The way to wow potential customers who come to your website, and convince them to connect with you, is to captivate their attention by embracing the twin concepts of engagement and interactivity.
Let’s face it, a passive, boring brochure website is hardly a turn-on. It’s like staring at a shop window with a static, uninspiring display. Most of us will just turn away after a quick glance and walk on, looking for a more dynamic, compelling experience to explore more deeply.
It’s in your interests to make sure your website is engaging for visitors, because you need them to enjoy their stopover enough to become paying customers, and to return regularly to see what you’re up to and what other goods or services you can tempt them to invest in.
The Ingredients for an Engaging Website
A website is engaging when it combines functionality with aesthetics and user experience. Key elements of an engaging website include clear calls to action, visually appealing design, easy navigation and interactive features.
Most of those elements come as standard with a professionally designed small business website – certainly those created at specialised agencies like Dentons Digital in Westbury, Wiltshire.
The design of a website has a huge impact on creating an enjoyable, intuitive and efficient user experience, so design is the first line to cross in the quest to produce an engaging website. Everything from the website’s colour scheme and image placement to its technical performance on matters such page load speed gel together to encourage users to enjoy and explore its content.
Succeeding with engaging website design is down to best practice and expertise. Engagement can certainly be given impetus by adding in interactive content and components that can get your website buzzing like a vibrant marketplace.
Types of Engaging Interactive Website Content
Blocks of text, and even static images (particularly stock images) just don’t cut it when it comes to stopping today’s world weary website wanderers in their tracks. They want action, adventure and challenges they can immerse themselves in to grab their attention. They are looking to get information quickly in an easy to digest format, and wanting to learn everything they can about your business, products and services dynamically and effortlessly.
If your content is enjoyable, memorable and interactive website visitors will gain a great impression of your business and be encouraged to convert into customers.
Here are some types of Interactive content you could consider incorporating in your website to involve your audience and enhance engagement:
- Quizzes & Polls – fantastic ways to capture attention and gather valuable insights into your audience’s preferences, while having a bit of fun.
- Interactive infographics that allow users to explore data layers, hover over elements for more information, and uncover insights at their own pace.
- 360 degree Product Views and Virtual Tours are excellent for e-commerce businesses to bridge the gap between online and offline, allowing customers to virtually examine products from all angles, or take a virtual walk through your showroom.
- Interactive maps to help people find your physical business location (or nearest branch), explore your service areas or get directions.
- Calculators and configurators are popular ways of providing added value for users, and to keep them engaged. Examples are mortgage calculators for an estate agent, product configurators for a furniture outlet or ROI calculator for a marketing agency.
- Comment sections on blog posts and product pages foster a sense of community and connection. Make sure you respond to create dialogue, and show your value your audience’s input.
- Provide real-time support by including a live chat facility, to significantly enhance user experience.
- Integrate your social media channels into your website by way of live feeds or embedded share buttons to encourage visitors to connect with you.
- Host contests and giveaways that require user participation, like submitting photos or answering trivia questions.
- Introduce a sense of challenge with badges, progress bars or loyalty rewards to entice and entertain users.
Avoid Interactive Overload
While interactive elements can provide many benefits for user engagement, there’s a fine line between engaging and annoying your website visitors.
Too many interactive elements can be chaotic and overwhelming, distracting visitors from focusing on your core content and the purpose of your website.
Lots of movement and “in your face” interactive features can also give your site an amateurish, poorly designed look that is off-putting to users.
Most of all though too many complex interactive elements can add to the website’s load time and negatively impact its overall performance, leading to frustration for users.
We suggest you use interactive elements strategically and sparingly, always keeping the focus on enhancing user experience and achieving specific goals.
Here’s some tips for how to use interactive elements to engage website visitors:
- Prioritise user needs
Before implementing interactive elements, consider what your users need and how they can enhance their experience. Don’t just add fancy features just for the sake of having them. - Use Micro-interactions
Interactivity can be effective even when used on a small scale. Use subtle elements like button hovers, scroll-triggered animations or reactive effects sparingly so as to not overwhelm the user. - Test & Optimise
Regularly test your website’s interactive elements to make sure they are working properly and not negatively impacting user experience. - Focus on Quality over Quantity
A few impactful and creative quality interactive elements will enhance user experience more than flooding your website with a bucketload of them.
If you believe your website could do with an interactive boost to make it more engaging and therefore more likely to retain and convert site visitors, it is wise to seek professional advice. Our team at Dentons Digital have been designing and building websites for local small businesses for years, so we know what works. We’ll know what type, and how much, interactivity your site can benefit from, so contact us for a free website survey today.
