Keeping customers engaged with your website can be quite challenging. Below are some helpful tips involving user-friendliness, quality content, and programs that will help capture your audience’s attention and convert leads into customers.
If you’ve decided to finally build a website in order to keep up with the evolution in eCommerce, then you’re already on the right track.
A website is not just a powerful marketing tool, it’s a very effective sales tool as well. It’s time to optimize your website to maximize customer experience in such a way that they’ll enjoy interacting with your site and keep coming back for more.
It doesn’t cost much, nor does it require daily maintenance or the usual rigorous R&D. You have to make sure you get your money’s worth so stick with professional web design and development companies.
The idea that a website only acts as an additional factor to a campaign has changed. A website is a central factor in your business; it’s regarded as one of the central players in branding and driving revenue.
Here are some ways to get customers returning to your website:
Improve Your Website’s Value Through Relevance
The more value your website brings to a user, the more relevant it becomes. Relevance is one of the key content factors that drive websites. Why? Users don’t want to spend time out of their day sifting through irrelevant pages just to find what they want. With thousands of websites being built daily and thousands of blogs being published by the hour, you can’t afford to lose a user’s attention because your website bored them.
Create Relevant Landing Pages
The landing page, as the name suggests, is the page that users land on or encounters when they click on a link.
First, you should design your landing page in a way that’s easy to navigate. You should also customize it to make engagement easier.
Customizing your landing page to immediately addresses the user’s need makes it relevant. The more relevant the page is, the more it will attract users to visit it– this will then tell search engines like Google that people find it important and valuable.
Customizing it can be as easy as positioning buttons in strategic areas to make it easier for them to shop, or providing concise information about the services you provide.
It’s that simple, but of course, you can make it as complex and as engaging as possible.
Highlight Your Products
Showing off your products is a great way to emphasize not only your hero products but elevate their value as well. Highlight your products and services by creating a special section for them. This can be in the form of a large banner that scrolls, or even a completely separate landing page.
Having a ‘best of’ section allows you to advertise products and services for seasonal events and promos. These kinds of ‘sections” can be the solution for your items that need more visibility, or products that you feel will benefit a specific user based on their previous shopping experience.
Suggest Different Types of Content (Based on What Users Like)
Keeping your visitors interested is essential to keeping them on your website. Remember, the longer they stay on your site, the better your site looks for search engines. Keep the information in your pages concise, straight-to-the-point, and relevant for that page’s purpose.
If you’re setting up a blog, make sure that your posts are highly informative, relevant to your business, and relevant to your customer’s needs (based on their previous interactions with your website).
Improve Your Website’s UI/UX
UI/UX refers to ‘User Interface/User Experience’, two important design factors that affect how a website visitor interacts with your website, and whether that interaction is positive or negative. Unique and highly personalized websites are obviously better, but how do you ensure that the UI/UX is great? Here are some ideas:
Keep Your Website Design Clean, Simple, and Efficient
In the 21st century, minimalism is the style trend that permeates everything from homes, architecture, clothing, and yes, even websites. Today’s internet users want clean designs with simple features: forget fancy chatbots and popups and instead focus on leveraging proper design to highlight your products and services.
Define which products and services you want to feature and create a list that assigns these products and services from ‘needs the most attention’ to ‘needs the least attention’. In this way, you can build your website buttons, features, and page map around this list so you don’t have to rely on blinking banner ads from the 90s (seriously, stop using that).
Keep Your Website Usable (Both on Mobile and on Desktop)
Over 4.5 million people access the internet via a smartphone, so make sure your website has a mobile version that is easy to navigate by applying intuitive menus, concise CTA’s (call to action), and simple, but thorough, search functionality.
This should be simple enough to do for local seo if your website is already streamlined to be clean and simple. Therefore, the translating from desktop to mobile should be an easy process.
Increase Engagement Through Email Marketing
Email marketing is still alive and kicking. It’s one of the best tools you have to connect with customers at a more personal level. It’s a great way to maintain their interest in your website, and can also be leveraged to entice them to return if you notice they haven’t been back in a while.
Gather User Emails
One of the best ways to collect user emails is to just ask for it. Those “subscribe now” buttons you see on other websites actually work wonders. You can also collect emails by requiring new users to set up an account before they purchase, but incentivize their efforts by providing promos and special offers.
Keep Them ‘In the Know’: Newsletters
Newsletters are a great way of updating site visitors about special promos, seasonal events, or new content. Try to send a newsletter on a consistent schedule so that subscribers know when they’ll receive it. Space out the newsletters, though– you don’t want to spam them!
Another amazing factor about newsletters is that they communicate how valuable your customers are to you. Newsletters tell customers that you think about them and you want to keep them informed. Especially if the letter is going to tell them that they’ll be the first to hear about your brand’s new offers. This technique effectively makes your newsletter a sort of reward for subscribers and new users, making them more likely to become brand advocates.
Which brings us to…
Creating Brand Advocates by Constantly “Rewarding” Them
Over time as your brand’s popularity increases, it’s natural to have ‘brand advocates’; that is, your company will start highlighting certain members of your community to showcase your appreciation for them and, of course, to spread even more awareness, but on a human level.
Acknowledge Brand Advocates Personally
People love feeling special and valued. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to acknowledge particularly loyal customers personally, whether it’s through your website, social media, or via newsletter.
Certain brands even acknowledge loyal customers through their products: some brands will include names of particular brand advocates in their next line of products, some will include a personalized ‘thank you’ card with purchases, while some companies have loyalty programs that allow them to become independent brand ambassadors.
Use Social Media To Show Gratitude
You can use social media to thank people directly. Post their content on your brand’s page or comment on their posts. It’s also helpful to feature testimonials, IG posts, and Twitter shoutouts whenever possible so you can show that your brand sees them and that you are grateful for their continued support.
Other customers will be visiting your social media page, and if they see how well you treat your customers, it can be enough of an incentive for them to patronize your brand as well.
Create a Loyalty Program
Your most loyal customers deserve some love and everyone should know about it. A loyalty program ensures that customers will have goals to reach if they want to be part of this elite group of people. (Note that you should agree on the guidelines with your marketing team before launching).
Make sure that customer’s loyalty is rewarded accordingly. Your loyalty program’s incentives should be made special as possible– meaning, incentives should be something that you would want for yourself, your family, or friends too. Be creative and think outside the box. Give more than huge discounts! Offer early access to products, or even tours of your facility. Remember, the more personalized, the better.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, web design is all about your customers and users. Whatever you add to your website, whether it’s design, feature, or new content, the customer’s perception and ease of navigation it should be your top priority. Your website’s end goal is customer satisfaction, and once you have that in mind, the quality work your produce will inevitably keep customers coming back.
Lila Shearsmith is the Head of Business Development at Axadra. She has been in the BPO and KPO industry for almost 20 years, not to mention, has been an advocate of Inbound Marketing with hands-on experience in Inbound Driven Sales, development of strategic sales processes and digital marketing strategy projects for companies in Australia, the UK and the US.
When she’s not working or seen speaking at conferences, she’s either underwater doing scuba, travelling, doing yoga or curled up with a good book (kindle of course).
