Businesses tend to think of their websites as a corporate brochure. A place for visitors to come read about their company, products and services and leave behind some contact information just in case they might be interested in what’s on offer. There may still be some amount of budget invested towards drawing traffic towards their website and once that’s done, focus shifts off the website to other areas. Is that really making the most of a business website? It can be a lot more than a corporate brochure!
Several companies think “well…we’ve got the traffic on our website, we have a whole lot of information for those who may be interested in what we have, why isn’t all this translating into new business for us?” Traffic statistics can be quite misleading on business websites. Knowing you have 8000 visitors and 14,000 page views on your website is half the story. Knowing how long those visitors spend on the website will give you a better understanding of just how much content on your website is actually getting consumed by those visitors. The “bounce rate” and “average time spent” are great indicators of how sticky your website is for visitors. It tells you how many of your visitors really spend time on your site, how many return and how many simply land on one of your pages for a few seconds and leave before absorbing any message from your site. If you have a very high bounce rate and less average time spent, it probably means your website doesn’t provide enough incentive for visitors to stay there.
Social networking features built into a business website with technology platforms such as Communifire can be the hook to grab visitors and keep them on the website. Social networking sites are sticky and great at being able to retain visitors simply because they encourage visitors to communicate, interact, and invoke action from them rather than simply providing a message and allowing them to move on. Discussion forums, blogs, commenting, videos and instant messaging are all features that keep you on a website. Don’t agree? Think of the top 5 websites where you spend time as an Internet user and see if they incorporate features like this. The point is, almost any business (large or small) can incorporate these features into their website and create the incentive for visitors to spend longer on their sites.
For example, consider a chain of musical instrument stores who have a business website designed along the lines of a standard corporate website. Most visitors are more likely to read a page or two and move on quickly if at all they do take the time. Now, consider the same company has designed their website to include some of the trappings of social networking such as a discussion group for users to talk about and exchange views on the latest signature series guitars, exchange tips on how to how to improve drumming skills and so on. That’s an incentive for potential customers to keep coming back to the website and spending more time there. It helps build a social community around the business and most importantly, it makes the website sticky.
Any business can achieve this by looking for the right components to build into their sites. There are a lot of lessons one can apply from social networking sites — which we’ll discuss in upcoming posts.
What can you do to make you business website stickier? — And better yet… What are you doing to make your business website stickier?
We’d love to get some ideas and feedback, just simply post them as comments below.
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Well said Tim. We at Healthizen.com have used YAF (Yet another Forum) to engage our users. How can we replace it with communifire? Our site is ASP.NET 2 based.