Enrich Your Website’s Customer Experience with Interactive Features
Enrich Your Website’s Customer Experience with Interactive Features
Brands in every industry are “upping the ante” to get customers to lean forward and fully engage while browsing their website. Making your website more interactive provides a more memorable experience and invites your customers and prospects to be more active in the community. Your organization will be rewarded with a more loyal customer base that enjoys browsing your site again and again.
Read on to learn how you can engage your website’s visitors with a more interactive experience!
1. Employ User Experience Design Methodology
While it may sound basic, the foundation for getting users to engage starts with the design of your website. Start thinking about User Experience by interviewing various customers to put together an idea of what they want and need when they visit your website. How can you entertain them while still helping them get the information they need in the most efficient way possible? Map out the various scenarios of your users with a wireframe and design the site to ensure an enjoyable experience for all. Additionally, make sure you use a web content management system that enable mobile-friendly design, so you don't lose potential customers because of a poor mobile website experience!
2. Promote Website Visitor Participation
Brand advocates today want their actions to have an impact on the products and services they love. What would give them more pride and passion to promote you than to feel like they’ve had an impact on your progress? Websites that welcome visitors to interact are shown to keep people on the website longer (longer session durations) and have lower bounce rates.
Try utilizing features like 24/7 chat services, social media, and surveys, questionnaires and quizzes to both entertain website visitors and potentially capture more data to use when optimizing your conversion rates.
3. Personalize the Customer Experience
Not only does personalizing content enable you to deliver relevant content faster, but it allows you to accurately predict and respond to customer needs to be sure that your business stays top-of-mind. The sky is the limit when it comes to the ability to personalize your website visitors’ experiences, so start by thinking about what you’d like to accomplish and then find a way to make it happen.
You can segment users into groups based on their geographical location or referring sites, use page variants to target your content to specific user segments, and use their past behavior history to curate and recommend content relevant to their interests.
4. Add Interactive Features
Do you want to know how to increase visitor engagement? Get them involved in activities on your website with things like gamification (rewards, points, leaderboards), calculators, reports and tests. For example, some mortgage companies will offer calculators showing what a typical mortgage payment would be after the visitor inputs variable according to their income and personal data. According to Kapost, interactive content generates two times more conversions than passive content – so get creative!
5. Solicit Feedback and Reviews
Today’s consumers favor shopping online more than visiting retain stores. This gives them the ability to leisurely research products, and possibly save money by comparing products from different brands. According to Pew Research, 79% percent of shopping in America is done online. Additionally, 97% of shoppers consult online reviews before making a first-time purchase (up from 22% in 2000), according to Techcrunch. It is because of this that online reviews are more important than ever, since most consumers use reviews and customer feedback to validate their product selections.
Set up a Google My Business page (it’s free) or create a dedicated page on your website for reviews and testimonials. You can also create a space for reviews on each product page, making them that much easier to find when it comes time for a customer to add an item to their shopping cart. Finally, make it easy to post reviews by emailing customers with links to do so. You can even offer incentives for completing product reviews, such as a discount on future purchases.
Developing a more interactive website should be an integral part of your online marketing strategy. There are many ways to make your site more interactive – just be sure to select the methods that are most appropriate and relevant for your industry, and don’t be afraid to ‘think outside the box’ to stand out among your competitors. If done correctly, your efforts will result in a higher percentage of return visitors, longer visit durations, less bounces and an increase in leads and conversions!
Ready to improve your customer experience? Get started with this whitepaper!
