If you’re reading this article, it might mean that you’ve managed to entice your target audience to visit your website—which is a significant achievement. Now that they’ve arrived at your site, your next challenge is getting them to visit multiple pages, spend time reading them, spend money on your products or services, and keep coming back for more. So, how do you ensure engaged, repeat traffic that grows your audience? Learn more below about engaging your audience and creating repeat visitors.
What happens when audiences are engaged?
You hear a lot about audience engagement in the world of ecommerce, but what is an engaged audience and how do you measure it? Put simply, an engaged audience means that the people who visit your website carry out the following types of behaviors:
They spend a longer-than-average time on the pages they visit. Keep in mind that some people leave their browsers open, which may skew this number.
They visit multiple pages on the site during a single session, clicking between internal links on your pages as they become more interested in what your brand has to offer.
They share your content on their own social media. That said, people who share without clicking links might not be considered engaged, so cross-reference to make sure they have definitely visited the site themselves.
They come back and visit the same pages on multiple occasions, because they like what it has to say and are probably at the consideration phase of the customer journey.
They don’t click away from your website before viewing other pages—this is what’s known as a low bounce rate.
When all of these audience behaviors take place, it means that you are in the process of turning followers into fans and fans into loyal customers—which is precisely what you should be aiming for.
Keeping website visitors engaged
There are a number of techniques you can use to encourage audience engagement. It all starts with making sure your website is filled with high quality content. That includes not only what you publish on your website, but also the format and how well it’s crafted.
An engaging website will make use of elements like:
Landing pages. These encourage visitors to either click through or sign up; both are evidence of audience engagement.
Calls-to-action (CTAs) and clickable menus and buttons. Make it easy for your visitors to navigate from one page to another to improve their User Experience (UX).
Internal links. Giving visitors multiple opportunities to click around your website encourages deeper investigation, which demonstrates engagement with your brand.
Varied content types. Some of your visitors might prefer videos to blog posts, whereas others might prefer podcast feeds or a combination of different types of content. Give people multiple reasons to stay on your website.
Balanced depth of content. A busy professional might not have time to read a 1,500-word blog post and may prefer a bite-sized read to a deep dive, while the opposite might be true for someone with more free time.
It’s also important to maintain the performance of your website by ensuring any images you upload are the right file sizes. Websites developed using Squarespace are built with responsive design, which means your photos will be automatically resized for optimization across different types of devices.
Making sure visitors return to your site
A key indicator of an engaged audience is when they come back to your site on multiple occasions.
If they return to the same page, that’s excellent because it tells you there’s something of value for your target audience there. Repeat visits from the same person to different pages, however, is also an indicator that your content is high quality. You can glean the latter from the unique visitor statistics in your website analytics tools.
You can encourage people to visit your website in a number of ways, including:
Email updates or a newsletter. After collecting subscribers with a promotional pop-up or newsletter block, send email updates—or even a newsletter—to prompt previous visitors to return.
Social media. Encourage your social media visitors to follow you so that they are able to see what you’re posting, and give them multiple, regular, and ongoing reasons to visit your site.
Automated emails. Create emails in advance that can be triggered to send when a visitor makes a purchase or signs up for a mailing list. Make sure to include a CTA that encourages further visits to your site.
Personalized notes. If you want to develop a stronger connection with your customers, you can add personalized notes to automated order confirmations. Or to build anticipation and get customers checking on your site regularly, you might want to set up waitlists for your forthcoming products or services.
Looking for more tips on developing your audience? Take a look at our How to Build an Audience guide.