How to attract customers to your website

As more and more companies go the online way to do business, it becomes imperative to attract consumer attention and hold it to your website. Here are some tips that can help you attract attention to your website and have your customers asking for more.

Provide relevant content
 

The design and content of the website should be in accordance to customer requirements. Before actually developing content for your website, do some research as to the requirements of your existing and potential customers. Research has shown that users, at an average, spend not more than 46 seconds per web page; that is the time you have to attract consumers' attention and make them curious enough to browse through your products and services. The importance of relevant content becomes all the more imperative when you consider there are more than 60 millions registered domains and the number is still growing. In the light of this, deliver content and design of your products and services that has real relevance for the users.

Then again, your content can be in the native language of your target audience. Your e-commerce venture may have a global as well as a national audience. For example, you may have a sizable consumer base in France. In this case, you can design your content in both English and French so that users can browse through the site in their preferred language. An ideal example for this would be websites offering tour packages across Europe and the United States. Given that many European countries use their native language, you can maximise your sales by giving your potential clients the choice of browsing through your website in the language they are comfortable with.

Engage your clients
  Not many people realize the importance of updating content of their website at regular basis. Regularly updated content adds freshness to your site and keeps the clients engaged to it. Keep in mind that things change quickly on the web and users are not static. Information that is relevant today may not be of any relevance tomorrow. For example, if you have a financial website, it is absolutely necessary that you provide frequent updates, including near real-time changes in stock prices to keep the customers engaged to your offerings.

This holds equally true for websites for which the bulk of content remains unchanged. For example, the home page of the website Britannica.com is constantly updated with lists and reviews of websites, magazines and books to provide novelty to the users and also give an impression that the material is by no way obsolete.

One way to ensure that your site is fulfilling customer requirement is by monitoring activity on it in terms of what features and content attract user attention. These features would be your strengths and you can plan your strategy such as to capitalize on them by giving people more of what they want. A note of caution here though­ --- if you focus too much on features preferred by existing clients, you may drive away potential clients for whom those particular features are not relevant. So a judicious judgement is required to maintain a balance to retain the existing customers and not to drive away the potential ones.

Another way to engage your clients is by providing fun and games on your site even if it is a non-gaming one. Take the case of Boo.com, a casual-apparel site in London that keeps customers engaged by having virtual mannequins that rotate in real time to give the customer a 360-degree view of everything from footwear to swimming suits and also offer running commentary as you navigate the site. It is precisely to keep people online for hours, that even the most staid of corporate sites have animation and audiovisual clips to enliven them up.