Last time, we learnt about bounce rate with a precise definition as well as how bounce rate happens on your e-commerce website. Let’s move on with the second part and the last things about bounce rate: How to reduce bounce rate with some effective optimizations. Making visitors stay or comeback for you doesn’t seem so hard if you know how and put sincere effort into doing it.
At first, let’s make things load faster
Make your website load faster
Be it the whole page, an image slider or some nice effect transitions, etc. – make sure they load in an instance. If you can’t do so, considering using another way to convey your message without holding the loading speed back. One of the most irritating things for Internet users is snail-like loading speed. Waiting for the content to load is so exhausting that it might even turn users into stone covered in spider webs before knowing what the heck your site is about.
Loading speed is also one of the main factors that affect your site visitor’s first impression. So, when going online with an e-commerce website, make sure you test the loading speed with tools like Pingdom or Google Speed Insights.
Then, make things crystal clear to understand
Make things clear to understand
What is your website all about?
What do you want visitors to know when they visit your site?
What do you want them to do next after landing on your site?
Make all these as clear and as actionable as possible. To achieve this, you need to be sure that the design and content of your website doesn’t get in a fight. Base on your brand’s message and how you want to present your brand in the eyes of customers, choose the right design for it – it could be a minimal, a flat design or realism one…it doesn’t matter as long as the design supports how you want others to perceive about you.
Also, don’t confuse visitors with too many call-to-actions in one single page. Define what the main purpose of the page is and add just one call-to-action in that page. For example, if it’s a product detail page, then the main call to action can be “Try Trial” or “Buy now”, etc.
Furthermore, make your site’s navigation easy too. Easy navigation is consistent navigation, in both where and how it appears on your site to help visitors quickly find the information they want. Let your navigation be categorized and clickable. Put the right name for each navigation element too so people will get the idea what it is about. Don’t forget to add a quick Search into navigation pane too.
Make it irresistible to stay or comeback
Make it irresistible to stay or comeback
Add more into your page to make people stay, or at least, remember you and want to come back to your website.
Pick out the pages with high bounce rate and low average time on page (which means the content is not good enough to keep people stay) and nail a better copy for these pages. Go beyond a normal sales/marketing/techie page. Instead, make these pages more appealing with useful content like a manual, customer feedback or a video…so visitors will stay longer or even ready to buy from you.
Plus, you can consider using live chat to hit a good first impression into visitor’s mind. Read this article to get a grab of how you can do this. Always, a dedicated chat invitation at the right time helps to make visitors feel like they’re specially welcome and cared for. Make people like you and they’ll be with you.
Be visible, for the right audience
Many times, you have unwanted guests who land on your page and leave immediately just because your site isn’t really what they’re looking for.
So what to do with them?
Fix your SEO strategy.
Fix your SEO strategy
Choose the right keywords for content on your website. If you have different target audience, you can use different landing page with optimized content as well as keywords for each type.
SEO strategy should be revised and adjusted overtime since the trend for people searching for keywords is constantly changed too. Having your keywords fresh and up-to-dated with the current searching trend helps your website stay relevant to targeted audience. As a result, you are likely to have a lower bounce rate.
One last advice from me is to be sure to be available on as many places as possible. Not just search engine result pages. Put your brand presence on social media or spread it via newsletter, a campaign elsewhere. That’ll help people to remember your brand better and more likely to comeback.
That’s all! Or is it not?
Now you’ve known a plenty of useful ways to kill off, or at least, reduce bounce rate on your website. I hope that I’ve covered enough aspects for you to improve your website’s customer retaining capability. If not, please feel free to add your thoughts in the comment section below!
Related Article: A to Z About Bounce Rate and How to Reduce It On Your E-Commerce Website (Part I)
