Want more affiliate sales, email subscribers and loyal readers? Make people stay on your website for LONGER. Easier said than done though, right?

If you’re battling with high bounce rate (which is when people leave your website soon after they land on it) you may want to make a few changes both in your website layout, as well as user experience and content. Today, we’re talking about how you can make users want to stay on your website, keep browsing and interacting with your content and view your products and services + eventually buy.

 

Why do you want them to stay anyway?

See, people need to be exposed to your call to action (like email opt-in or product) around 7-13 times before they purchase. They also need to TRUST you before they buy anything.  That’s why we don’t want them to leave your website 3 seconds after they landed on it. It’s not enough time for you to make them either trust you, nor see CTA’s 13 times. So what we can do is think of ways to keep them browsing, scrolling down and clicking through. This in turn will give you enough time to turn them from visitors, to customers and clients.

 

Clarity first

If we helped you win with your high bounce rate, we’d start with strategy (as we always do). We’d need to make sure you understand your ideal audience well and you know what interests them. Otherwise, none of the design tricks or features on your website won’t work.  So before you scroll down to read this post, start with Brand Clarity and figuring out all of that, okay?

[et_bloom_inline optin_id=optin_12]

 

 

Great content always

That goes without saying, but we will say it again: great content is king. Nobody will want to browse your website if they can’t find what interests them there. If they can learn something new, fix some of their problems or be inspired by your content, they will stay for longer and those design tricks we’re talking about later will be a great way of helping them do that without getting annoyed by technology.

SMART DESIGN

First of all, your website needs to load fast and be responsive. With short attention span, information overload and lack of time, nobody will bother to wait 15 seconds until they can see your content, or search for what it is that you do through all the fluff. Be concise and get rid of copy you don’t really need. Make your website only contain the most important info plus your main calls to action and leave all the rest for the sales page and blog posts. Remember: you only have up to 4 seconds to grab the user’s attention. Within those 4 seconds, they might be able to see your header and maybe scroll a little bit past it. Make sure all the important stuff are there in an easy to consume version.

NO POP-UPS, PLEASE

On mobile, that is. Nothing makes people leave your site quicker than a popup showing split second after the website had even loaded. Not only do they often take more space than the screen making it impossible to close them, but most of all: your users are NOT ready for them just yet.  You wouldn’t shove your business card into person’s pocket before you said hello, wouldn’t you? Same here. Let’s give them some time to browse around before we start pushing our offers, okay?

ROLLING POSTS

This feature is PERFECT if you blog for business, or if blog is your business. What it does, it that it automatically loads next post as soon as you’re at the bottom of the current one. It makes you want to read the next post and guess what: it’s makes it easy. You only need to keep scrolling to consume the content (and be explosed to all the sexy email opt-ins and calls to actions along the way).

NEXT POST POP-UP

If you use rolling post together with this feature, you got yourself a really good way of keeping people browsing! When you scroll down while reading the post, you’ll see this small pop up showing in the right-bottom corner of the browser, inviting you to read the next post. It will then disappear when the next one loads and show again when you’re at around 60% of the post length. We think it’s a really cool, modern way of making it easier for users to read your content.

RELATED POSTS

If you don’t have a bespoke website just yet, this feature is something you can implement on your website one of WordPress plugins, like Jetpack. It will show posts users might be interested in right below the current post.

The rolling posts feature we did for Shannon Willardson of For the Love.

Keep them coming back

We want loyal readers, users that come back and buy from us over and over again, don’t we? Start the conversation by inviting them to our email list and nurturing your relationship with them there.  You can keep serving them new, interesting content and making sure they remember your brand and come back to your website over and over again.  Remember to personalise your content by user’s interests using tagging, segmenting and automation, so you only send out emails that get opened and are welcomed.

 

Wrapping up

Each website is different and will definitely need a different treatment. If you’re a blogger you will surely need different solutions than someone who sells online courses or jewellery, but those few ways we presented here can work wonders for everyone. Tell us in the comments: have you tried increasing the time users spend on your website? If so, what did you do and how did it go? We’re dying to know!