Did you know that between 70 and 96 percent percent of people who abandon your website never return?
As a marketer, your number one goal should be to convert those one-time visitors into customers. You can’t achieve this goal if visitors aren’t sticking around to read your content.
The longer your visitors stay on your site, the more engaged they'll be, and the higher the chance for them to convert.
Let’s take a look at a few ways on how to keep people on your website longer.
1. Fulfill your headline’s promise
Getting clicks on your headlines is one thing, but if you want people to stay on your website longer, your content needs to match the title. Don't let your headlines make promises your content doesn't keep.
A click-worthy headline written by the most gifted copywriter won’t do anything for your business if the content doesn’t live up to the hype.
2. Create more scannable content
Did you know that users spend an average of 5.59 seconds looking at a website’s content?
People rarely read your content word for word. Instead, they scan the page to pick out important words and phrases.
If your content is made of long sentences and paragraphs that are hard to scan, no one’s going to stick around to read more. Instead, they’ll leave to find content that’s easier to consume.
Here are a few actionable tips you can follow to make your content more scannable:
Ensure readability: Make sure your font size and line spacing are large enough to read easily, without causing eye strain. Simply increasing the font size and line spacing on your site can often give a quick boost in your engagement metrics.
Break up your content: Posts without visual breaks in the content are hard on the eyes. For maximum scannability, keep your sentences short and most of your paragraphs to three or four sentences at most.
Craft engaging subheadings: Subheadings are powerful tools to keep readers engaged. Not only do they provide a visual break in your content, but a well-crafted subheading can pique the curiosity of a reader, keeping them from losing interest and clicking away.
Use bulleted lists: Lists stand out from the rest of your text and help the reader to scan your content for the important points.
3. Add a call-to-action at the end of each post
The best time to ask your visitors to take action is just after they’ve finished reading a blog post. This is one way of how to keep visitors on your website.
Readers tend to leave your site once they’ve found the information they’re looking for. But with an appropriate call-to-action (CTA), you can give them a reason to stay on your site, or stay in touch via your email newsletter.
But the question is, are your readers noticing that call to action? The problem with a static CTA placed below the content area of your post is that most of your visitors tend to ignore it.
One of the best ways to combat this visitor ignorance is by using a slide-in opt-in. An animated slide-in grabs attention without disturbing your audience.
With an opt-in builder like OptinMonster, you can easily build a slide-in opt-in on the bottom right-hand corner as the user scrolls down your page.
Check out Keap's Lifecycle Automation Assessment to determine where your business stands among the industry's top performers.
4. Customize your thank you pages with helpful content
Once your visitors have engaged with your call to action, they’re more likely to leave your site. This is especially true if your email subscription thank you page doesn’t provide any helpful content to encourage visitors to stay on the site.
Your thank you pages should be more than just a confirmation. They mark the exact moment when a cold visitor becomes a warm lead.
You can seize that opportunity to engage by highlighting relevant, useful content on your site.
For example, Kissmetrics displays several exclusive infographics on their thank you page:
If you’re running an e-commerce business, you can also upsell related products in your thank you page.
Not only does this practice make them more engaged, if done right, you can increase the revenue per customer as well.
5. Use engaging videos
Many of your visitors would rather watch a video rather than read text. More than half of surveyed executives said they’d rather watch a video than read text, and marketers that use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.
Are you giving your visitors that option?
Adding visual content on your site might seem like a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be as tedious as it seems. To create videos, you can simply repurpose your text-based content into presentation videos. For example, in List25, all of the videos are slideshow based narrations that are repurposed from blog posts.
6. Reduce page loading time
One of the essential things you need to do to keep your visitor on your site longer is to reduce the time it takes your site to load.
The best content in the world won’t help your business if your visitors won’t wait for it to load.
Even a 1-second delay in page response can result in a 7 percent reduction in conversions. If you don’t take page speed seriously, chances are you’re leaving money on the table.
There are many steps you can take on your site to reduce the page loading time, but two of the most important are:
Image compression: Your images will have a huge impact on loading time. You can reduce the size by compressing images if they’re unnecessarily large. If you’re on WordPress, you can use a free plugin like WP Smush It.
Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN is a network of multiple servers distributed throughout various locations around the world to reduce the loading time. Your CDN service will cache the files of your site, and deliver the content to your site visitor through a server that is closest to them.
7. Use an exit intent popup
When most visitors who abandon your website never return, that means your marketing efforts are going to waste.
With an exit intent popup, you can detect when your visitor intends to leave your site and prompt them with a targeted campaign to stay engaged.
Exit intent popups are highly effective because they’re attention-grabbing without disturbing your visitors.
Aside from encouraging users to stay on your site, exit intent has proven to reduce shopping cart abandonment and increase overall conversion rate.
Below are a few things you can do with an exit intent popup to keep visitors on your site:
- Invite visitors to chat with a support agent
- Recommend popular blog posts to read
- Offer an irresistible lead magnet in exchange for joining your email list
I hope this article gives you some insights on how to keep your visitors longer on your site. With a bit of due diligence and following these best practices, you can engage those abandoning visitors and convert them into customers.
Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketer. He is the founder of a lead generation software, OptinMonster.
