Dramatically improve your website’s user engagement
Having a well oiled, member or customer acquisition engine running smoothly is obviously the key to any business or organisation but in terms of being an essential part of your strategy; there’s another aspect that is arguably much more important than simply getting people through the door.
We are of course talking about retention and engagement. You don’t want your website to turn into a revolving door; people go just as quickly as they come, leaving your online space as a digital reflector – causing people to dismiss the main reasons that they signed up, joined or purchased in the first place.
To put it simply, the key is not in the initial attraction, but getting them to stay. While this sounds like a rip off of some dodgy dating advice guru; it really is about keeping your audience as interested as possible for as long as possible. An article in Forbes explains that working out the Life Time Value (LTV) gives you an idea of which of your audience are here to stay and which ones are here for a good time, not a long time. What is the use of this information? Basically, it allows you to better understand where you should be spending your resources (be that marketing spend, human resources or simply time and effort).
Think of it as a numbers game.
If you spend approximately £500 in marketing per member acquisition, with each person spending £150 for an annual membership – this doesn’t initially appear to be a good investment on your part. If you then discover that on average for your organisation, a member who stays engaged for a long period of time; attending numerous events (approximately 2 per year at £100 per event), enrolling in your courses (1 per year at £1000) and staying on as a member for 5 years, you’re looking at approximately £6,750 in LTV for a member that only cost you £500 to acquire.
The crux of all of this is ensuring that you are creating an environment that your members are finding engaging enough for this revenue cycle to continue. There are of course many other benefits of improving your website’s member engagement but increased Life Time Value, improved SEO and increased user satisfaction are the main players.
According to HubSpot, it’s important to use data more effectively. They state:
If you’re just tracking how many people have visited your site and what they bought, you’re missing out.
Hubspot
Effectively, as HubSpot are suggesting, there are many different elements of your site that you should be tracking and using in order to improve your user engagement. If you can do this, you are well on your way to both improving performance, retention and Life Time Value.
So, we put together a handy guide for you to not only find out which metrics you should be using to gauge your sites user engagement but also actionable steps to dramatically improve your organisations member engagement. Don’t have members per se? Not to worry! The guide is still relevant for organisations that don’t necessarily have a membership base but also want to improve the engagement of it’s website’s users.