Most customer experiences start with an online visit. Is your website fit to turn visitors into happy customers?

A visually appealing website isn’t enough to gain customers. Even an easy-to-navigate site can fall short at turning visitors into customers.

The key: Get customers’ engaged in your website and company, says Gabriel Shaoolian, founder and VP of digital services at Blue Fountain Media. That helps boost their interest in your products and services, and boost conversion rates.

Here are five ways to increase website engagement:

1. Keep the message concise

Remember the KISS principle — Keep it Simple, Stupid. You don’t need to educate customers on every aspect of your products, services and company on frequently hit pages. They can dig deeper for that if they want it.

You only have a few seconds to engage them. Do it with one concise message. Use a large font size (somewhere between 16 and 24) for your one-line, important statement. Then reiterate that message — in smaller form — on your other pages.

Make sure it’s easy to read the copy and use links on mobile devices, too.

2. Call visitors to action

Continue to capture interest by asking visitors to interact more with your website and company. This isn’t an invitation to buy. Instead, it’s an offer of something valuable.

For instance, “View our work,” “Find a location that works for you,” “Make an appointment,” or “See what customers like you have to say about us.” Skip the generic call-to-actions that add no value such as, “Learn more” and “Click here.”

3. Keep it fresh

Most visitors don’t become customers on the first visit. It takes several visits before they’ll buy, researchers found. So you need to give them a reason to want to come back again. Fresh content is the answer.

Keep it fresh with daily updates. Get everyone in the organization to contribute so you have enough content. You can include news and trends pertinent to your industry and customers. Add some fun stuff too — appropriate photos from the company picnic or workplace antics. Also, invite current customers to add to the content. Let them tell stories of how they use your product or how a service has impacted their business or lives.

Promise new, valuable content, and deliver it. Visitors will come back until they buy.

4. Put them on the right page

Not every visitor belongs on your home page. Sure, that gives them an overview of who you are and what you do. But to engage some visitors, you need to get them right to what they want to see.

Where they land depends on how you’re pulling them into your website. Whether you use pay-per-click campaigns, advertisements, social media or focus on search engine optimization (SEO), you want the people you focus on to get to the page that will engage them most.

For instance, if you distribute vehicle parts, and have an ad geared toward SUV drivers, you want them land on an SUV-specific product page — not your home page that streams parts for motorcycles, tractor trailers, sedans and SUVs.

5. Measure it

Like anything in business, you want to measure website traffic and performance to make sure your efforts are — and will be — correctly focused. You can install a tool such as Google Analytics at little or no cost and measure traffic and see what visitors are doing — like learning the pages where visitors linger the most or drop off the most. Then you can optimize.

Copy from Internet Resources