Nobody wants a website with high bounce rates and low average time on page. Most people who view your site won’t be back again, so it’s important to convert these viewers into customers by increasing their engagement.
This guide will show you why it’s important to keep users on your site, and it will give you helpful tactics to increase your site’s engagement.
Why Keeping People on Your Site is Important
While generating more traffic to your site is great, it doesn’t matter if no one’s hanging around. The longer you can hold people’s attention span, the more likely they are to convert. That’s why keeping users on your site is one of the best things you can do as a marketer.
Keeping people engaged allows them to learn more about your brand, builds a relationship with your readers, and ultimately leads to conversions.
Simply keeping them on your site is not enough, however. You want to include call-to-actions, so viewers don’t simply consume your content and disappear forever.
How to Keep Viewers on Your Site
If your user engagement isn’t where you want it to be, keep reading. With the help of this guide, you’ll learn some effective strategies to keep users on your site and convert them into customers.
Use Real-Time Marketing
If you’re unfamiliar with real-time marketing, it is marketing that isn’t strategically planned out before implementation. Instead, it reacts to things like feedback, current events, and trends to quickly determine the best way to target customers at the right time.
In fact, 52% of marketers say they use real-time engagement on at least one platform. Real-time engagement is more relevant to customers than traditional campaigns are.
One of the best real-time marketing examples took place during the 2013 Super Bowl. During the game, a power outage caused all the lights to go out in the stadium. Oreo decided to take advantage of this.
It’s marketing team sent a Tweet with the caption, “Power out? No problem.”, and a picture of its famous cookie with the text, “YOU CAN STILL DUNK IN THE DARK”. Even though it wasn’t a commercial, it was known as one of the most buzz-worthy ads of the event.
So how do you use real-time marketing to keep users on your site? You can do this by including real-time content like live blogs and engaging users with live chat.
Live blogs are used to engage readers by posting quick updates on an event that’s happening in real-time.
Like the Oreo example, you can use a live blog to enhance user engagement during a live sporting event. Posting real-time content during a big game or annual player draft is a sure-fire way to keep readers on your site.
Live blogs can also be used during virtual events, in-person conferences, and breaking news events.
Don’t just post content on your live blog, encourage your viewers to join the discussion through live chat. Live chat is a way for people to ask questions, answer polls, and give their opinions on your live blog or event.
Globo TV is a great example on how to leverage Live Blog and Live Chat to boots retention and engagement for its reality shows.
Live chat doesn’t have to be used during a live event, however. Simply adding a one-on-one live chat to your website can instantly improve your site’s engagement.
You can use live chat to survey your audience, invite them to chatrooms, and use call-to-actions to convert them into customers in real-time.
Make Your Website Scannable
Making the content on your website scannable is one of the easiest yet most important ways to keep readers on your site. Content that’s scannable means that it’s easy for people to read.
There’s nothing worse than attempting to read a long block of text that covers half the page. The first way to make your website scannable is to break up long paragraphs into varying sizes.
As a general guideline, it’s best to keep paragraphs to three or four sentences max. This is a simple concept that makes your content seem less intimidating to busy readers.
Another way to make content more scannable is to ensure your font size and line spacing is easy on the eyes. Also, make sure your text and background have contrasting colors. For example, you can’t go wrong with black text matched with a white background.
Subheadings can be used to categorize content and grab reader’s attention. Images can be used to provide readers with breaks, and they make content more visually appealing. If you want to go the extra mile, include bulleted lists and bold important phrases.
Add a Call-to-Action
Bounce rate measures when readers view one page on your site then leave without viewing other pages of your site. A high bounce rate is bad, but you can decrease it by encouraging readers to navigate to another page on your website.
This is done through a call-to-action (CTA). An effective CTA is targeted, clear, and purposeful.
Marketers can mess up CTAs by including several of them throughout a post. This distracts readers and can cause them to not click on any of them. It’s best to include only one or two CTAs, giving the reader a clear action for what to do next.
CTAs should also stand out. Make them clear, bold them, and tell readers to click on them.
Before you create a CTA, decide what its purpose is first. You can use one to encourage readers to download a free guide, sign up for your email newsletter, or take them directly to a product sales page.
By correctly adding CTAs to your website, you can lower bounce rates, keep readers on your website longer, and increase conversions.
Conclusion
For those having trouble capturing the attention span of their readers, use the strategies covered in this guide to improve engagement. Keeping users on your site creates a more impactful brand impression and improves your conversion rates.
Real-time engagement tactics like live blogs and live chats offer more relevant content and allows readers to interact with your brand. Creating content that’s easy to read prevents reader fatigue. Finally, make sure you include targeted, clear, and purposeful CTAs in your content.
These aren’t the only ways to keep people on your site. Live events can be used to improve both engagement and traffic to your brand’s website or social media platform.
To learn more about engagement and how to create a live event, check out our eBook by clicking the link below.
