The Best Ways To Keep Visitors Glued To Your Website

Research indicates that most people who visit a company website never return, so it is vital to keep people engaged with your company, website, and products for as long as possible to have the best chance of converting them into sales leads.

According to some research, between 70 and 96 per cent of people that leave any given website will never return. This is a scary statistic for online marketers and drills home the importance of making an excellent first impression online.

The simple fact of the matter is that there are plenty of options for consumers on the internet, so if you don't blow them away, they will probably just stay away. If you can keep them on your company website for any significant period, it means you have engaged them and piqued their interest.

This will increase your chances of converting them into a sale or, at the very least, will likely have convinced them to return. This is especially important in the e-commerce industry, where companies live and die on sales.

Spotify's website is a great example of a website that does an excellent job of keeping visitors engaged, giving them a reason to return, and converting new visitors into sales with its slick design, well-placed calls-to-action and great content.

It is also prevalent in the iGaming industry. Many brands on the best online casino list in UK use strategies like calls-to-action and strong visual content to keep new visitors engaged and have fun on their websites for as long as possible.

With all that in mind, here are four of the best methods for keeping people on your website for longer and, hopefully, increasing your chances of converting them into a sales lead.

Strategic Calls To Action

A call-to-action is a feature used in effective website design that involves any act of encouraging a visitor to do something. Using the Spotify example, its homepage is the perfect example of a simple and compelling call-to-action.

It is dominated by just two colours and has the simple text “Listening is everything. Millions of songs and podcasts. No credit card needed”. This is followed by the bold and in your face call-to-action “Get Spotify Free”. They are saying in clear and certain terms if you like the music, you can get it from them, and it won't even cost you anything.

It is important not to put a call-to-action on every page because you don't want people to feel like they are being bombarded by new information or forced to stay on the website. However, strategically placed calls-to-action or links to new information can make your website way more engaging to new visitors.

Exit Pop-Ups

An exit pop-up is an element of web design that only fires when someone is about to leave a website or is busy clicking away from the site. They can be incredibly effective because, in many cases, people will want to leave. After all, they haven't found what they are looking for, so if you can design and place strategic exit pop-ups in the right places, you can exponentially increase the amount of time new visitors spend on your website.

For example, with blog posts and content pieces, it is a good idea to link people to other relevant content once people have got to the end of the original page, or even link them directly to the product a specific piece of content is about.

On product pages, you can link people to user reviews or even generate discounts for people to encourage them to make a spot purchase. Discounts and special offers are especially effective in the shopping cart, an area of company websites that new users are notorious for abandoning.

Use Easily Digestible Content

Some research suggests that most website users spend less than six seconds reading content on any particular page. They don't read content word for word but instead scan over it to pick out words, phrases, or prices that they are most interested in.

E-commerce sites featuring technical pieces of content with long, complicated sentences filled with jargon and complex words are not effective unless they target a very specific niche, which isn't the best strategy online.

Instead, make sure your font is big enough to read quickly and that the text is well-formatted and easy for the eye to follow. Break up blocks of text with subheadings, graphics, video, and bullet lists. Help the content stand out and make it easy for the user to get the exact information they are looking for as easily as possible, and you will have gone a long way to keep them glued to your website.

Make Your Website Fast

This is a simple point but one that is becoming more and more important as increasing portions of the globe gain access to more processing power and faster internet speeds. Put simply, the world is in a rush, and no one has time to sit around and wait for a slow website, especially one that is trying to sell them things.

Loading times have such a significant impact on e-commerce that some research even suggests that a 1-second delay in page response will lead to up to a 7-per cent drop in sales conversion. The two best ways to increase website loading speed are to ensure all images used are compressed and to use a content delivery network that features servers worldwide so users will access your site via a server local to them rather than having to send information halfway around the world.