How does your e-commerce website stack up to the competition? If you’re like most website owners, you probably measure the performance of your site in terms of the bottom line – the amount of revenue the site generates. While that’s certainly a meaningful metric, you may find it even more valuable to track your level of website engagement rather than simply looking at sales numbers.
Why Is Website Engagement Important?
Website engagement – the number of pages that visitors view before leaving your site – is a good way of measuring how useful and informative your website is. Regardless of whether your website generates a high volume of sales or not, it isn’t a good sign if the majority of the people who visit your site view just one page before leaving.
Keeping people on your site for the longest amount of time possible, on the other hand, helps to build brand recognition and cultivate positive sentiment toward your company. Even when someone doesn’t make a purchase, that person will remember your company’s name if he or she found the visit useful or informative.
Maintaining a high level of engagement and a low bounce rate can also potentially improve your website’s keyword rankings on Google. It is Google’s goal to provide high-quality search results, and if a website has a high engagement level, it’s probably a good search result. It’s likely, therefore, that Google uses site engagement as a ranking factor.
So, are you doing everything you can to keep visitors on your site as long as possible? Use these techniques to maximize customer engagement on your e-commerce website.
Learn What Works by Studying Successful Websites
One of the easiest ways to increase customer engagement on your website is by studying what the most successful businesses are doing. In the vaping industry, for example, websites like E-Cigarette Empire consistently enjoy long visits from customers who search for those sites specifically by name. That’s your goal – to generate so much customer engagement that people remember the name of your brand and go directly to your site when they want to shop again in the future. If you want to be the best, you’ve got to take the time to study what the leaders are doing.
Keep Your Site’s Design Clean and Appealing
If you want to keep people on your site, you’ve got to have a design that’s clean and attractive. With off-the-shelf themes for content management systems like WordPress and Shopify, that’s easier now than ever. You don’t need graphic design skills to build an attractive website because others have already done that work for you. The most important thing that you can do, then, is make some intelligent decisions about what to include in your site’s layout and what to leave out.
What does that mean?
Think about all of the things that you want to have on a product page. In addition to information about the product itself, you’re also going to want to have navigation elements that allow people to browse the rest of your product selection. You’re going to want product discovery features, basic company information, a link to your blog and perhaps even an invitation to subscribe to your mailing list. That’s a lot of stuff.
Developing a great e-commerce site is a matter of striking a balance between presenting the most vital information without creating so many distractions that people end up clicking nothing at all. For inspiration in this area, look at Apple’s website. That’s a perfect example of a site on which everything is designed specifically to support and guide the customer’s journey toward clicking the “Buy” button.
Make Your Product Pages Great
Your product pages are the most important pages on your site because they’re the ones that lead directly to revenue. Strive to make your product pages so informative that people don’t need to click elsewhere to get more information before buying. Every time a product page on your site forces someone to go elsewhere because they can’t find an answer to a question, you lose a sale.
- Clearly list the product’s features and specifications.
- Make sure people understand what the product includes.
- Describe the product fully, answering every possible question about it.
- Use high-quality photography to ensure that prospective buyers can get a good look at the product.
Make Your Blog a Top Priority
When a website has a great blog, it’s always a top traffic generator – and it can generate traffic for a completely different set of search terms than the keywords that bring people to your product pages.
Creating a successful blog on an e-commerce site isn’t just a matter of being a good writer, although that certainly helps. It’s also a matter of making your content as readable as possible by organizing it logically and by adding plenty of elements like images and bullet lists to maintain attention.
In addition, one of the most important aspects of making sure that your blog will be a success is your selection of keywords and post topics. Do everything you can to ensure that you’re providing information that isn’t available on all of your competitors’ sites. Come up with highly original article topics. Conduct your own research. Your blog will be a massive traffic generator if you can provide value that people can’t find elsewhere.
Encourage Mailing List Signups Whenever Possible
One of the most important things that you can do when someone visits your website is to capture that person’s contact information if you can. You’ll often need to touch a prospective customer several times before he or she ultimately buys from you, and you’ll do that by encouraging that person to subscribe to your mailing list.
The trick with mailing list subscriptions on an e-commerce site is to make people aware of your mailing list while distracting them from the commerce experience as little as possible. If you annoy people while they’re looking around and thinking about whether or not they want to buy, you’ll lose subscriptions and sales. That’s bad, so you should experiment with different ways of displaying your signup form until you find a display method that generates signups without reducing sales.
In addition to the problem of distracting users from the commerce experience, you also need to offer a meaningful reward if you want people to subscribe to your mailing list. Just about every e-commerce site out there has a mailing list, so a generic message like “Subscribe to find out about our latest sales and discounts!” isn’t going to cut it except with people who are extremely serious about buying from you. To increase subscription conversions, consider offering single-use coupon codes or holding monthly giveaways.
