Website Visitor Retention – Stop Them From Sliding Off

If you keep visitors on the surface of your website, they’re going to slide off.  The job of your website is to lure them into your world.

Tie Together Everything You Do

There are two themes that should tie together everything you do:

• Apply a continuous improvement process to your website (more on this theme in a future blog)

• Once you make all this effort to bring visitors to your world (your website) don’t wake them up.

Don’t Wake Up Your Visitors

What do we mean by waking up your visitor.  Think about a movie, where from the first moment you are completely absorbed; where the only shocking moment is when the lights come up at the end.

Now let’s take the same movie, but the people behind you are talking, the guy two rows down is fiddling with his candy wrapper and people keep walking up and down the aisles and opening the door to the lobby.  Same movie, but you keep getting woken up.

When this happens to us, we sometimes leave the theater if it’s too distracting, or we avoid movie theaters for a while (at least until memory of the bad experience dims).

Now, what happens if it’s just an OK movie – no outside distractions,  but the story is hard to follow, or you can’t understand half the words one of the characters is saying?  If we’re watching it from our TIVO, we’ll just stop the movie and delete it.  No sense wasting time on a movie we’re not enjoying.

Make Them Fall Under Your Spell

The same thing happens on your website.  You want your visitors to enter your website and fall under your spell.  You want that feeling to remain constant as they move through the site.  You wake them up when the content doesn’t match what they came to find.

You startle them when links take them to strange, unexpected places.  You confuse them when what they’re seeing (videos, pictures, or even the overall look and feel of your site) doesn’t reinforce the content.  Any hitch, any hesitation by the visitor, even for only a nanosecond can wake the visitor up and interrupt that good customer experience you’re trying so hard to establish.

Continuous Improvement

Go through your site regularly.  Think about all the ways your visitors will want to find things on your site…can they do it?  Really work your navigation system, your search function and your internal linking.  Fix anything that’s broken.  Use what your learn to tighten up your message, add new products, make the site clearer and more relevant for your visitors.

When you’re using the web (as a visitor/customer), keep a record of sites you especially like and then analyze why.  Use your analysis to make improvements to your own site.

Look at your competitors sites, not as a competitor but as a visitor/customer.  Analyze their strengths and weaknesses.  Anything you could apply to your site?

Think of the changes as part of a continuous improvement project.