9 Essential Tricks To Reduce Bounce Rate And Improve Customer Engagement
With websites being the easiest and most cost-effective method to reach your audience, it’s vital to not only entice visitors to your site but to also keep them there.
A low bounce rate indicates that, for one reason or another, although you are succeeding in getting people to click through to your site, they are clicking back out before they have had the chance to explore or make any purchases.
The key to achieving a low bounce rate is to improve the user’s experience of your website. There are numerous ways to do this, each one working towards offering a seamless, interesting and engaging experience for your potential customer.
In this article, we will look at tips and tricks to keep your audience engaged once they have clicked through to your website and also how to improve the engagement of your customers once they are there.
#1. Make sure you have a mobile version
With the vast majority of people using their smartphones to surf the web for either the majority of the time or at least multiple times a day, you don’t want the clunky desktop version to let you down.
Research carried out by Dataportal.com shows over a 50% increase in website traffic to mobile phones between the years 2009 and 2018. This indicates that it is crucial to have a mobile-friendly version of your website. Not having one will offer the mobile user an unsatisfying experience of your website, which is likely to put them off returning.
If providing your customer with the best possible experience isn’t motivation enough for you to create a mobile version of your website, bear in mind that Google also deems it important and evidence suggests the most popular search engine will punish websites that do not offer a mobile version. This will lead to less visibility in search engine results.
#2. Speed
People expect quick service. They expect websites to load in a matter of seconds. Your potential customers don’t have time to be waiting around while your website loads, a slow experience is one sure-fire way to ensure visitors leave, increasing your bounce rate.
According to Kissmetrics, a leading web analytics tool, 47% of website visitors expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds. 40% of visitors are seen to abandon the website if it takes an additional 1 second to load. Of course, this percentage is then seen in an increased bounce rate.
There are tools to detect the speed your website loads, including Google’s own tool so it is quick and easy to check the speed of your website. Fortunately, even if you discover a lag, it should take an experienced web developer only a few days to fix.
#3. Keep it interesting
By making your website easy to read, interesting and engaging, you’ll see your bounce rate reduce drastically. Browsing should be an enjoyable experience for your customers, not a frustrating one.
White space is very important, as is the choice of font, in making sure the readability of your website is spot on. Having plenty of white space on your page around titles and subtitles and between paragraphs gives the eyes time to rest, therefore encouraging people to continue reading. Keeping sentences and paragraphs short and sweet helps to ensure you have enough white space.
Remember, people visit your page for enjoyment, not work, navigating and reading content on your page shouldn’t be a chore. Your website is a funnel to sales. You want to keep visitors engaged and reading.
Another great way to ensure visitors to your website stay is to include fun quizzes and surveys. Quizzes are a popular method to increase customer engagement and surveys are an interesting way to both make your customer feel listened to and important and to also keep them on the page for longer.
#4. Use pop-ups sparingly
Pop-ups can be an effective way to encourage customers to sign up to your newsletter or to sell your product, but use them sparingly and wisely. Too many pop-ups or badly timed pop-ups can cause a customer to immediately leave your website.
If you decide to use pop-ups, make sure they are well-timed, of an excellent design, and, above all, relevant. One trick is to offer a freebie in exchange for your customer’s email address so you can add them to your subscriber list. Start collecting emails easily.
A well-thought-out pop-up can hugely increase your customer conversion rate, but an ill-timed one with little relevance to your site can send bounce rates soaring.
#5. Reviews – social proof
Proving to potential customers to your website that the products or services you are selling are credible is a crucial aspect of gaining new customers. This is especially important if your product, service, or site is relatively new.
A simple, yet hugely effective way of showing potential customers the value of your product or service is to leverage social proof—collect and display excellent reviews from existing customers.
Displaying good reviews on your homepage, your product pages, or your landing page will increase customer conversion. After all, no one wants to be the first to try something new. Humans, by nature, prefer to try something they know is credible and lives up to its promises.
Another way of using social proof to increase your customer engagement is to use conversion pop-ups to display the most recent conversions on your website. These may include the number of sign-ups, sales and subscription rates. This clever tactic feeds into the humans’ natural fear of missing out (FOMO), leading to reactive buying and subscribing.
There are many tools you can use to achieve these conversion pop-ups, including Automate and crowdy.ai.
#6. Test, test, test
If your bounce rate is low and your customer engagement low, it may be worth implementing some A/B split testing. That is, choosing a focus and recreating it. For example, you may choose to test your landing page, in which case you would create two and test them against each other. The one which results in the lowest bounce rate and the highest customer engagement will be the one you decide to stick with.
A/B split testing can be applied to numerous parts of your campaign, including the design of your landing page and any offers you have for your customers.
A similar method can be used to show customers localized landing pages. For example, if you are offering products or services to an international audience, by setting up localized landing pages, you can use the appropriate currency, language etc to help improve customer engagement.
Most website and blog hosts now offer A/B split testing, so it’s not as difficult to carry out as you may at first think.
#7. Videos and images
Videos are proven to hold your audience’s attention for far longer than images and text alone. Videos can be utilized in many ways on a website to grab your potential customer’s attention, including enabling a video to play in the background of your website or having a video close to your Call To Action button to draw your customer’s focus in the right direction.
Videos can be very versatile. You could use animation, patterns to draw the eye, music, narration, etc. The possibilities are endless.
Remember to use videos sparingly. They can be a great tool to increase customer engagement, but overuse them and you risk losing your customer prematurely.
#8. Content
We’ve spoken about how to display your content, but not about the content itself. Obviously, this needs to be written in an appropriate tone to the product or service you are selling, but above all, you need to make sure you refresh your content frequently.
Plan your content ahead of schedule to make sure you have regular fresh content. This will not only engage returning customers but will also help to ensure visibility in search engine results.
#9. Meta descriptions
The most important thing to bear in mind is your meta description—the one to two sentences displayed under your website name in a search engine result. Without an engaging meta description, you won’t succeed in getting the customers to your website in the first place.
Equally, if your meta description isn’t relevant to your website, your bounce rate will increase as your description will be enticing the wrong audience to your site.
By using relevant and carefully researched keywords in your meta description you will attract audiences interested in your products or services and therefore decrease your bounce rate.
Conclusion
Many factors will affect the bounce rate of your website, but fortunately by implementing the above steps not only will you see a decrease in the bounce rate of your website, but the overall customer engagement will increase too.
Bounce rate and customer engagement go hand in hand. If you change what is causing potential customers to click away from your site, you will automatically encourage them to engage.
