8 Design Strategies to Boost Customer Engagement and Improve Your Site’s Bounce Rate

Securing traffic and conversions is undoubtedly every website’s ultimate goal, regardless of the kind of product or service that you offer or the niche that you’re in. But, even if you manage to acquire enough visits and prospects, the part where you ensure they engage with your website is where the real conversion happens.

Many websites struggle with their visitors leaving with no desire to interact and no incentive to take action, so they ultimately end up losing them. Today, we’ll talk about how not to be one of those websites, how to improve your bounce rates, and how to boost customer engagement.

Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who exit your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate can indicate that your website is not meeting your visitors’ expectations or that your content is not compelling enough to keep them engaged. This can negatively impact your website’s search engine ranking and reduce the overall impact of your online marketing efforts.

Designing a website that engages users and boasts low bounce rates requires an elaborate, strategic approach. 

In this article, we’ll cover eight design strategies that will help you improve your bounce rate and guide you in creating a more engaging website experience.

Be Clear About What You Do

If you fail to be crystal clear about what you do, most of your site visitors won’t be ecstatic to engage with your business. A lack of clarity can lead to confusion and frustration, causing visitors to leave your site and potentially seek out a competitor who provides a clearer message.

Cluttering your message with unnecessary design elements provides a counter effect. While a visually appealing design is lucrative, it shouldn’t detract from the main message. Too many design elements can overwhelm your audience and make your main message difficult to digest.

To avoid this scenario, it’s important to prioritize clarity in your website design. To make sure you engage those who are actually looking for what you’re selling, don’t be ambiguous about your product or service.

This means concisely communicating your value proposition, what you offer, and how you can benefit your potential customers. Your message should be front and center with a clear, eye-catching headline that grabs the visitor’s attention and convinces them to explore further. 

Not to mention, paying attention to keeping the same language and tone across all your pages is essential as well. This way, you’ll ensure that your brand identity is clear and recognizable. In other words, consistency helps build trust with your audience and reinforces your message simultaneously.

Vivion does this perfectly. This ingredients supplier’s minimalistic design and clear copywriting style make room for their message and value proposition to shine through successfully.

Offer an Exceptional Mobile Experience

Most people will access your website using mobile devices. Smartphones account for a weighty portion of today’s overall web traffic, with a whopping 59.16 percent excluding tablets in 2022. That prompted Google to announce that mobile-first indexing is now the default for all new web domains, solidifying the importance of mobile optimization.

That should be a reason enough for you to roll up your sleeves and curate an exceptional mobile experience to offer to your audience. Needless to say, you need to make sure to do it right. You can start by:

• Ensuring that your website’s design is responsive (optimized to look perfect on any device)
• Using clear and concise language, as mobile users may be more likely to skim content rather than read it from A to Z
• Keeping menus simple by making sure they’re easy to navigate and not too complicated
• Prioritizing page speed and load times for mobile users who are often accessing your site on the go and may have limited data or a slower connection. Google says that 53% of visitors will abandon your mobile site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load. So, it doesn’t matter how charming your site is if it loads at a snail’s pace.

If the desktop version of your website is complex, your mobile version should be the opposite, as mobile users seek simple, direct answers. The famous fast food chain Burger King is a great example of this as their mobile website is simplified and offers an app-like experience for faster ordering, paying, and order-tracking.

Make Your Core Functionality Immediately Visible

Your website’s design should facilitate your visitors’ understanding of what your business does and how it can benefit them. In some cases, simply giving users access to your core functionality is the best way to stimulate engagement without the need for lengthy explanations or positioning statements.

All you need to do is place a key functionality in a prominent location, such as in the header of your homepage. This will prevent visitors from leaving your site too early and make them take action. 

For example, if you’re an ecommerce store, you can enable visitors to browse products, search for specific items, and add stuff to the cart right from the first loading screen. This can be achieved through the use of a top search bar, clear categories and filters, and a smooth-running checkout process.

Similarly, if you’re a SaaS business, placing a simple demo of one of your tools can be a great incentive for further engagement. You can achieve this by developing a tour-like interface of your service and attaching it below your main value proposition. 

Take inspiration from Career Sidekick – a career advice and interview preparation website that offers a free resume builder. They design their homepage by drawing attention to two very effective CTAs (one in the header and one below their value proposition) that take the user to the important conversion section of the site.

