The importance of retaining your visitors
Most people make the mistake of focusing on visitors, when emphasis should be given on retention and bounce rates. These terms may seem alien to you, but if you are looking to improve upon your site, they may prove invaluable.
The number of visitors coming into your site, while giving you some understanding of your site’s popularity, it is irrelevant to the site’s health. Is your site actually being enjoyed by visitors? Or do they leave without reading the content completely, or if they read it, only to never come back again? This data can be quantified using terms like retention, engagement and bounce rates. You need to weed out those who never return, those who accidentally landed on your site and it is important to know whether your readers actually enjoy what you post.
What is Engagement and Retention?
There are two main metrics you should focus on: Engagement Rates and Retention Rates. They are connected to one another, and if the engagement rate is higher, the retention rate is usually higher. Engagement Rate looks at how much a visitor engages with your site (Clicking on links, reading other articles, sharing, etc). Retention rates look at the time after the visitor’s session, and observe if and how often they come back.
A viewer would engage with a site if they find it interesting, and naturally, if they enjoy it, they will keep coming back. Therein lies the connection.
There’s no point in bringing in new visitors if they don’t keep coming back and eventually opt for your products/services. You need to increase customer retention, and as Michael C. Scott said in The Office:—that it costs more to bring in a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. Therefore, you can see how important customer engagement and retention are to your website’s – and business’s – success.
How to Engage Viewers on your Websites
Engagement is defined by your engagement parameters and goals, and simpler goals mean ensure engagement. The complicated goals are the polar opposite, and are more difficult. But we have found a way to meet both types of goals:
Easy Engagement
Let the goal be for the reader to visit another page on the site, and generally explore the website. This can be done with a combination of great content and hyperlinking to other articles. These other articles should come in naturally, and should be relevanr, leading them to be more successful. You need to create a need to click on the link. For example, you have some useful information. All you need to do is to link it, and the reader is almost guaranteed to click on it.
Harder Engagement
The more complicated engagement goals are usually the more worthwhile. An example maybe getting your reader’s email, and as you know, it would be a complicated endeavour, since many are afraid of spam. Here, you need to be more clever, and need to tie a reward for the reader with the information you want. If they need an eBook, they need to provide their Email, as simple as that. That’s just an example, as you can be creative in getting them to hand over their emails.
Readers may also like to engage on Social Media, and that’s why you need to focus on these channels too. However, the base techniques for making your content more engaging are same across all mediums.
How to Retain Customers Visiting Your Website:
1. Make your content smart (or just plain funny).
2. Make it different.
3. Make it mobile-friendly.
4. Make it readable.
5. Make it emotional.
6. Make it human.
7. Know your readers.
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