You can look at a lot of big things in how to engage customers, prospects, partners, etc. You can revamp your contact strategy; implement and/or restructure nurture emails; look at the design, format, and branding of invoices; test creative head-to-head in large scale, fairly-complicated A/B testing scenarios; plan themes, variations on themes, non-theme items; and so on. And you definitely should keep doing these big things too.
BLOG ENGAGEMENT
Paradoxically, I was reminded the other day just how small things can make a big difference in customer engagement. I was told a story of how a simple act of sending a confirmation email to a blog commenter had made a very large percentage increase in the return visits to the site, and therefore increased customer visits and engagement metrics.
The site visitors who received an email letting them know their comment had been posted went back to look at their own comments posted on the site! It’s seemingly a small thing, but so elegant in its simplicity and effectiveness.
IMPROVE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT WITH WEBSITE OPTIMIZATION
Made me think of some of the little things that often need our attention but we can sometimes lose track of.
- I’ve for years harped on the auto-responder emails (those emails that are automatically sent when someone submits a form) from websites. Because these types of emails aren’t as immediately as visible, it’s easy to let them get out-of-date; they often need better language, usability improvements, and lots of design help as features, function, and the times change. It’s time to revisit them. It’s another of those small things that make a really big difference in customer engagement. Don’t have auto-responders from your forms? Perish the thought! Get them now.
- Making sure there are no dead links is an important step in website optimization. That means checking all the hyperlinks to ensure they still work. It’s tedious but well worth keeping a visitor to your site from being frustrated by a non-working link. It’s especially important for links that link to third-party sites as you just never know if they’ve kept their pages up and/or the links the same. And also for links to documents; sometimes the documents accidentally get deleted from the database and cause a broken link.
- Creating customized 404 (Page Not Found) pages for links that point to your site. If a link to your site is broken, you can create Page Not Found pages that have customized content (instead of the basic browser version) and help direct people to other areas of your site that might have similar content to what they’re looking for; or, at the very least, offer them a way to easily contact you to get the information they’re after.
- Double-checking client lists on websites, in brochures, etc. to make sure they’re still accurate. That goes for both getting new ones that would be better to highlight, to ensuring any clients you might not have anymore are removed from lists. Nothing worse than having someone mention a customer they saw on your list and it’s no longer accurate!
Those are just a few of the things I can think of off the top of my head — good luck on your list of simple ways to improve your website optimization!
