Five Ways to Improve Customer Engagement on Your Website

Customers come to websites with high levels of expectation, and low levels of patience. They now expect to be immediately drawn into engaging, interactive content when they visit a website, and if they don't find it, they leave promptly.

Recent studies have shown that more than 70 percent of site visitors will leave a site within one to two minutes if they don't find the products they're looking for, 36 percent of which won't ever bother returning to that site.  Here according AJ Harring president of EPiServer U.S. are the top five ways to build a website that succeeds in engaging customers.

Get social: Site visitors don't just want to read content – they want to add content themselves, or connect with other visitors. They want get involved in websites where they can create information, share their know-how, and even add their own photos and videos where relevant.

This embrace of social networking puts pressure on site owners to add features that help create community and encourage visitors to participate. Make it easy for visitors to debate each other in online forums, to set up blogs, or to talk to each other via chat and webmail. Competitions and polls can also encourage visitors to take an active role in your site, as can the ability to rate and tag certain features.

Get personal: Customers love to return to websites that "remember" who they are. When a site stores their shopping preferences, or displays that last five products they've viewed, or makes it easy to see what they've ordered in the past, that's a site that visitors want to come back to again and again. Likewise, from a marketer's perspective, the ability to target customers based on personal preferences and activity on your site can be key to reaching them at the right time with the right message.

Make it rich: Video and other image material have proven immensely popular with website visitors, as you can see from a cursory glance at any news website. And it's a dramatic way to showcase your company messages or show off products.  For a website to be alive and attractive to the visitor, images, such as Flash presentations and video, should be used in different ways. The ability to create, store, publish, and update these images easily is an important factor in ensuring your message is always compelling, updated, and alive.

Measure twice: Even if you put into place all of the above site enhancements, you won't know if they are achieving the desired impact unless you measure results and get a view into site metrics. A good web content management system should provide you with the tools you need to instantly determine how online campaigns are performing and adapt those campaigns in real-time to ensure the desired ROI is achieved. This measurement capability should encompass data from more than just your own website, such as data gleaned from your presence on social sites and online communities. To do this, your web content management system should offer a dashboard that can be configured for differing roles in the organization – whether content owner, editor, or web developer – where they can see a streamlined view of the collection and analysis of metrics from across web channels.

Adapt fast: Customers' tastes and preferences will change rapidly, and you need to respond quickly to drop the site features they don't use, and add more of the features they enjoy. Site metrics will help guide adjustments to site structure and content. Make sure your content management system has an easy-to-use editorial interface that lets business users make these changes – you don't want to enlist the help of IT every time you need to add a social networking feature or new video to the site.

Many marketers spend a great deal of money and time working toward the ultimate goal of driving traffic to their sites. Yet, once that traffic arrives, they may not pay as much attention to the reaction each visitor has on that site or to their level of engagement. To reap the desired returns from their online strategies, companies must ensure they are creating a truly engaging, one-to-one experience for each and every customer.  This can be achieved with much less effort and cost than it takes to drive site traffic, but can make all of the difference in improving customer service, increasing sales conversions, and building a reputable brand.