11 Proven Ways to Engage Your Audience

The key to a successful website and driving more sales is high engagement. When you create unique and entertaining content on a regular basis, your visitors will always come back for more which will increase sharing and your page rank in organic search. By increasing website engagement, you can more effectively convert your prospects into customers. Below are some simple ways to increase website engagement and improve user experience to better hone in on your target market.

Personalized Content

Your users crave relevant experiences. Did you know that over half of the customers feel that online shopping is too impersonal (McCann Truth Central, 2014)? When websites serve up more personalized content, 93% of them experience a dramatic rise in conversion rates (eConsultancy, January 2015). When an anonymous visitor comes to your site, marketing software like Get Smart Content can deliver smart content based on his / her location, Pay-Per-Click engagement, referring domain, on-site behavior or keyword search. Although smart content is a relatively new web marketing trend, more and more companies are using it to deliver more personalized online experiences.

Live Chat

Live chat makes it very easy for visitors to ask quick questions without having to pick up the phone or submitting a contact form. You can even embed live chat software like Olark directly on your website in just minutes! If you are worried about getting too many chats, Olark’s targeted chat allows you to set rules to only interact with users who go to a specific page or perform specific behaviors (reduce cart abandonment!). Users can even provide feedback afterward.

Short Videos

Creating short, entertaining videos to introduce your products/services or display client success stories are much more entertaining and interesting than text and images. Furthermore, video testimonials are much more believable than website testimonials which can be easily faked. You can add calls-to-action or structured questions to your videos to encourage commenting and interaction.

Funny & Sharable Blog Posts

Funny and unique blog posts can significantly increase web traffic and session time. Relevant and high-quality content will not only boost your website rankings in organic search but also be shared more times on social media increases your chances of going viral. Avoid being too salesly and try being more helpful in your blog. Regular and interesting content will keep your company top-of-mind and visitors coming back for more.

Internal Search

Internal search makes visitors stay longer by helping them easily locate what they were looking for. We have all been disappointed before when we click on organic search results and the website we are taken to doesn’t answer our question. Without internal search, most likely visitors will just leave immediately. Website search allows visitors to immediately find answers to their problems, reduces bounce rates and increase session times by suggesting related content or products.

Guided Tour / Demo

If you want to more easily explain your services or products, there is no better way than providing guided tours and demos to train and engage your users. Online tutorials can lower support costs and increase sales and customer satisfaction. Nickelled and InlineManual can help you easily create online guides for customer on-boarding, support, queries and new feature rollouts.

Questionnaires & Feedback

Surveys are a great way to solicit feedback about your website. You can also ask questions to route prospects through more specific sales funnels to improve conversion rates with a responsive WordPress plugin called ClickFunnels. By categorizing prospects, you can feed them more relevant information thereby improving conversion rates.

Social Media Updates

Currently there are about 2 billion social media users. Needless to say, being active on social media is an essential part of any effective web strategy. There are plenty of free tools like Google Alerts, Hootsuite, Social Mention, Topsy and Brand24 that can monitor and listen to your social media activity. Including images and videos in your posts can significantly increase interactions. Posting contests, games and giveaways can also encourage your target audience to be more active.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a great way to regularly connect with your purchasing base by emailing them updates about blog posts, promotional offers, company events and any other pertinent information. Building an email list is as easy as installing MailChimp’s WordPress plugin and asking people to subscribe on your website. MailChimp also has tons of free mobile responsive email templates you can drop your content into if you cannot afford a San Francisco web designer. Accounts are free if you have fewer than 2000 subscribers.

User Experience

If you have a professionally designed and well-built WordPress website with content written uniquely for your target market, your visitors will undoubtedly be more engaged. A fast-loading mobile responsive website will create a great user experience causing people to linger longer.

Measuring Engagement

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service that provides statistics and analytical tools for monitoring your web traffic and search engine optimization (SEO). An increase in website engagement can be measured by a decreased bounce rate, more page views or longer length of visit times. Generally speaking, a bounce rate between 26 to 40 percent is stellar. Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site immediately without interacting with the page). Please note that the baseline for what is good, bad and ugly will vary depending on your website, target market, and industry.

In Conclusion

Contact us if you are interested in increasing your conversion rate and leads by improving your website engagement.

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