Everyone knows how hard it is to attract visitors to your site. In previous Business Learning Center articles, we’ve discussed how to get visitors through search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (pay per click).

But getting visitors to come to your site is only the first step. Once they’ve arrived, it is your job to keep them on the site for as long as possible and then to encourage visitors to keep coming back again and again. This is the essence of what is called stickiness.

What are the key elements of a sticky website?

Fresh Content

This may seem obvious, but there are many sites where the content rarely, if ever changes. While a beautiful design or a great story may attract visitors once or twice, it soon becomes boring and the visitor is lost to you forever.

• Make sure you rotate your featured products on a regular basis (for e-commerce web sites)
• Make sure you rotate images and video on a regular basis
• Write articles related to the interests of your target market
• Link to articles related to the interests of your target market

WebMD.com is constantly adding new content to keep loyal visitors coming back for more.

Blogs

A well-written, informative, and entertaining blog can be a magnet for visitors. Like a favorite columnist in a newspaper, your blog can be a destination spot for loyal readers.

Your blog can serve several purposes:

• It puts a human face on your company
• You can provide truly useful information- the kind that builds trust and brand loyalty
• You can provide information not directly to your business but of interest to your visitors

A blog requires a real commitment. Unless you update frequently (at least weekly), you will lose your audience. If you blog effectively, the time invested will be well worth the effort.

Blue Fountain Media uses the BFM Blog to attract visitors, tell them about our business and provide information that is truly useful for individuals interested in enhancing their web presence.

They will anxiously return to your blog expecting fresh articles on a regular basis and you must deliver on this promise. Visitors will soon grow impatient with a blog that isn’t updated on at least a weekly basis.

For more details on effective blogging for businesses, READ THIS.

Practical Resources

Visitors to sites appreciate information they can use. By providing practical information to visitors, businesses reap myriad rewards:

• It helps to brand the business as a source of great information
• It can  help turn visitors into customers by funneling the visitors directly from the information provided to buying opportunities
• The information provided on the site can be picked up by other sites, thus garnering even more traffic to the site and better placement on search engine results (SEO value)

Blue Fountain Media provides such practical information in the Business Learning Center (which you are reading now!).  Another site making great use of resourceful information is The Vitamin Shoppe. They sell vitamins and supplements online, but they also provide practical medical and health information to their visitors:

The Vitamin Shoppe provides practical medical and health information to their visitors

If you don’t have the expertise or resources to create your own resourceful information, a great idea is to provide either “Industry News” or “In the News” areas on your website. Here, visitors can link to information that addresses their specific interests. While this may seem like a detour from your site, it shows your visitors that you are looking out for their interests and makes them more loyal to you.

User-Generated Content

A great way to engage visitors is to encourage user-generated content. This can come in many forms:

• Discussion boards
• Guest blogs
• Reviews
• Photo sharing
• Testimonials

Not only does user-generated content increase stickiness, it can be a terrific tool for customer service. By listening to your visitors, you can learn about your strengths and weaknesses.

Obviously, not all of these are appropriate for every business.

Polls, Quizzes and Surveys

For whatever reason, people love polls and surveys. Everyone wants to let their voice be heard. As with other online content, try to create a poll or survey that relates to the interests of your target audience.

• Entertainment sites have polls on the Oscars
• Sports sites let visitors choose the MVP
• Financial sites ask visitors what their biggest financial concerns are
• News sites ask visitors for their favorite news stories of the week

Facebook uses polls to increase stickiness.

If you have any wonders about the sticky power of polls, just look how Facebook utilizes them to engage their visitors

Personalized Information

If you want to create visitor loyalty, it helps when you make them feel special. By turning visitors into registered users, you can gain valuable information about them and target content specifically to them. Through the use of cookies, you can learn visitor preferences, behavior and history. Armed with that information you can target special offers, discounts and drive them to areas on your site that would be of most interest to them.

Of course, nobody does this better than Amazon.com, which keeps track of your browsing history, your purchase history, and your ratings to create highly personalized recommendations for you.

Increase revenue and brand loyalty with personalization

This kind of personalized treatment leads to both brand loyalty and increased revenues

Social Media

The likelihood is that your visitors are well ensconced in the social media world. They Tweet, they have Facebook pages and are truly LinkedIn. Every business should be similarly tied into the social media network. And just like user-generated content on the site itself, it provides an excellent opportunity for customer service and reputation monitoring.

A great way to leverage this audience is to have your social media outlets easily accessible on your site. A live Twitter feed, for example, is a great way of showing your visitors who’s talking about you at any given moment. More importantly, it keeps them on your site!

In Conclusion

Attracting visitors to your website, getting them to stay and convincing them to return are a huge challenge.  By providing your visitors with a host of sticky features you give them reasons to be loyal. Repeat visitors turn into prospects and prospects turn into customers/clients.