UnscrambleX (a Scrabble word finder) is another example of a site that simply embeds the conversion function into the header of the site. The difference here is that the visitor can immediately use a core functionality which is amazing for minimizing bounce rates.

Embrace Explainer Videos

Sometimes, displaying complex information in a text format can cause visitors to lose interest. That’s where explainer videos come in. They’re short-form videos that use animation, voiceover, and other auditory and visual details to explain a business, a product, or a service in a compelling, memorable, and engaging way.

Including explainer videos as part of your website’s design is an effective way to stand out from the crowd. It’s perfect for grabbing the audience’s attention and elaborating complex ideas in an easy-to-understand format.

People are more likely to watch a video than read through walls of text looking for an answer about something concerning your product or service. Besides products or services, explainer videos can be used to showcase your brand’s values and get you closer to your audience.

Another great thing about these videos is that they’re super-shareable, meaning you could potentially reach a wider audience and make a lasting impression.

To make great videos, first and foremost, you need to define your target audience. Then, make sure to use simple explanations and plain language. Be clear and straightforward, and say all you need to say in up to two minutes. Avoid using lots of unnecessary visuals, and last but not least, use closed captions.

Zendesk, a leading customer service and sales CRM brand, offers an excellent example of how B2B brands can use an explainer video to engage visitors.

Note how clearly the video discusses what Zendesk does. It starts with simple language along with easy-to-understand visuals to convey the product’s value concisely and extremely effectively.

As the video progresses, information becomes more granular, but never overly-complex. The video is short, too, meaning that viewers are far more likely to watch to the end.

Simplicity is key with explainer videos. When someone clicks on the “play” button, you want them to stick around. And the quickest way to sabotage this is to give them a ton of complicated information that doesn’t address their needs.

For a B2C explainer video example, let’s take a look at GetSafe, a medical alert company with a target audience of elderly people and their caregivers.

The brand aims to instantly establish emotional relatability. Where the B2B example prioritizes clarity and value, GetSafe wants viewers to invest their feelings into the story. This is what drives engagement. When visitors can instantly place themselves in the video’s narrative, the likelihood of a bounce becomes much lower.

The focus on emotional relatability doesn’t mean the video is light on useful information. The product and its features are given the spotlight just 20 seconds into the video.

The key difference between B2B and B2C explainer videos is in how they use value and emotions to trigger engagement.

Offer a User-Friendly Search Function

In today’s competitive digital space, customers want to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, and a poorly designed search experience can easily annoy them and make them look elsewhere. Regardless of the nature of the content, a well-designed search function is a must for any website. 

To ensure that your search function passes the vibe check, there are some simple practices to keep in mind:

1. It should be prominently displayed on your website, ideally at the top right of the page where users expect to find it. Don’t let them spend time searching for the search bar, as this can be a major drawback and lead to high bounce rates, and we are trying to help you avoid that.
2. The search bar should be easy and intuitive to use. It needs to include helpful features such as autocomplete suggestions, filters, and sorting options.
3. The search function should be fast and efficient. Users expect search results to be returned quickly, and a slow or unresponsive search function can be super frustrating. Minimize the number of clicks required to access search results and optimize the search algorithm to ensure speedy results.
4. Finally, it’s vital to continually monitor and improve your search function over time. This means tracking user behavior, analyzing search data, and implementing changes and improvements based on user feedback and best practices.

The MarketBeat search tool is everything a search tool should be. It’s clear that this stock market news and research tools website put in a lot of effort to design their search function to display results instantly, autocomplete suggestions as you type, categorize results, include image icons, and more.

Focus on Site Performance and Speed

Your website’s performance and speed directly impact user experience and satisfaction. Users today expect websites to load quickly, and even a few seconds of delay can lead to frustration and high bounce rates. That’s why it’s essential to focus on optimizing your site performance and speed to provide a smooth and seamless user experience.

While speed might not be directly tied to design, it certainly conditions and limits the extent of your design liberties. You can’t expect to have the fastest-loading website if you clutter it with tons of visual elements like gifs, images, videos, and animations.

These design elements can be large in size and slow down your website. What you can do to prevent this is limit their number and optimize them by using decent compressing tools. There are a number of amazing tools that will reduce the size of your media files without compromising their visual appeal. 

