Tips to Make Customers Stay Longer on Your E-commerce Site

The more time your customer or a guest stays on your e-commerce website, the more he/she is engaged in your products and website.

More time means more money. This is very much true in the digital world, especially in e-commerce. Most people think that a successful website is all about page views. Having plenty of visitors to your site is a good thing, and we all want that, but the dwell time, or the amount of time they spent on your website, is equally, if not more, important.

Introduction to Google Analytics

Before we talk about how to keep visitors on your website longer, it is incredibly important that we discuss how to track your visitors first.

Google Analytics is the perfect analytical software to help you track your visitors. We are so lucky that Google is providing us with such a powerful tool for free.

Sign up for Google Analytics and find out exactly how long people are spending on your pages.

Sign up here.

Make Them Stay

As a marketer, your top priority should be to convert those one-time visitors into customers. You can’t achieve this goal if visitors leave your website after a few seconds. In this article, I will give you six handy tricks to make visitors stay on your website for longer:

1. Make the Website Visually Appealing

Whether you like it or not, humans are visual creatures and judge a book by its cover. And that alone is enough reason why you and other business owners should invest time and money in building visually appealing and efficient websites.

Your website is your customer service representative; it is the digital face of your business. A poorly designed website is like a rude, unhelpful customer service rep. A professional-looking website, on the other hand, represents a polite, friendly rep that goes out of his or her way to help customers in any capacity.

As for trust, the concept is similar. Would you invest money in a business located in a dark, back-alley building with cracked windows and trash all over the place? Of course not.

Putting your best web design foot forward is very important in converting your visitor into a customer. A great template is a good start; the rest is about making the image and color choices that will really add up to a beautiful design.

2. Make Your Site Easy to Navigate

An easy-to-navigate website not only means that it is clutter-free, but it is also essential that you don’t have any broken links and that you make it easy to find what your visitors are looking for.

This can be done with navigation bars showing different categories, and it can also mean creating an easy-to-follow funnel of where you want people to go. Making your site easy to navigate is one of the best ways to keep visitors on your website longer.

3. Put Your Best Stuff at the Top

The e-commerce homepage is the most important part of the website (especially the top part). This part plays a huge role in visitor-to-consumer conversion. It is where you should put all your best stuff to convey what the site is about and provide all the elements that customers are looking for, which will entice them to explore the rest of the site.

If you have some offers or are running a sale, it makes sense to promote it on the homepage.

4. Reduce Page Loading Time

Website speed is one of the factors that you need to keep an eye on to keep your visitors on your site longer. If your site takes more than a couple seconds to load, most people will leave.

A one-second delay in page load time yields:

• 11% fewer page views
• 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
• 7% loss in conversions

No one has the patience for slow sites.

There are many steps you can take on your site to reduce the page loading time, and since an e-commerce store requires a lot of "CLEAR" images, you may start with this one:

Image Optimization: Your images will have a huge impact on loading time. You can reduce the size by compressing images if they’re unnecessarily large.

5. Exit-Intent Pop-Up Offers

These are Pop-ups that fire only when your visitor is about to leave your website. With an exit intent popup, you have a second chance to convert the visitor to a customer by prompting them with a targeted campaign or an offer they can’t refuse.

A Discount or free shipping, for example, to convince them to view and buy your products. Discounted products are very hard to turn down.

Aside from keeping your visitor from leaving your website, exit intent has proven to reduce shopping cart abandonment and increase the overall conversion rate.

Below are a few things you can put on the exit intent popup to keep visitors on your site:

• Invite visitors to chat with a support agent.
• Discounted Products.
• Offer an irresistible lead magnet in exchange for joining your email list.

By following these best practices, you can engage those abandoned visitors and convert them into customers. If you need professional help with your e-commerce site, contact us and let’s discuss it.