor engagement means much more in today’s cyber world then it did even a few years ago. It seems like just yesterday Internet marketers based their metrics on the page view.
Today, we measure engagement. This is the yard stick by which we measure how much interaction is going on deep in the pages of your website. We’ve gone beyond the page view, and instead we are focusing on how your website visitors engage with your content.
For example – did they sign up for your email list, did they download a whitepaper or did they click to chat with your online support team?
Your website should persuade visitors to do something. This is why engagement holds the key to conversion. It’s what keeps your visitor on your site and drives them to take an action.
According to one source, you’ve got just 15 seconds to engage your website visitor. Let’s talk about how to do that.
The Key to Conversion
We’ve put together a few tips on how you can increase your conversion rates through visitor engagement.
1. Allow Social Login:
When you allow website visitors to login through one of their social media accounts, you make it easy for the consumer. Your website visitor is more likely to engage if they can auto fill your form.
Plus, you increase the likelihood they’ll return because they don’t have a username and password to remember.
2. Tweak Your Headlines:
With just 15 seconds to capture their attention, the size and wording of your headline can make or break the deal. Be sure your headline accurately captures the offer and the page text.
Make it attention grabbing, but truthful. Tell them why they should accept your offer with creative, intriguing words. Use the word you and not the word we.
3. Redesign Your Page:
Use attention grabbing images. Include some video. Add some interactivity in the form of sliders or quizzes. Your goal is to engage the visitor. You want to keep them on your page and engage them so much they’ll take an action.
4. Add Live Chat:
Leveraging live chat can increase visitor engagement and lead to more conversions.
Consider the findings of this study:
- Online buyers who use live chat were more likely to make online purchases at least once a week (40%) than buyers who had never chatted (22%).
- Sixty-three percent of people who live chatted were likely to return again and make a purchase.
Here’s another reason to consider adding a live chat feature: businesses that use live chat usually report a 10-30% increase in conversion rate.
5. Ask Questions:
When you ask a question, you engage your web visitor. Make it a question they’ll feel compelled to answer.
Questions can be at the end of a blog post, as an exit question, pop-up, call to action or a survey.
You can even flip the question. For example, your form has a call to action prompting users to provide their email address for 50% off one item. Upon leaving, without filling out your form, you hit them with this question: “Are you sure you don’t want your 50% off coupon?”
Using this tactic, you’ve made them rethink their decision to not engage with your site and hopefully prompted them to sign up. Again, their engagement holds the key to conversion.
How to Measure Engagement
You’ll want to take a look at several key areas when measuring your visitor engagement. Here are a few things to look at when evaluating your website engagement and conversions:
Look at your landing page bounce rate. This tells you how many people land on your page and then “bounce” off without visiting any of your other pages.
Consider two things when looking at bounce rate. If your rate is low, you can conclude that your content was so engaging that visitors wanted to see more. If your rate is high, it may be that your visitor wasn’t engaged at all and left. Or, depending on the content of your landing page, they engaged and took the desired action.
You’ll have to look at your analytics to decipher your page bounce rate.
Take a look at your returning visitors. This is an important piece of information because these folks were so engaged they came back for more. Figure out what you are doing right and do it again.
Next, look at the average pages per visit. If you’re looking at your blog, that may be a low number because they came for just one article. Look for ways to engage your blog readers and encourage them to click to other pages.
When your website visitors visit multiple pages on your site, you can assume they’re engaged. Try and increase the number of pages your average customers visit to gauge engagement.
To Conclude
We encourage you test your landing pages, and if they aren’t converting, you can bet the reason is because they aren’t engaging. Continue to test, monitor and revise to increase your conversion rates.
Lastly, remember the best tools for increasing visitor engagement are serving your customer. Talk to them directly, meet them where they are, and know what they want.
Create a clear path for them to navigate. Guide them to the content they’re looking for and engage them. They hold the key to conversions for your website. Keep the web visitor at the forefront of your mind when designing pages, creating engaging content and crafting calls to action.
If you’d like more information on how to increase your conversion rates, we can help. Conversion rate optimization and lead generation are our specialty. We can help you improve your overall conversion rate. Contact us today.
We’ll provide you with our FREE site performance analysis so we can work on your landing page conversion rates.
Image: Fabrice Florin
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