Onsite Customer Engagement 101: How to Better Engage Your Customers on Your Website
While often viewed as the most valuable marketing asset, a website is also an excellent tool to engage and connect with customers. Of course, a great web design is essential, but there’s more to onsite customer engagement than aesthetics.
What is Onsite Customer Engagement?
Onsite or website engagement is a brand’s ability to retain its web visitors, offering them multiple and relevant touchpoints to interact with the site. It measures how much value users find in a website and its content, what actions they take, or how they interact (downloads, shares, clicks, conversions, etc.).
The higher a website’s engagement, the more likely visitors will stay on it or repeatedly visit it and take high-value actions.
How to Better Engage Your Customers on Your Website
1. Deliver Relevant & Valuable Content
Content that relates to your audience and adds value to their lives is a cornerstone for engagement. In addition to drawing in your target customers and keeping them hooked, great content can lead them through the sales funnel.
So, keep your web content clear and engaging enough while maintaining your primary focus on the audience. Share your brand’s values and inform them how your products/services can benefit them. Also, ensure the content is locally relevant to build trust and increase conversions.
Pro tip: Display related content to help visitors easily find more content related to a topic.
2. Build a Responsive Website
The global number of mobile internet users is estimated to reach 6.1 billion in 2028. Amid people using more mobile phones to browse the web, building a responsive website is the key to increasing onsite customer engagement.
Remember, a non-responsive website design may look good on a desktop, but it might block the main menu or sitemap on a tablet or iPhone, and no business would want that.
So, to avoid leaving your website users frustrated by making them navigate a desktop website on mobile phones, use responsive design. It will convert your website for optimal use based on the screen it’s being viewed on. No pinching or zooming. Only smooth scrolling!
3. Host Live Events
Between the declining influence of in-person events and the rise in virtual competition, it’s never been more important to reach more audiences online. To build and nurture a community right on your website, host live events, webinars, etc., directly on your website.
You can easily do it with Sequel.io’s no-code and low-code embeds and experience high engagement by encouraging your audience to take action on your own website. Plus, you can modify and customize modules with brand colors, fonts, etc. – reinforcing your brand’s personality as you host live events on your site.
Sequel.io also offers you insights about your audience with real-time engagement data, so you know what (or who) runs the show.
4. Embed a Social Media Feed
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter offer businesses the opportunity to connect with customers. Leveraging your social media posts by embedding a vibrant and dynamic social media feed on your website can increase the time visitors spend on your site, reducing the bounce rate.
Additionally, adding a social feed gives your customers a chance to interact with your brand on platforms you’re active on. By adding to social trust and improving brand loyalty, a tactic like this is worth its weight in gold.
5. Incentivize Your Audience
Running contests and giveaways or providing offers and discounts can create a flow of digital word-of-mouth marketing – giving a steady boost to website traffic.
So, as long as it doesn’t hurt your bottom line, incentivize your audience and increase brand recognition while improving website user engagement.
6. Embed a Networking Hub
Another exciting way to boost onsite customer engagement is to embed a networking hub using Sequel.io.
You can embed a hub as a stand-alone component and create a lounge or an expo or link it to the start or end of a live event to drive better conversations. Either way, embedding a networking hub on your website gives a place for your target customers to gather on your brand real estate.
Besides fostering a sense of belonging amongst your audience, it can generate loyalty, increase engagement, and even lead to repeat purchases.
7. Leverage Calls-to-Action (CTAs) Wisely
“Sign up”, “Join now”, or “Add to cart”, calls-to-action like these should be used as a tool to power your onsite customer engagement strategy — not mess it up.
When strategically placed on your website, these buttons, links, or media tidbits can drive actions from your audience and convert them into customers.
So, use CTAs wisely and position them with your site content in the right pathways. To ensure these contact points positively impact your website users, give due attention to the language. Avoid pushy or salesy copy for your CTAs. Instead, carefully highlight the value proposition. For example, instead of “Grab your discount”, you can use “Save up to 30%”.
Shining a spotlight on your website’s CTAs requires the proper alignment with the sales funnel stage your content belongs to. So, as you focus on creating clear and compelling CTAs, don’t overlook at what point the website user is in the purchase journey.
8. Capitalize on Social Proof
When it comes to what it’s actually like to be associated with a brand, nobody is more honest than existing customers. So, use them and add social proof to your website to supercharge your onsite customer engagement.
You can add social proof in the form of in-depth case studies, short-form recommendations/testimonials from existing customers, and even real-time statistics such as recent purchases and the number of people looking at a particular product at that point in time.
9. Weave Automated and Human-Assisted Interaction into User Journeys
Even though website automation plays a pivotal role in elevating user experience, combining it with human interaction offers hybrid engagement at all touchpoints – helping businesses deliver convenience and personalization on the go.
This hybrid approach would ensure that even though chatbots are available 24×7 to engage website visitors, human-to-human interactions in the form of phone calls or video chats offer a virtual in-person experience.
Personalized and instant responses, thus, can help lower customers’ frustration, providing a frictionless digital experience throughout the user journey.
10. Consider the Technicalities
Your website’s technical optimization is as critical as its layout and UX to increase engagement. The better your website responds to users’ queries, the more likely they will take the actions you want.
So, here are a few facets you must keep a close watch on to improve your onsite customer engagement:
- Navigation – Plan how your website users will interact with your content and streamline navigation to help them find what they’re looking for. For example, you can add a simple navigation menu and page/blog post categories. This will not just organize your content and make your website easily accessible but also help you enjoy a reduced bounce rate and higher user engagement.
- Internal linking structure – Ensure a good internal linking structure to boost your website’s SEO ranking and simplify user navigation and engagement.
- Page load time – Slow loading pages is bad news for brands looking to increase onsite customer engagement. In addition to making the entire user experience frustrating, it’s also one of the major causes of increased bounce rate. For this reason, try and limit the number of elements on your web pages and fix the speed of your website if it loads slowly.
11. Analyze, Research & Test
Many businesses expect expert advice and best practices to enrich their websites and improve user experience. But they fail to monitor what their website visitors are clicking, where, when, and how.
To ensure your website meets your customers’ requirements and leads you to better conversions, you must analyze website data and conduct research continuously.
And as you use website data to study your audience, don’t forget to conduct regular testing to find out how visitors interact with your website— what are their roadblocks and how to avoid them for better overall engagement.
Tap into the Right Tools for Better Onsite Customer Engagement
Fast-tracking your website engagement strategy doesn’t require you to spend all of your Q1 revenue or bring a team of seasoned web developers on board. Instead, work on the abovementioned points to gradually improve your onsite customer engagement.
Capitalize on tools like Sequel.io to host live events directly on your website and skyrocket user engagement. If you’re ready to learn more about different types of virtual events, this guide can help.
You can also schedule a personalized demo to find out how Sequel.io makes it easier to embed virtual events on your website and minimize distractions by keeping the audience on your brand property.