At Blue Fountain Media, we work with our clients to make their sites as sticky as possible. Using web metrics and analytics, we can demonstrate quickly to clients how new features and content on their sites translate into more page views, longer time spent on the site and more repeat visitors. If you are interested in discussing stickiness or any other web design or online marketing issues, please contact us at 212.260.1978.

As part of my work, I spend countless hours looking at websites developed by other companies. There are many websites I greatly admire, but the vast majority of the sites I’ve looked at have major issues with navigation, design and content.

These aren’t mere cosmetic issues. These problems lead to poor traffic, high bounce rates and a major loss of revenue.

Every website designed by Blue Fountain Media is built with these ideas in mind:

• Clear Messaging
• Clear Calls to Action
• “Stickiness”- Content that is both useful and compelling

Web 1.0 versus Web 2.0

When a user comes to your site, you have less than 3 seconds to get your message across. Unless you make it worthwhile to stay, visitors are a mere click away from leaving your site… forever.

When businesses first started going online, their online strategies were mere extensions of their offline marketing strategies. The websites were essentially online billboards or brochures. Companies felt like they could simply deliver their message to an online audience and the audience would buy their products. This was the essence of Web 1.0.

Today, successful websites are the ones that focus on the user experience. They are the ones that:

• Give visitors value
• Relevant information
• Entertainment
• Special offers
• Provide clear calls to action
• Make it simple for them to transact business

This is what Web 2.0 is all about. Your visitors come to you with a problem or need… and you solve it for them.

To illustrate this, I’d like to compare two websites: Anthonys.com and Amerifit.com. Both are ecommerce web sites, but they go about their messaging in very different ways.

Amerifit.com

According to their website, “Amerifit Brands is a privately owned, consumer health and wellness company that develops, markets and distributes branded products that support natural wellness.”

When you go to their homepage, though, this essential message never gets across. The centerpiece of their homepage is a rotating illustration with this message “Committed to improving the lives of our consumers through innovative and effective products.”

What does this mean? What kind of products? Why am I visiting this site?

Under the three second rule, the vast majority of visitors are gone long before they get the answers to any of these questions.

The homepage then provides tiny product illustrations with even tinier descriptions. The four products illustrated are: Estroven, Azo, Culturelle and Cardistat. What are those products?

It takes way too much work for the visitor to get the answer to these questions.

Take a look at their home page for yourself:

Problems and Problem Solving

Visitors to this site come because they have health concerns and they want those concerns addressed. This site clearly fails to do that.

The home page needs to have clear titles and messaging that quickly shows visitors that you have the solution to their problems.

Rather than just showing a box o Estrogen, you should have- in large readable text:

• MENOPAUSE SYMPTONS? TAKE ESTROGEN
• URINARY TRACT INFECTION? TAKE AZO
• DIGESTIVE DISTRESS? TAKE CULTURELLE

Another huge mistake made by Amerifit is that the homepage offers no practical information and nowhere to go for such information. When people have health issues, they want detailed information on their condition. Nothing on the home page indicates that such information is provided anywhere on the site.

A great way to get more traffic and more sales is to give visitors the opportunity to share the information from the site with their friends. Amerifit.com offers no such “viral marketing” opportunities.

To make matters worse, when you click on one of the featured products, you go to an entirely different site. To get back to the Amerifit.com home page, you have to use the back button.

Amerifit’s products may be terrific, they may deliver on their promises, but the poor messaging on their website will result in poor branding, reduced traffic to the site, high bounce rates and depressed sales.

Anthony.com

In stark contrast to Amerifit.com, Anthony.com- an upscale men’s skin care company- delivers clear messaging, useful information and forceful calls to action.

As you can see below, products and product categories are clearly presented. Calls to action are prominent and all messaging is short, sweet and to the point.

The home page navigation is not only simple, it funnels visitors quickly and effectively to the site’s ecommerce functions. When you go to “Our Products” and click on “Shave” this is where you are directed:

As you can see, you are on a shopping page that not only makes buying simple; it also offers practical advice (“The Perfect Shave”) which also serves to funnel visitors to more buying opportunities. This kind of practical information keeps visitors on the site and keeps them coming back again and again.

Other key user-friendly features on Anthony.com include:

• Great customer service through “Live Chat”
• A “Grooming Guide” tutorial
• A store locator
• Special gift packages
• E-Gift Certificates
• Social Media links (Twitter and Facebook)
• “Recommend to a Friend” link

Since Blue Fountain Media redesigned the Anthony.com site will all of the above functionality and features, traffic on the site has gone way up, visitors to the site stay longer and, most importantly, sales have increased substantially.

In Conclusion

The best websites are the ones that best serve the user’s needs. Businesses that fail to keep that in mind get exactly what they deserve: poor branding, poor traffic and poor sales. Blue Fountain Media has designed, developed and marketed successful website for businesses in a wide variety of industries. To discuss your business’ online strategies, please give us a call at 212.260.1978.