Getting people to interact with your website

Allowing visitors to your website to get involved, add content or comment can be an effective way to keep them on your website, and to feel that they can ‘get involved’ with your business, products, services or brand.

Here are some suggestions of ways to encourage engagement from your visitors, but of course, please feel free add your own ideas/tips in the comments box below!

Adding blog comments

A blog is a great way to keep your website fresh, and keep people visiting regularly, if you offer them the option to add comments to a your blog, you can give your visitors a voice, a chance to give you feedback. You can have the option of moderating comments before they appear if you have concerns about what people might post.

Add extra relevant visual content like photos or video

You could give visitors the opportunity to add photos or video content of their own, that is relevant to the subject of your site. It could be photos of an event you held, from the viewpoint of the visitors, or videos customers have created of them using your products. This kind of content is sometimes used for competitions, where they enter a video or image of their own.

Add a review

Give your visitors opportunity to review your products in words, or star-ratings, they are used increasingly on shop websites and not only offer interaction, but a rich resource for potential customers.

Like

Facebook users, of which there are millions, are used to the idea of clicking a ‘like’ button on things they, well…like and this is being used increasingly on other websites. You can have an individual like system on your site or you can have a facebook like button integrated so that visitors can automatically like your site and your facebook business page at once.

Allowing visitors to easily share content is huge and varied now. You can have an addition to your websites page, products or blog posts that allows people to share the information on lots of different social media sites as well as via email.

Online suggestion box

The old-school suggestion box, with a contemporary twist. You could enable visitors to make suggestions to additional products, services, features or functions for your business. Gain precious market feedback, as well as engaging your customers, and showing you are open and progressive. Again you could add in moderation, so you can approve or decline suggestions before they appear on the site.

User-generated sales

Web users increasingly use customer reviews, so in addition you could add customer suggestions for example …’I wore these boots with the black dress for an formal dinner party’ it has the potential to enable customers to sell, and even up sell for you, gain customer loyality and offer a great extra service for new visitors.

Personalising the look of the site

Quite often used for accessibility purposes its possible to allow visitors to personalise the way they view the site. They could change size of elements they see on screen, such as text and images, change background or font colours, or more, giving them a more tailored experience to suit their needs or preferences.

If you’d like more tips or suggestions on encouraging interaction on your website, contact us for a free web design consultation in Chester or a Skype consultation outside of Chester.