The Importance of Engagement

Every time we build a website we focus on 3 major elements.

• Web Traffic – growing visitors to your website
• Engagement – how long they stay on your site
• Conversions – what the customer does – eg. calls, appointment requests, quote request

Focus on Engagement. In this post, we are focusing on engagement. We define “engagement” as how relevant and interesting the site is keeping the prospective buyer’s attention. The general idea is that the more engaged your potential customers are, the more time they spend on your site. The longer they stay, the more likely they will call, schedule an appointment or show up at your showroom or retail store and become a customer.

The Top 3 Most Engaging Items. Over the past 5 years we have learned through extensive study and analytics that customers shopping for kitchen and bath products and services like countertops, cabinets and tile, look for 3 major things…

• Colors / Inventory
• Finish Projects (Portfolio)
• Shopping Tools (Visualizers)

Colors / Inventory. By far, website visitors spend the largest amount of time is searching for colors. This is true for countertops, cabinets, and tile. Most prospective buyers don’t know exactly what they want when they start shopping. The one thing we know they want is abundant choices. As an example, for our countertop clients, we provide all colors of manufactured quartz from companies like Caesarstone, Silestone, Pental, Hanstone, etc. While this may seem like overkill it gives the potential customer a tool to narrow down their choice and it keeps that customer on your website and away from your competitors. Some businesses just post the logos of lines they carry, while it may be better than nothing, adding the inventory or color charts will change your website into a shopping tool.

Portfolio / Photo Gallery. The second most time is spent looking at your gallery and or portfolio. We train our clients to spend more time increasing their finished product image portfolio. It’s really important for a couple of reasons. First, prospective customers want to know what kind of work you do and if the quality is good. Having a lot of great finished projects gives the prospective buyer some level of comfort that you are good at your job. There are other benefits from having a lot of images – they can be used in social media – like Facebook, Houzz, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

Shopping Tools. The 3rd most popular engagement tool are visualizers. There are many great tools out there but we found that kitchen and bath visualizer that let the customer play with colors for countertops, cabinets, tile and flooring are really useful. They allow the customer to stay longer on your site and it helps them narrow their choices before they come in for a visit. There are other tools like Quoting tools that allows the customer to generate a price quote as well.

Summary. While the concept of engagement is fairly simple, many businesses have a hard time executing an engagement strategy. The easy way to start is to add Google Analytics – a free tool, to your website. You can track visitors, and how much time they stay on your site. A small site will generate under 1,000 visitors per month, and without content, the customers will visit a few pages (page views) and spend, on average under a minute (time on site). This is a low engagement. By adding colors, inventory, a gallery, and shopping tools we can grow engagement significantly. On average our clients with these tools will see more visitors, an average of 10 page view per visit and more than 3 minutes on the site. Engaged visitors are 60% more likely to convert to customers.