4 Ways to Get Visitors to Stay on Your Website Longer Improve your conversions by keeping your audience engaged on the website.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
It's important to convert as many of your visitors into leads or sales the very first time they land on your website, because it may be your only chance. Between 70 and 96 percent of your website visitors will never return once they leave after that initial browsing session.
The easiest way to increase your chances of generating conversions is by getting those visitors to stick around -- the longer they stay on your website, the greater the chance of them converting. Here are four ways to keep your visitors engaged and on your website longer.
Related: 15 Useful Tech Tools for Your Business
1. Place strategic calls-to-action on every page.
Every page on your website needs to have some sort of call-to-action that eventually leads to revenue generation. For example, a blog post should include links to other pieces of relevant content within your website, or more information about a particular product or service. If someone is interested in purchasing, but not quite ready to pull the trigger, pushing them to additional information can be all it takes to get them to convert during that visit.
You can also create gated content, accessible once the visitor submits his or her email address. Some examples of gated content include in-depth reports, case studies and videos. This not only places additional content in front of the visitor to keep them engaged, but it also helps add to your email list, which you can market to in the future. Remember though, collecting emails is just half the battle -- you need to make sure you optimize for deliverability in order to generate revenue from your email list.
Related: 25 Creative Ways to Promote Your App For Free
2. Create several exit-intent pop-up offers.
Pop-ups that fire only when your visitor is about to leave your website can be highly effective. There are several different ways you can leverage this, depending on the page the visitor is on. Some examples include:
- Blog posts: You can design content-specific exit pop-ups that offer the visitor the opportunity to be re-directed to a relevant blog post. Set these up page-by-page to push the visitor to additional information that could help push them toward your conversion goal.
- Product pages: If a visitor is trying to leave a product page, give them the opportunity to read reviews or informative pieces of content related to the specific product they were just looking at. Write content that answers frequently asked questions -- if you answer common pre-sale questions you will greatly increase the chances of converting that visitor.
- Shopping cart: Shopping cart abandonment costs companies billions of dollars every year. While you can present special offers or discount codes to try to keep the visitor in your cart, you can also offer to take them to specific pages of your website if they try to leave your cart, such as a review or testimonial page.
Related: A Step-by-Step Guide To Building Your First Mobile App
3. Use engaging visual content.
One of the easiest way to increase your average time on site, is to include a lot of visual content on your website. Explainer videos are great at keeping your visitors' attention when describing a product or service, and infographics will typically have longer visit durations than text-based blog posts.
Some websites, especially landing pages with a single specific goal, can use visual elements to help keep the visitor long enough that they end up completing the conversion goal. Look at Travel Visa as an example -- they use background video around their call-to-action in order to pull the visitor to the area where their conversion funnel begins.
If their website didn't have this visual feature, a visitor might scroll through and leave. The video background causes the visitor to see the search option with minimal fields. Someone visiting this website is doing so because they have a need -- capturing attention like this increases the likelihood of that first step being completed, and keeping them on the website longer.
Related: The 25 Best U.S. Cities for Tech Startups
4. Make your content easy to skim through.
It's important to break your content into multiple pieces, making it easier to consume, even if just skimming through it quickly. If you use headings and sub-headings correctly along with the correct formatting style, you can deliver your message to your visitors even if they skim through it.
It doesn't matter what your content is about -- the subject matter is irrelevant. You need to format it similar to this blog post, which features bite-sized paragraphs of no more than two to three sentences, descriptive headings and bullet points. This makes it possible to quickly skim through the blog post and come away with the main points.
Not all visitors are going to read your content word-for-word, so if you can get your main points across via a quick skim, it will greatly increase the chance of that visitor clicking through to a product page or to additional information.
