In today’s fast-paced world, user expectations are soaring high. Recently, as per research conducted on thousands of websites from varied domains. It is found that after landing on a website, more than 60% of the users within 15–30 seconds finalize if it’s up to what they are looking for.
When it comes to captivating the attention of the website visitors, you don’t have much time. To be precise, the first 15 seconds are definitive in deciding if a visitor will convert into a buyer or not!
With the advancement in web design technology, users' interest have significantly shifted towards visiting responsive and dynamic websites. But, this isn't the sole factor in building a user-friendly website. Including this, there are additional factors too that decide the outcome of visitors’ journey!
The Reason and Science Behind High Bounce rate and Low Conversion rate
Bounce rate is a critical metric in deciding the conversion rate and fate of your business website. It can be defined as the percentage of users that hadn’t further explored the site after landing on a specific page. For instance, a total of hundred visitors lands on your website and out of which 50 left, and the other 50 continue exploring it. Then the bounce rate will be defined as 50%.
Google tracks such users (who left) and analyzes the effectiveness of the web page presented to the user as a search result. Based on user behavior, Google defines the reliability score of a website.
The worst-case in the Bounce Rate is when users visit a webpage and in just a few seconds, revert to the search results. This happens when users didn’t get what they have searched for. In this case, Google marks the earlier visited webpage deceptive. And, eventually, downgrades the SERP rank as well.
This gets more complex when you are running a business website for selling products, lead generation, marketing and sales. As in this scenario, its highly possible that users might not be interested in completing the CTA while filling web forms, register for a demo, avail discounts, etc.
Let’s understand the two main factors that decide the bounce rate:
- Your website is not interactive enough to delight the buyers. It can also be attributed to the excessive use of web forms, unresponsive live chat, and lack of product information.
- The purpose of the webpage and user query are different.
Note: Though in general, the bounce rate exclusively depends on the niche of the website, like service-oriented websites get a lower bounce rate than landing pages. But still, it would be in favor of your business to keep improving the performance of the site and making it more accessible for the visitors.
When serving a varied user base, it gets essential to standardize the user experience.
The dynamics of online business is changing at a rapid pace. With this, it gets much easier to explain your product to the buyers. Such as, you can make use of interactive gifs, videos, and images to demonstrate the product and lure the buyers. But, making use of interactive web technology is not enough to stand out from the crowd. Here are the crucial factors that can help you understand what can distract the prospects from your business website, and how to perfect it:
1) When website visitors get no value, and their queries go unheard and unanswered
A website visitor can be termed as a ‘Potential customer’ when he shows interest in learning more about the product.
Many business websites make use of live chat tools and web forms to collect user queries and answer them when their customer support team is available. In contrast to this situation, when you keep prospects on hold for a long time, then it can demote their interest in making the same purchase.
Losing out to such prospects can severely affect the ROI and hinder the growth of your business. And, it’s also probable that after facing lousy customer service, the interested buyers might never visit back your website.
Tips to overcome this:
- In this fast-paced era, you should skip time-consuming and tedious web forms for collecting user details for lead generation. Also, it's that after witnessing a web form, more than 83% of the people skip them or close the tab.
- Keep live chat agents active during business hours. Also, make sure to attend each user query in real-time. The shorter the wait time remains, it doubles the chances of users to buy a product.
- Deploy AI chatbot to answer the repeated queries of the users.
2) When buyers don’t get what they are looking for
You should never ever promise buyers something that you don’t have. It has been seen that for the sake of gaining momentum in the market, businesses exercise misinformation on their website. Including this, make sure that website content is relevant to what you are selling. Also, while advertising products or services, you should be wary of fake promotions.
Tips to overcome this:
- Keep the product/service information, FAQs, About us, and pricing concise and up to date.
- Optimize your website and product pages for the right keywords.
- List the product offering in a meaningful way and make it easy for people to navigate the website.
- Buyers hate hidden charges, so make pricing and other fees clear from the very beginning of the product journey.
3) When your website is not user-friendly and is loading slow
At least 30% of the mobile buyers abandon a website if it fails to run correctly on their device.
When buyers click on a search result, they expect websites to be able to have them on board. But, when the same doesn’t happen, it disgusts their interest in further pursuing a product or service from the same brand. Because, from a user perspective, it doesn’t matter if you are giving away Diamonds in free. If he is not able to access it, he might not trust it as a reliable source to place an order.
On the other hand, a responsive website will boost the usability, trust of the users, while also lower down the bounce rate.
Tips to overcome this:
- Optimize website for both web users and mobile users.
- Remove broken links.
- Optimize media files for fast loading.
- Get your website AMP enabled.
4) When buyers see too much information, they get confused
It is one of the most common cases with business websites, as despite being explaining all the aspects of the product, it gets challenging to convert the visitors into buyers.
Users like to be educated about the products so that they can make a logical decision. But, presenting users with too many choices often leads to users making no choice at all. Because the excess of information about a product or service might hinder their ability to make the right judgment.
Tips to overcome this:
- Guide users with products and services with logical statements.
- Don’t give buyers too many alternate options.
- Don’t make use of intrusive autoplay media.
- Present offers clearly with the products.
- Keep product features and pricing crystal clear.
- Make the call to action easy for the users to complete.
- Internal linking should be meaningful, don’t get carried.
- Keep it simple for the users to get what they are looking for.
- Include the stories of other people using your products and services.
5) Lengthy product registration process and too many checkpoints
Clearly, no one likes to fill time-consuming registration forms
When a buyer learns everything about a product, then the last thing he does is register for it. But, with the lengthy and time-consuming registration process. It's found that while doing so, many users skip in between.
Tips to overcome this:
- From the beginning of the process, make it clear what users will get after registration.
- Ask only relevant information.
- Break the registration process into short and engaging steps.
Conclusion
Instead of creating a mirage of what your product can do, you should focus more on how it can be helpful to your prospects. This way, you can build a strong reputation for your company and as well as products and services. This can be done by offering users the right and brief information that can promote their interest to the next level.
Moreover, you should also keep a check of the website’s downtime and if it’s optimizable for mobile devices. While pitching a product or service to the buyers, you should also keep Call to Action text clear and it shouldn’t deceive users.
Also, you should be wary of promoting the product to the landing visitors. Rather you should first build trust. This can eventually help in improving the user engagement rate while lowering down the bounce rate.
From a business perspective, when a user lands on your website, then nothing can be changed in 15 seconds. Practically, this time is not enough to make an impact. But, from a user perspective, 15 seconds is the time most of the buyers took to make a choice.
You might not change the fate of those 15 seconds.
But, by perfecting the website from every viewpoint, you can ensure that it remains up to the standards. The chatbot can help you take forward your business strategy and make your website reachable to the users, even if they stay less than 15 seconds. With the Pre-welcome message feature, you can display offers and discounts to the users, and also assist them with their queries.
A chatbot can exclusively cut the clutter and can help in gaining the trust of the users. It can assist buyers when finalizing a product, pitch them the right product as per their requirement, make registration process engaging, and keep buyers valued throughout the conversation.
