It is not a secret that the more engaged your website visitors are, the more chances they will buy from you a product or service. The Gallup analytics firm states that fully engaged customers bring 23% more revenue compared to the ordinary ones. That is the reason why many entrepreneurs start thinking hard over how to improve this rate and gain more profit.

Regardless of who you are — a business owner or а marketer — you should be aware of strategies allowing to boost user engagement and result in higher sales volume.

Is user engagement so important?

First things first. A user engagement (also known as customer engagement) is a set of metrics based on which it is possible to monitor how deep a user interacts with a website.

The engagement rate can be measured with the help of the following interactions:

• Number of downloads of various materials
• Comments
• Click-throughs
• Shares
• etc.

Now, let me briefly comment on why it is important to engage users on websites:

• First and foremost, engaged users feel themselves more like a part of your brand, and they stay loyal to your company which has a positive effect on sales.
• Studies prove that the level of customer engagement is proportional to the revenue they bring to a company.
• User engagement increases brand awareness and helps Google rank the website better since a lot of interactions on it — a good sign for search engines.

In the era of business competition every detail matters. So whether you already have a website or only developing it, you should choose a complex approach combining modern user requirements as well as tech and marketing trends. User engagement is both a trend to follow and a necessity to sale more and rank higher.

According to the McKinsey&Company survey results, most C-level executives believe the engagement strategy is their priority task.

Tactics to enhance user engagement on your website

It is time to get to the point of this article. The tricks listed below are pretty result-driven yet straightforward.

1. Take care of website load time

Nobody loves slow-working software in the 21st century. The research by Kissmetrics revealed that about 40% of users close the website if it takes 3 and more seconds to load.

Fortunately, it is pretty easy to measure the current speed of your website and compare it to the requirements of Google and other search engines. To make measurements, you can use one of the hundreds of website speed tests available on the internet.

If the speed is at an unsatisfying level, you should dig deeper and find out the reason for this. Heavy plugins, uncompressed images, bad hosting provider are only three of dozens of possible causes.

2. Look at your UI/UX design from all angles

First impression matters and the design of your website is the primary thing a customer is faced as soon as the page is loaded. A too boring or overloaded design will not make potential customers stay on the page for long.

There are several other factors which you should take into consideration in UI/UX design:

• Responsiveness. Poor mobile browsing experience is the reason why 52% of potential customers would leave your website. So, adapt the site to every type of device separately or build a responsive layout that will be adjusting for them automatically.
• Cleanness. Make sure your website’s pages are not overloaded with unnecessary elements, where it is not really needed, and have enough space between all of them. Bear in mind that a clean and simple design is key to focusing visitors on target actions. What is more, it contributes to better website performance (read as load time).
• Readability of fonts. In case you have a blog on the website or just lots of text — pick an easy-to-read and good-looking font. This will make visitors read more articles and other text blocks which is good news for your business.
• Testing. Do some A/B testing to figure out which placement of elements works best and has the most influence conversion along with engagement.

So, you should think over all the aspects and include design when calculating the cost to build a website.

3. Start a blog

Content is the #1 factor for attracting more internet sales and increasing brand awareness. A wise approach to content marketing is capable of engaging website visitors and turning them into loyal customers.

Though there are several tricks to make effective content:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Insert related to the topic keywords into a piece of written material to achieve better search engine ranking.
• Tailor content to your customers. Write client-oriented articles that are useful for the target audience and able to capture their attention for longer.
• Make easy-to-read writings. Lots of complex and lengthy sentences along with bookish words are not those factors making your content great. Focus on quality of producing articles rather than their quantity.

4. Thorough website navigation

It is not only about navigation menus helping your visitors conveniently jump between various key pages but about related content tabs and internal linking between the pages.

5. Make your website interact with its users

Interaction is the key component of user engagement. There are plenty of ways of how one or another business can interact with customers to capture their attention and push them to desired actions. I will specify three of them that can be easily adopted by anyone.

• Live chat. Quick support is what most customers appreciate. A live chat gives them an opportunity to ask questions to managers, and thus, push users to finalize their buying decisions. Check this comparison article of the best live chat software out there. By the way, FAQ pages can also be used for this purpose, but they are far less effective than live chats.
• Social media. Provide users with an option of sharing your blog articles or other content to their favorite social media networks like Facebook or Twitter. If your website is equipped with registration, let them sign up by using social media credentials.
• Motivate interaction. An opportunity to comment on the article, item or whatever is an excellent example of motivating users for interacting with the website. Besides that, you can add a rating and reviewing system for your goods or web pages.

Wrapping up

Those were the basic tricks anyone can do with their lead-generating or selling website. This list could have been extended, but those additions would be pretty specific and focused on different website groups.

To measure how they perform, you can keep track of such metrics like bounce rate, a number of visitors, page per visitor, and others (depend on the website type).