The word “engagement” is being tossed around in the website building community quite a bit of late. Though we all understand the word means getting others to pay attention to; understand; remain interested in, and enjoy the information we are offering, many of us do not know what we can do to make our websites as “engaging” as possible. So that is what we are going to discuss now.
1. Know Your Audience
The adage “know your audience” has been in place for many years. First, it was a suggestion for speakers that warned that their presentations would not be successful unless they made an effort to know who their next audience would be and how it differed from other interested parties.
Now, in the digital age, website builders are being told the same thing. When you build a website, be sure you know who you are attempting to engage. Making a connection with your potential customers must come before trying to persuade them. Research, customize, and research and customize again. If you do not spend time gathering information about what your target customers need and the challenges they face, you will not reap the benefits you want.
How can you know your audience well?
- Did we already say “research?” And after researching, reflect on the results.
- Direct your content to their challenges and needs.
- Consider your audience’s race, age, gender, and other demographics.
- Collect information about your audience through comments on your site; buying patterns; user reviews, and any other input you can generate.
- Consider an on-site survey, quiz, or poll.
- Use the answers to help you create buyer personas.
- Answer audience questions, criticisms, and praise.
- Learn more about and, perhaps purchase Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software which can store customer data, track leads, and so much more.
2. Landing Pages
The landing page of your website is the door through which you collect information about your visitors. The idea is to get them onboard and convince them to convert. The most significant addition to a landing page is an element that asks for a customer’s information. If your landing page is engaging, it is likely that a visitor will fill out the form, and you will get more conversions.
So, the question becomes, “How can I create better engagement on my landing pages?” And, we say, “It’s relatively easy.”
- When you are about to come out with an offer, plan your content to ensure that at least one post covers a subject that relates to the promotion. It is possible that visitors will click on the link to your landing page, because they enjoyed, or were interested in, what they read.
- If you have blogs that include timeless information, link them to your landing page.
- Re-promote these blogs on social media to obtain an extra increase in page views.
- Filming an explainer video does not have to be expensive. Use co-workers, write the script you need, and get your message out in a different way.
- Set up social sharing buttons on your landing page to make it simpler for visitors to share what they see.
- Streamline, declutter, and make your landing page more streamlined. A simple but appealing, minimalistic landing page is a must where engagement is concerned.
3. Visuals
Infographics rule the Internet world. They do make it easier to understand the information shared and it allows for ingestion in less time than reading several paragraphs of text.
Google Image search gets almost half as many shares as does Google.com. People feel drawn to images. Your visuals, however, must be compelling. They must draw the eye to them. People want to click on them.
- Create more visual content and optimize it for search.
- As already mentioned, videos are a great start.
- Try some interactive tools (chatbots, live chat, recording software to discover when visitors disengage, ease of authentication software, and more).
- A large number of individuals worldwide are visual learners.
- Use terrific visuals in your emails. A picture is still worth a thousand words.
4. Speed Up Your Website
You’re not going to get increased conversions or more organic traffic if your website is slow. Search engines cannot crawl properly nor find more content on a site that is not speedy.
You may need to change hosts and afterward optimize your code and use aggressive caching and a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a geographically dispersed network of proxy servers and their data centers. They provide high availability and high performance by distributing the service that is spatially relative to the end-user.
5. Collect Email Addresses
Email marketing is among the biggest money-makers in e-commerce. Collecting email addresses allows businesses the ability to speak with their community directly and at any time. If an owner wants to promote a sale or a product, sending these facts to everyone on their email list is a fabulous way to get the word out.
How do you start your email list?
- Create out-of-this-world email content yourself. When your content is incredible, people will share them with others and look forward to seeing one of your emails on their list.
- Ask subscribers to share and forward your emails. The easiest way to do so is to add a social sharing button and an email to a friend button to your marketing emails. You can also add a “subscribe” button to the bottom of your emails to encourage those who receive a forwarded copy of your email to opt-in.
- Divide your emails by buyer personas. Recipients will open emails that cater to their particular wants and needs.
- Make a lead-generation offer for which readers must provide their email addresses to download.
- Create a Pinterest board that encourages visitors to sign up with their email address to see more content.
6. Adding Interactive Plugins to Sites
Interactive plugins can take many forms. A few examples of the many plugins available to site owners include:
- Online appointment setters
- Filtering tools (e.g., Zillow’s home-finding tools)
- Google XML Sitemaps which makes it easy for crawlers to see your content organization and update your search rankings when you update content on your site
- UpdraftPlus keeps users from losing their sites’ content to hackers, a server crash, or other malfunctions
- Shared Counts is an advanced social sharing button that does not use cookies, tracking scripts, or store user data, and more
Ndevr
Here’s to happy and engaging websites that bring increased conversion rates and satisfied customers.
