The Most Effective Ways to Engage Users (Not Email!)

A visitor to your site spends on average less than 59 seconds before they bounce. Even more riveting, less than 2% of those who make it that long will take whatever desired action you want them to: sign up, read an article, take a survey, click an ad, make a purchase, even just explore an item. Essentially, you have less than a minute to make a strong enough impression and engage a visitor before they disappear and you lose that opportunity forever.

If you’re paying to drive traffic to your site, that can be incredibly costly just to be lost in less than a minute. Just another perk: the longer you keep users engaged on your site, the lower your overall bounce rate is for your landing pages and the higher your ranking on Google will be. Boosting engagement on your site should be a top priority.

In this post, we’re going to lay out some new, creative, and effective ways you can engage new and returning users on your site to increase conversions and your site’s value:

Offer cool, useful things in exchange for interaction immediately (and continually).

Easily interactive pages get much more engagement and users spend much more time on them than pages with just content. With interactive features, you can get users to not only spend more time exploring but also collect their personal information so you can reach them again and have more than just 59 seconds to sell your value. A good way of doing this with no effort is offering something cool in exchange for an email, etc. A really fantastic example of this is CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer where users need to enter their email and some details about their business to use this really simple tool. Hubspot also offers short guides relative to what you’re viewing on their site for your email. It helps set you as an authoritative page and starts a continue interaction with that new user.

Never have users just “Click Here”.

One small minor change you can make that can help boost engagement is to increase the number of internal links on your pages...but make them relevant and well placed. Within blog posts and copy, you should make suggestions and references to other interesting parts of your site that are relevant and useful to increase the time users spend on your site. When linking, your links should never just be “click here” but include relevant and descriptive anchor text. You want users to know exactly what they’re headed to and why it could be helpful to them to decrease the bounce on that page! It’s simple but very helpful at getting traffic to move through your site and boost engagement.

Simplify your value, whatever it may be.

Clearly, the attention span online is not long and users won’t waste any time in quickly determining whether you provide something useful to them or not. You want them to realize “yes” as quickly as possible, so simplify your value and make it visually and linguistically easy to read. Don’t waste your time explaining all the features of your product, crowding your site with vague taglines and values that leave a visitor guessing what your site is about: get straight to the point; you’re valuable. With that, immediately provide steps they can take towards that value. Use well crafted and well-placed CTAs to sign up, purchase, explore more, contact, etc.; whatever desired action! Show them the value and show them the way to it in less than one minute for unstoppable engagement.

Personalize user experience wherever you can.

Personalization on your site isn’t even a little perk anymore, it’s expected from web users and can help boost engagement on your site tenfold if done properly. The best part is it doesn’t take a ton of effort with the tools available. A very simple, not automated way to offer a “personalized” experience is to create varied experiences for the different user personas of your target audience. For instance, we created “Beamer for___” guides that offer a more specific, tailored view of our features and uses for Beamer based on who would be visiting our site. Use tools like AddThis to suggest content automatically for users based on what they came to your site looking for and what they may have already viewed. With Beamer, you can do all of this easily by using the segmenting feature to change the updates in the feed based on the individual user’s demographics, language, and past behavior on your site to better engage them without having to create any extra pages or content. It’s too easy!

Make sure it’s easy to actually get around your site.

While users are exploring a page or moving from one part of your site to another, make sure there is an easy way for them to get back to any page or explore others. Sticky and well organized navigations are best for this. It’s also helpful to include other navigations elsewhere on each page. For example, we have a few navigations on the bottom of each page and post that have descriptive link to other more specific, helpful pages.

Use Beamer to engage new users and update returning users.

Users can come in on any page of your site, and if you’re effectively using content marketing, your content. These pages aren’t always designed to be the most perfect landing pages and you might be missing out on converting traffic. No worries, Beamer can help make all the pages of your site more engaging. Beamer is an in-app newsfeed for updates of any kind that opens up on any page of our site. All users have to do is click the “What’s New” tab in the navigation or icon in your interface to open up an interactive feed of updates. You can create updates for anything: offers, new content, upcoming events, news, new features, etc. You can add photos, videos, and CTAs to make them interactive and get users exploring other parts of your site. No matter where users come in from, they can access the feed. You can segment the updates in the feed for different demographics, languages, locations, and based on past behavior on your site. For example, you can show new users updates that more explain your site or offer them something and returning users general updates. Beamer can be installed and updated by anyone on your team in seconds with no design skills necessary. With just a minute, quite a bit can happen online. It can be the difference between converting a sale, getting a new sign up, or getting someone to contact you. Don’t miss out on those opportunities by not taking these simple steps to engage users. Try Beamer and boost engagement 10x now.Check out the our new article to learn about 6 ways to improve customer engagement and reduce churn.