With many businesses struggling for visibility online, the goal is always to get as much traffic as possible. But what if you get a lot of visitors and they just leave without interacting with anything?
Developing a bounce rate reduction strategy will help get the most out of your traffic — and convert more of your website visitors.
But what can you and your team do to improve those numbers? We’ve listed 10 tips that will make a difference and help you get more of the visitors you already have. Let’s take a closer look 👇🏼
Conversion rate: Learn the good and bad numbers
First, you need to set your expectations. How do your current numbers compare to other successful websites? What bounce rate can you aim for?
You can read the bounce rate in your analytics tool and rate it based on these values:
- If the bounce rate is over 80%, you have serious retention issues
- Between 70% and 80%: your website is performing poorly and you should act as soon as possible
- If the figure is between 50% and 70%: you are following the average performance of most websites
- 30% to 50% should be your goal because these numbers are considered excellent for a digital marketing strategy
- If the bounce rate is below 20%, you probably have a tracking problem – it is extremely rare to reach such numbers.
You may think that 70% of visitors who bounce is a bad thing, but it’s not. If you’re targeting 30% of your visitors, that’s already more than many traditional marketing strategies with far larger budgets could achieve.
Try to understand why visitors leave so early
To understand this, you could ask yourself the following questions:
- What page do they leave most often? You should be wondering what puts your visitors off.
- Was it the design of their landing page?
- Was there a mismatch between the expectations they set (e.g. on their ads) and what they found in your online store?
- Were the offers not reasonable?
- Perhaps the people you are addressing are not interested in your brand at all?
Every answer you find will give you better insight into what you need to do to improve bounce rate. For this reason, it is important to know your buyer persona and base your strategy on it. (A buyer persona is a user profile representing a target customer.)
Design a better user experience
All of the above questions should drive your team to find elements, tools, and processes that will improve your website experience.
Good UX starts with a fast and well-structured website but goes way beyond that. The sum of visuals, information, and interactions meets and exceeds specific expectations.
Again, you can use your buyer persona as a reference. What do they want when they enter your website? What are you looking for? How can you guide them and even positively surprise them?
Maybe you need to revamp your pages to make them more engaging.
Make sure your website is responsive
As technology advances, so does the variety of screen sizes, input methods, and devices that can access your website.
Many bounces happen when a user enters your website but cannot easily navigate or visualize some of the information. A responsive website is designed to adapt to each of these variations – making sure you don’t lose potential customers to technical issues.
Create some landing pages
One challenge companies stumble upon when working to lower bounce rates is predicting the entry points to your website. It doesn’t matter how perfect your homepage is if most of the traffic comes from a blog article that isn’t optimized for conversions.
Landing pages are a great solution to this problem. They are specifically designed to serve as the best entry point, with attractive layouts and CTAs.
Think about the opportunities you have to create more of these and how you can adjust your marketing strategy to drive your traffic.
Do some A/B testing
If you’re still in doubt about what kind of choices improve UX and bounce rate, why not test them out? In an A/B test, you create two different versions of the same page and set them up to show different visitors when they arrive.
You can then measure which version is better at retaining visitors. You can consolidate the winner or transition from it to another A/B version, constantly improving your numbers.
Use images to captivate faster
We, humans, are visual creatures. Images and photos that are engaging and easy to interpret can grab customers’ attention much faster than any text — sometimes even catchy CTAs.
Invest more in visuals and connect them to the next steps you want your customer to take. You can design a page in such a way that it is really engaging and not just viewed in passing – provided, of course, that it makes sense and resonates with your target audience.
Plan your content marketing better
Content is always a good way to keep visitors on your website. Useful articles, rich material, and relevant data are always worth a longer engagement with your brand.
Use interactive content
There’s no better strategy for getting people online quickly than offering interaction.
When you invest in interactive content, you’re prompting your users to take actions that almost always result in them exploring your site, visiting other pages, and learning more about you.
Some examples are interactive e-books and infographics, lookbooks, and quizzes. These can even be used on your landing pages to build a deeper connection and make them stay longer. Possibilities for interaction often lead to more interactions.
Invest in live experiences
Live blogging and live streaming are great ways to keep visitors interested and drive traffic to your pages.
You can use social media to increase your visibility while embedding the live experience on your website.
Engagement is key: comments, user-generated content, discussions – all can be achieved with the right tool and strategy.
Conclusion
With these kinds of ideas to retain visitors while increasing engagement, the effort to reduce bounce rate is minimal and the benefits are positive for your brand. Start by identifying problems and opportunities and build a healthy relationship with your buyer persona.