The fundamental difference between ecommerce and retail, as it has existed for all of time before the internet, is that the customers a company hopes to attract are geographically dispersed, in a sense faceless and, perhaps most importantly, have the ability to check out of the “shop” with a single click rat her than with their feet.
Within ecommerce, the phenomenon of visitors clicking away from the site within a matter of seconds is known as a bounce. But a high bounce rate should not be thought of as an indication of disaster. Certainly, something needs to be fixed, but there is always a great opportunity here.
Why? Well, if you experience a bouncethen you must also have experienced a generated lead. In other words, your marketing or brand appearance was sufficient to attract some traffic to your site – they just weren’t too impressed when they got there. Naturally, there can be many reasons for this.
For small businesses, bounce rate can be extremely important to monitor precisely because a high bounce rate reveals that the problem lies in your website and not your marketing or brand identity. As for the products, well, the visitor didn’t even get a chance to explore those!
So monitor your bounce rate, and if you notice a high one then it’s time to start thinking about improving your website.
Engagement is Key
Azola Creative, a website design company with offices in Jacksonville and San Francisco, say that the well-known challenge of ecommerce – standing out among the millions of other companies – is best overcome by fostering not interest, but proper engagement. Naturally, a high bounce rate is detrimental to this, and avoiding a bounce from every lead is a sure way to not just attract traffic but also get repeat traffic.
When a visitor actually explores your site, they learn about it, your brand, products, and overall identity. They have also given your site a lot more time than any marketing material you might have used elsewhere on the internet and, given that they now have a full understanding of your company, standing out, at least to those customers, is not difficult.
This is the ecommerce equivalent of the renowned“customer loyalty” that we’ve known for years. And if you can foster customer loyalty online, then these customers have the ability to visit whenever the mood takes them, something we didn’t see with brick-and-mortar.
And, as mentioned, the path to this is engagement.
Tips for Lowering Bounce Rate
Understand Why
…because there can be several potential reasons and they are not always clear. In some cases, you could have an excellent website but misleading marketing materials, with visitors arriving only to discover it is not the type of company or product they were looking for. In this relatively rare case, you won’t need any update to your website, but the other reasons can potentially be diverse (too diverse to go into here).
Make Sure the Website is Responsive
Takes more than three seconds to load? Then you might already suffer a bounce just from this. The necessary quality of your hosting package and server will increase the more that your website offers and does. Be sure to identify this simple problem where you can.
Include CTAs
These so-called calls-to-action are there to encourage some type of action, such as signing up for a newsletter or leaving feedback. You walk a thin line here, and CTAs can just as easily be off-putting as enticing.
As mentioned, you should take heart from the fact that your bounce rate means you are getting visitors in the door – now you just need to impress them.