Posted on October 28, 2022 in Marketing Thoughts

Every site owner understands the value of getting traffic to their website. It’s impossible to make a sale or generate a lead unless someone is actually there to sell to. But once the potential customer is there, you have to address the opposite problem: visitors leaving your website without converting.

A few thousand visitors can still result in zero conversions, and that means zero revenue. This is where many website owners encounter a roadblock and struggle with their next steps.

Website engagement is poorly understood because website owners can get lost in the never-ending struggle to attract more and better traffic. But getting one visitor (or a thousand) to your website doesn’t mean you’ve made any conversions.

Converting visitors into customers or leads is the goal of website engagement.

Building Blocks to Increasing User Engagement

Start by posing yourself questions from a few different perspectives:

• As your customers
• As your users that return to your website and convert then
• As users that leave without converting

The first two will help you understand what you’re doing right. The last will tell you what you can improve in order to increase conversions.

Here are some questions to ask yourself from each perspective:

• What are people looking to do when they come to your website?
• How easy is your website to use to accomplish their goal(s)?
• Why do people return to your website?

Already answered these questions and know your website needs more engagement? Start in 15 minutes.

Table of Contents

• What is website engagement? [anchor text]
• Why is it important to engage users? [anchor text]
• From engagement to conversion [anchor text]
• Live Chat [anchor text]
• Product or service experience [anchor text]
• Use an omnichannel approach for a seamless experience [anchor text]
• Proactive Messaging [anchor text]
• Interactive content [anchor text]
• Use data to optimize website engagement [anchor text]
• Engaging text and video content [anchor text]

What Is Website Engagement?

Engaging your website’s users is how you inform, guide & convert your users into customers or generate leads.

Website engagement is a measure of how well you catch the visitor’s attention and what kind of connection they make with your business. Website engagement includes every action that visitors take on your website – filling out forms, watching videos, calling your business, sending you an email, contacting you via live chat, and more.

Why Is It Important To Engage Users?

Engaging your users encourages them to give you the time and connection you need to generate sales or leads. Websites that lack engagement will always struggle to convert visitors into customers, no matter how many people are attracted to the website.

Your website can’t just generate traffic and call it a day; it needs to engage your visitors in ways that grow your business’s revenue. The methods you use to engage visitors need to be targeted to generate conversions.

You can have the best ads in the world and still lose visitors when they come to your website. Visitors can leave for any reason you can think of ranging from boredom and frustration. You need to continue to improve user engagement if you want to fully optimize your revenue.

Engaging users will:

Improve the customer experience

What would you be more likely to buy from?

A company providing the minimum in information and customer service? Or a company that anticipates and satisfies your desire for engagement through targeted and timely videos, convenient communication opportunities, FAQs and customer testimonials? You can do even better: you can satisfy customer needs before they even realize they want those things. Using your data [anchor text to Data heading below] from BirdSeed lets you anticipate the needs of future visitors and provide for those needs at exactly the right point in the customer journey.

Give you more data on your customers’ journeys

Tracking user engagement gives you much greater insights into users that convert and users that leave. Did 35% of visitors who watched the video that introduces your team immediately convert? Or did they take additional steps first, like contacting you via Live Chat or by phone? Having these kinds of percentages gives you large amounts of leverage in pushing the kind of engagement that users want to experience before they take the leap to conversion. BirdSeed provides all the data you could want on interactions people use it for on your website.

Increase brand recognition and loyalty

Encourage visitors to spend more time on your website and experience engagement tailor-made for their needs. They are much more likely to have pleasant memories of your company, your products, and your services.

Reduce bounce rate and churn rate

Providing engaging options, material, and content-oriented toward conversions for your users decreases:

• your bounce rate
• increases conversions
• increases the number of customers that return again and again.

Providing valuable engagement for visitors on your website gives users reasons to stay on your website and to return another day.

From Engagement To Conversion

All types of engagement keep the user on your website as long as they’re engaged, but keeping visitors on your website is not the ultimate goal.

Not all engagement leads to conversion, and not all actions that fall under the umbrella of website engagement are equally desirable – some businesses won’t want users to send an email, while others will need users to schedule a meeting. That means it’s not enough to see that users are spending time on your website. Just giving users something to do isn’t the same as generating conversions.

It’s important to understand exactly what they are engaging with, at what point they engage during their customer journey, and where visitors are leaving your customer funnel.

BirdSeed is designed to engage and interact with your users at every point from when they land on your site, to conversion, and beyond.

Live Chat

Offering Live Chat gives your visitors a convenient and no-pressure way to engage with you about anything that’s on their minds.

Answer questions about products, services, shipping times, and so on. Chatbots often frustrate customers; keep Live Chat and complement it with a Knowledge Library of Frequently Asked Questions to answer FAQs that you know a lot of visitors ask before converting. These can be paired up side by side in your BirdSeed.

