Website engagement is a metric used to measure how much time customers spend on a business page and whether it results in actions such as subscribing, buying products or signing up for newsletters. To capture the interest of the audience, you need to get creative with your website and put up ideas that are unique to both your business and the customer.
Role of KPIs in website engagement
All business efforts for website engagement are focused on a central goal — to convert visitors into leads and leads into customers. However, in order to achieve that goal you first need to define a few key performance indicators. These KPIs will help you determine what’s working for you and what needs to be improved. Based on your product, you can select from the following KPIs:
- Pageviews: One of the most basic KPIs for website engagement includes pageviews. This typically shows how often people are visiting your website and what they are looking at.
- Average time on page: As an extension for page views, the next metric you can track is average time spent on page. This helps you understand what content customers like and what can be improved.
- Bounce rates: Bounce rate is the percentage measure of how many people land on your site but leave without exploring further.
- Conversion rates: This mainly describes the number of people who complete the desired action on your site, like filling a survey, signing up for the newsletter.
Once you have listed down the metrics, then you can proceed to track them and investigate the results. The results of the KPIs will give you a fair idea of what’s working and what isn’t. Setting the right goals plays an important part in achieving the right targets.
How to optimize your website for better customer engagement?
You set your KPIs, receive the results but aren’t too satisfied with the performance. To tackle such roadblocks you need to work on optimizing your website to improve engagement. Doing so is important because it will enable you to utilize your website to its fullest potential and hit the targets on your conversion rates and even sales revenue. To help you get started, here are a few engagement ideas to boost your metrics:
Intuitive design
The first thing customers notice about your website is the interface. In order to simplify user experience, work on creating an intuitive design that’s easy to understand with highlighted unique selling points. When a custom lands on your page, they should be able to grasp what the business is about instantly. The more time it takes to comprehend what the site is about, the greater the bounce rate is going to be.
According to research, around 38%of people will stop viewing a website if the content/layout is unattractive. Start by building a distinctive design that reduces white space and clutter and is visually appealing. Keep it simple with an easy to follow layout. A good idea is to mix layouts for different landing pages, this gives the customer something new to explore with every page.
Create and theme and use colors intelligently to keep the users engaged. Font plays an important role in the website and should be legible and in tune with the overall design.
Simplify navigation
Website engagement increases for sites that have an easy navigation style. In order to simplify navigation, work on a hierarchy style. Every page should be easily accessible from the main menu. Typically websites list general page titles in the main navigation as more specific pages listed as subtopics. This helps users find what they are looking for easily without having to open different tabs. To help you have an idea of a structured navigation bar, take a look at the homepage of an asset tracking software.
Try not to over clutter the menu with extra options that may end up bogging down the customers. You don’t want users to get lost in the navigation bar. Only highlight what stands out and leave the rest for users to make their way through.
Improve website load time
Stats show that 38% of the people will not engage with the website if the page takes too long to load. To improve your page load time, conduct a page speed test to check whether your site loads within a few seconds. If a site takes longer than 2-3 seconds to load, then you should try to remove unnecessary elements from the page. This can include heavy images or graphics that slow down the page.
Page speed can also be improved by configuring a fast infrastructure and a streamlined HTML code for the site. Hosting your site on a reliable fast server also plays a big part in determining the speed of your website. After this, the next step is to optimize your images by keeping the quality intact. Apart from these internal practices, you can also invest in tools to help optimize page speed for better engagement.
Add compelling CTAs
Buttons like ‘Sign up’ or ‘Free trial’ are known as Call To Action (CTAs) and serve to boost website engagement. CTAs can be an effective tool to drive up customer interaction on the website if used in the right way. To start off, come up with the right text for your CTA buttons. The suitable words can make a lot of difference and get customers to click on the buttons, eventually increasing engagement.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when designing website CTAs:
- Use vibrant colors to make the CTA stand out.
- Design the CTA in an attractive way with a shape that goes along with the website design but still catches attention.
- Purposefully place the CTA buttons on relevant pages that have a high chance of customer engagement.
- Place value driven CTAs that speak about the unique points of your business.
Display the right content
When a customer visits your website, they instantly want to know what your brand can deliver. Try to post smart, simple and clear cut content that resonates with the audience without much explanation. As an example let’s take a look at a fixed asset tracking landing page, where there are a few relevant CTA buttons for sign up, free trial and talk to us. Such short but apt messaging encourages users to interact with the website.
Work on your selling points that set you apart from the competition and highlight them on your page. If customers can’t find the right information, they won’t be able to interact much with the site, thereby increasing bounce rates. Use infographics to get creative and remember that less is more.
Build a mobile responsive website
According to research, the first quarter of 2021 showed 54.8% of internet traffic being generated from mobile phones. A shift in how people are viewing information online means a need to optimize responsiveness on different devices. In this day and age, having a mobile responsive website is crucial to ensure satisfactory customer engagement. While building a mobile responsive website, take touchscreens into account and place text and CTAs accordingly.
Use mobile responsive images and videos that don’t take too long to load. You can even adjust the information you want to show on smaller screens to optimize customer engagement. However, keep in line with the theme and layout so that customers have the same experience with both web and mobile.
Gear website engagement leads for business success
An optimized website leads to higher engagement for both old and new users. This means that you can easily address queries for existing users and at the same time attract new potential users. Websites designed with a simple intuitive layout and easy to follow navigation systems are likely to have higher views per session as customers find them interactive.
Incorporate feedback and carry out competitive research to find out what people like to see. Once you have the information you need, put a creative touch to highlight your business’s unique selling points. With the age of social media and the internet, businesses have a high chance of success through online customer engagement.
