How to Keep visitors on your website
Web site’s ability to keep visitors on site, or to its success in encouraging visitors to come back repeatedly called website stickiness.
When talking about Web site stickiness, marketers are referring to a Web site’s ability to keep visitors on site, or to its success in encouraging visitors to come back repeatedly. A successful sticky marketing campaign uses a number of techniques designed to get visitors to ’stick’ to the site.
Here are some of the tips that may help make your Web site sticky or even stickier:
Content
Introduce appealing content to your Web site. It doesn’t have to be directly related to the reason visitors originally come to your site, but it may encourage them to come back again. Here are some ideas for content you might like for your Web site:
- Newsletters and articles
- Tutorials and frequently asked questions
- Glossaries
- A calendar of upcoming events
- Daily weather reports and stock quotes
- Location maps
- Thoughts for the day and favourite quotes
- Feedback mechanisms — forms, blogs, forums
- Free fun (viral) stuff like competitions, postcards, video clips and games
Bookmakrs
Make it easy for a visitor to find the pages that particularly interested them, by adding a bookmark button to the page. Bookmarked pages can be easily stored and then retrieved by visitors from their Web browser (i.e. Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox) as their own favourites or bookmarks.
Send to Friend
Add a ‘Send to a Friend’ button to your Web pages. If people value your content, they may end up encouraging new visitors to come to your site for you.
Print Page
Make your content accessible in print. It’s a very handy function for features such as maps and tutorials.
Site Search
If your content pages or ’sticky’ resources are becoming reasonably extensive, consider adding a site search function, so it becomes easier for site visitors to retrieve information.
Site Map
Include links to every Web page on your site map - it serves as an index for site visitors and search engines.
Special Future
Focus on adding special features to your site that sets your Web site apart from your competition’s. Have a look at what they are or are not doing.
If you want even more inspiration and ideas for developing your sticky marketing, browse around online and start noting down what you particularly like about some of your favourite sites. Remember, the longer your site visitors stay on your site, the longer they are exposed to your company’s products or services. At ASF Design Inc we have more sticky Web marketing ideas than you can shake a stick at!
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