No one is frustrated by FAQs, but having a chatbot simulate an interaction is at best a disguised Knowledge Library and Link Launcher; at worst, they’re extremely frustrating.

Get started with BirdSeed in just a few minutes and give your customers a pleasant live chat experience that’s fully customizable to your website and visitors.

Product or Service Experience

Whatever your business or service, there is always some form of competition in your industry. You have to stand above the obtain good market share.

Make it quick, easy and friendly if your customers buy physical products. Be clear about shipping times and be sure to provide clear product descriptions for your excellent products. Include friendly follow-ups and use your BirdSeed to offer assistance by live chat, phone, or email for any questions or issues you may have.

If you offer a service to your customers, ensure you stand out from your competition with superior customer service and top-of-the-line execution for your service offerings. Reflect all this on your website as well: use Client Testimonials and Video Showcase to vouch for your results and introduce your team. Just as with selling physical products, you’ll need to follow up to increase their probability of choosing you again and getting another useful client testimonial.

Use An Omnichannel Approach For a Seamless Experience

An omnichannel approach is the best way to retain customers when you have both a digital and a physical storefront. Retention rates can increase greatly when following an omnichannel approach vs businesses that have a less cohesive experience.

A critical part of omnichannel marketing is maintaining your brand and messaging clearly no matter how the customer shops for your products or services. This increases your credibility with your visitors by showing you are consistent and attentive online and in-store. It also communicates your brand and message more effectively with customers who would otherwise be confused.

If you truly offer an omnichannel experience, you have the opportunity to go a step further: any information you capture online such as the visitor’s name can be used to synchronize their in-store experience with what the potential customer engaged with online.

Proactive Messaging

Proactive Messaging is an appeal or greeting to the user without the experiential interruption of a popup. Popups certainly have their place and provide excellent value to users with exclusive codes and offers, but they can also be annoying and drive users away with requests for information or action that users are not yet ready to take.

BirdSeed’s Proactive Messaging gets your message noticed without being in the way. Think of it as a greeter welcoming people as they enter a store.

With options for video greetings and instant Live Chat, that’s a great way to describe the digital customer service atmosphere that BirdSeed creates. It’s a great option to greet your customers and tell them a little about yourself and your website.

Provide some quick links below the video to give them quick access to your most valuable pages. These pages should ideally be the most valuable to your users and to your conversion strategy.

Schedule a Meeting

Use BirdSeed’s Schedule a Meeting tool to get face-to-face with customers online or in person. In many industries, there’s simply no way to convert without having a face-to-face meeting. Going from a website visit to that meeting can require many steps, so we’ve removed all those steps.

You can easily configure your BirdSeed to provide easy access to the Schedule a Meeting tool on every page of your website, or just on the pages most targeted to generate those valuable leads.

Interactive Content

It’s extremely important that your website contains engaging content. A great way to provide value to your users is to create interactive content; for example, a bank that offers a loan calculator to determine how much interest you will pay per year at X rate of interest.

Just as in that example, the interactive content needs to be highly targeted toward creating conversions as its ultimate goal. And it should provide real value to your visitors; interactive, useful content engages customers and often brings them back for more.

Incorporate videos, infographics, accordion menus, images, and more to provide an ideal and easy-to-understand website experience.

Relevant Content is Engaging Content

If the content isn’t relevant to both your overall website and your conversion strategy, it won’t work. You may be able to pull in some non-relevant traffic to your site, but there’s a reason Google discourages building non-relevant landing pages: Users don’t like them, and they don’t lead to conversions.

Return to the Building Blocks to Increasing Engagement [anchor text to Building Blocks to Increasing Engagement] above and ask yourself those questions again to help you determine the relevancy of your content.

Only Data Fully Optimizes Website Engagement

Anybody can guess what the best solution and tools for your company would be. Only the data on how your customers actually interact with your website will lead to true optimization of your engagement & conversions.

BirdSeed provides extreme levels of detail in exactly how your users are engaging with your website. The detailed reports show you exactly what customers are using and what they avoid. BirdSeed excels in testing how different options for engagement actually perform, which gives you the ability to improve or remove the tools you’ve selected.

Be Willing to Spend the Time

All the best and surest ways to succeed take time. We’re not here to sell you on a get-rich-quick scheme. Building engagement takes time and consistent effort, and it’s all worth it.

Creating and optimizing your ideal engagement solution can be done incrementally, just taking one step at a time to improve your engagement and conversions. BirdSeed is incredibly easy to develop one tool, or even one page of your website at a time. Initial setup takes about 15 minutes; but the options for customizing your tools, engagement, and conversions are endless.