How to Improve Website Engagement and Turn More Visitors Into Customers

When you publish anything on your website, it’s only natural that you want your visitors to engage and eventually turn into customers. But that’s not what usually happens. Many website owners and marketing teams spend hours and days on their content only to hear complete silence in the response.

Website engagement is a vital part of every business marketing strategy. If the customers are strongly interested, motivated, and engaged with your content, they are more likely to buy or order. But what actually makes people engage with web content? And how can you improve customer engagement exactly? Let’s find out the answers to these and more questions in this guide. 

Psychology Behind Customer Engagement

Website engagement can take several forms. People can click your links, comment under your blog posts, share some of your articles on their social media, subscribe to your newsletter, or download an asset. But what actually makes them do that? What is the psychology behind wanting to engage?

You know it yourself. Most users simply consume content and scroll to the next piece. But some psychological triggers can actually make them want to stop and interact with your post. Some of the most popular ones are:

• Visual contrast: Unique layouts, bold graphics, sudden bursts of bright color. 
• Faces and empathy: People naturally lock on to faces in videos and images. That’s because they look for expressions and emotional connection. 
• Open loops: If you hint at a major secret or pose an unanswered question, the visitors’ brains tend to seek closure. And that’s why they can read to the end. 
• Disrupting expectations: Unexpected statistics or surprising facts make content more memorable. 
• Resonance: When people identify with your message, they’re more likely to connect.

But how do you know whether your website triggers any of those? The first thing you need is to make sure that your content is actually interesting to your target audience. This is where metrics like CTR (click-through rate), time on page, and average website bounce rate are important.

But what if all of those numbers look good and you still get no web engagement? It likely means that people are interested in your content, but they aren’t motivated enough to do anything in response. How do you change that? That’s what the next section is all about.

6 Steps to Improve Website Engagement

Check out the six following steps to help you increase user engagement on your website:

1. Test Your Website Performance and UX

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and check how well your website works. Monitor and analyze these things:

• Site speed: Don’t add too many heavy videos, images, and GIFs, and make sure your website loads fast. You can check your web performance for free with PageSpeed Insights.
• Accessibility: Make your website accessible to all by making the text easy to see with proper contrast, adding ALT text to your images, offering keyboard navigation options, and setting up video captions. That can help every visitor fully enjoy interacting with your website. 
• Mobile optimization: Your site has to be well optimized for mobile phones, as many users will only see the mobile version of your website.
• Website navigation and website usability: Make sure it’s easy to use your website. It has to be clear where all the important things are.
• Content clarity: It’s great to be creative, but when it comes to your major web pages, they have to be clear above all. So, when choosing names for different sections, it’s better not to overcomplicate this.

Ideally, start with a good user experience (UX) audit. This way, you can identify where users face specific issues and friction. So, you can get rid of these problems and fix them, if any, in advance. 

2. Understand Pain Points and Needs of Your Customers Through Conversations

Your website visitors come with different intentions. But there are still some challenges they have in common. And it’s important to know what those are. To understand what your audience is more likely to engage with, try to find the answers to the following questions:

• Who are we serving? 
• What do my customers need? 
• What aren’t they getting now? 
• How can we help them differently and uniquely?

Having conversations with clients is vital for you to know their needs and pain points. Ask them open-ended questions about their frustrations, goals, solutions, and what prevents them from getting the desired result. 

Getting regular feedback can deepen the connection between your visitors and your site. Besides, it can help you understand how to keep users engaged. There are multiple ways to do that. For example, you can have a direct chat with your audience where they genuinely share their experiences and thoughts. 

3. Track Your Website Visitors‘ Behavior

It’s also crucial to understand exactly how people interact with your website. It can help you figure out what people do on your website, where they engage, and where they aren’t interested. 

One of the ways to do that is through behavioral marketing. It involves analyzing actions like searches, products viewed, clicks, abandoned carts, etc. You can use it to better understand what your customers actually care about. With the data about visitor behavior, it’s easier to personalize their experience. 

Heatmaps are especially useful for this. When you add them, you can see where visitors move their cursor, click, and scroll. That can help you identify which elements draw attention and which are ignored. 

4. Create Unique, Tailored Content

There is way too much content these days. People have already seen all types of “ultimate guides” and “top 10 tips.” So, if you create yet another one of those, most likely, you won’t get much website engagement.

Research shows that 76% of people are more likely to engage with relevant and tailored content that matches their specific interests and needs. So, you should do your best to create unique and useful content. The more authentic your posts are, the more interest they can evoke in your prospective customers. 

Also, try to find out how you can personalize your web content. Your messaging has to be adjusted and tailored for the ideal customer profile (ICP). It has to be convenient and motivating enough for your target audience to flock to your website and buy. Because usually, if your website doesn’t generate leads, the problem is that your content doesn’t feel relevant enough to your audience.

5. Make Your Website Interactive

Before you can improve web engagement, your website has to make it easy to engage. There are multiple tactics you can use, but here are some of the easiest and most effective ones:

• Enable comments: Let your visitors start conversations with you and other users by enabling the comment option. This way, your visitors can share their feedback, ask questions, and give ideas for new content, products, or services. 
• Add interactive elements: Encourage your visitors to interact with your content more deeply. You can embed a contact form to allow users to get in touch and collect their contact data. Also, you may offer them to complete a quiz or questionnaire for more sophisticated interactivity. 
• Always give a clear next step: The users have to know exactly what you want them to do at every single stage. That’s why it’s so important to add clear CTAs and internal links throughout your website.

6. Reward Already Engaged Customers

According to statistics, website members who redeem rewards spend 3.1 times more than non-redeeming ones. You can offer discounts, points, early access, and exclusive experiences on your website. This way, you can make your potential buyers spend more money on your products or services. After all, people like being rewarded because they feel more accepted, understood, praised, thanked, and blessed. 

Rewards for already engaged customers can make them excited about what you offer. They can become more likely to recommend your business to friends, colleagues, relatives, neighbors, and so on. Essentially, rewards act as extra “pushers,” motivating clients to intentionally share their positive experience with your website. 

Rewards can also help convert website visitors into customers, as users feel more attached to your product or service.

Conclusion

If you want to improve website engagement, you first have to understand what your website visitors need and make it easier for them to navigate. So, you should discover your customers’ buying patterns, when they are interested, and when they aren’t. Knowing this can help you tailor and personalize your offer to them. When your website addresses their current issues and answers their questions, they are more likely to feel accepted, heard, and understood. As a result, you can turn more visitors into customers.

If you feel like your website isn’t attracting the right type of people, the reason might be its design that’s simply not aligned with your audience’s expectations. That’s where Big Orange Planet can help. If you want to create a website that looks great, has high rankings, and turns website visitors into clients, just book a free consultation.