Similarly, using lazy loading techniques, where images and videos are loaded only when they come up on the screen, can help speed up loading times and improve performance.

Finally, it’s vital to constantly monitor and optimize your site’s performance and speed using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTMetrix, so you can identify areas for improvement and make necessary changes.

Shine a Bright Light on Your Credibility

When first-time customers hit your site, it’s highly possible that they’ll be ingesting all of your sales information with hesitation and skepticism in the back of their minds. If you don’t convey trust and credibility very early in their journey, you stand the risk of them bouncing in search of a site that seems more trustworthy.

That’s why building trust with your audience is crucial when it comes to doing business. By demonstrating that your product or service is reliable and has a track record of satisfied customers, you can instill confidence and establish a strong reputation in your target audience’s eyes.

Shop Solar Kits does an excellent job in this department. This solar kits retailer website’s decorated with many credibility signals, so let’s take a closer look and detail the best elements for showcasing credibility from a design point of view:

• Product reviews floating link: By displaying reviews and ratings of individual products, you can provide social proof that helps potential customers make informed decisions. A floating link is a convenient way to encourage visitors to check out these reviews without having to leave the page they’re on.
• Detailed contact information: Demonstrate that you’re a legitimate business that cares about customer service by making it easy for customers to get in touch with you. Provide phone numbers, email addresses, and physical addresses and nurture the relationships with your customers. Place this element in your header where it’s clearly visible.
• Trust claims: By prominently displaying trust claims, such as “lifetime customer support,” “fast shipping,” or “guaranteed prices,” you can make a strong first impression and convey the value proposition of your business. A great spot for these can be between your main navigation and your main value proposition.
• Star ratings and reviews number: Include star ratings and the number of reviews for each product displayed on your homepage. That will reinforce the idea that your business has a strong track record of customer satisfaction.
• Detailed user-generated content (UGC) section: Showcase how existing customers have used your products or services is another way to leverage social proof to establish your credibility. Add this section below your products section and Include photos, videos, and detailed descriptions to make it more compelling.

Ensure Your Content is Highly Accessible

After fine-tuning all that we’ve talked about, you’re left with making your content accessible to visitors of all abilities. In the vast ocean of online content, it’s definitely not easy to design a blog that stands out as enticing, skimmable, and easy to digest.

Let’s go through the best practices for maximizing the accessibility of your web content:

• Avoid walls of text. Break up your content into small paragraphs and bullet points to make it more scannable. Long paragraphs are dull and make people lose interest quickly.
• Use images and videos. Including visuals in your blog posts can make them more engaging and help illustrate your points. High-quality images and videos will enhance your content and provide additional context.
• Pay attention to typographic design. Choose your text’s fonts, font sizes, and line spacing that are easy to read and in line with your brand image. Avoid using all-caps and fonts that aren’t suitable for screens.
• Keep content skimmable. Don’t forget to add many headings, subheadings, and bullet points to break up your content and make it easy to skim. Readers rarely read the entire article as they’re used to skimming and accessing only the information they came looking for.
• Answer questions early. Start your blog posts by answering the main question or addressing the main point of the post. This will engage the reader and make them more likely to keep reading.
• Choose the appropriate colors. Use high-contrast colors for text and background to make your content easy on the eye. Avoid using light-colored text on a light-colored background (and vice-versa), which can be difficult to read. Ensure that the colors you choose don’t deviate too much from your brand image.

Slack, the messaging platform for teams, boasts a very exemplary blog. They respect all of the above practices and use custom visuals throughout all of their posts. That way, they ensure their readers develop a stronger relationship with their brand, establishing authority and sophistication right from the get-go.

Final Thoughts

We’re sure that with all of the design strategies we’ve covered, you’ll be on the right track to significantly boost your site’s engagement and improve its bounce rates. You can implement all or some of them. No matter what you opt for, your final product will be a more engaging and user-friendly website that keeps visitors coming back for more. 

Just note that a well-designed website not only looks great but also provides value and a seamless experience for all who visit it. Satisfy these criteria, and you’ll be seeing more conversions.

Learn more about designing landing page CTAs that convert here, or discover design tips to improve Ecommerce conversions here.

If you’re ready to sell, check out our First Time Seller’s Guide.