3 Creative Ways to Increase Engagement on Your Website

It’s one thing to be able to make online consumers aware of your site’s presence. This is the beginning of an effective inbound marketing strategy. 

It’s another thing to be able to actually hold user interest once they’ve become aware of the existence of your product, service, brand, etc. This is the next step in the digital marketing funnel leading from awareness to action. Being able to hold and increase user engagement in the relatively short time you’re likely to have a user’s attention is crucial. 

A poor user engagement strategy could be what causes a potential consumer to quickly scan past your website, concluding it has little to no value for them personally, only to cast your site into the vast abyss of unremarkable sites with little to differentiate one from the other.

How can you avoid this? Try these creative ways to boost user engagement on your site. 

An outdated website designed with large paragraph blocks and undescriptive media–pictures with little context, lacking infographics, lacking videos–is sure to quickly lose interest. 

The problem isn’t whether relevant information is there or not, but how easily users are able to access it.  You don’t want users to have to scroll and click through the site, mining for even just the smallest bit of information relevant to them. 

Rather than saturate users with information, relay information in small, easily digestible bits. Be a refreshing pour, not a firehose. 

Give users the ability to get just the information they need when they ask for it. Not only does this prevent saturating them information, but it holds user engagement since they actually have to be involved in the process of asking for it

How can you do this? One excellent way is by utilizing interactive multimedia tools. A great example is the tool Thinglink. 

This and similar tools allow you to attractively display media relevant to your product or service. Beyond this though, it allows you to embed tags and icons within each piece of media, breaking the information down into small, descriptive bits that able to be visually placed in their exact context. 

It’s the difference between having an informative conversation compared to being on the other end of an indefatigable lecture. Sure, all the same information may be relayed in either case.

Yet, which are you more likely to enjoy and stay focused on? Which are you more likely to stay engaged with?

Speaking of conversations, what’s an even more direct way you can have one with your site’s users?

A still far too underutilized tool enabling this is the use of a chat box on your website. 

There are few better ways to hold user engagement than to enable people to simply ask for the information they need. Better still, they’ll be getting the requested information from an expert–you and your site’s staff.

Something that often gets forgotten in the scramble to implement an effective user engagement policy is quite a simple factor. Namely, your website’s page loading time.

How much time do your users spend waiting to use your site as opposed to actually being able to do so?

Does the difference of just a few seconds between pages really make that big of an impact?

Consider this 2018 study performed by Google. They found that the probability of a site bouncing users increased from 32% to 90% as the page load time increased from the 1-3 second range to the 1-5 second range. Not only does a few seconds make a difference, it makes a huge difference.

How can you reduce your site’s page load time? A few simple suggestions are to reduce the number of plugins on your site, allow browser caching, and make use of add-on tools that delay media from loading until users scroll to that part of your site. 

Earlier on it was mentioned how there is a vast abyss of websites that fail to achieve user engagement. One major problem is the lack of creativity preventing any one of these from really standing apart as different than another. 

Yet, as we can see there is no shortage of tools to be able to do so.

It may involve simply making your site more interactive. It could be that an aesthetic make-over is needed. Or, it could really be a matter of your site being a few seconds quicker to navigate through.

Check out our digital strategy blog for more tips on how to stand out from the crowd in your marketing endeavours.