How to Make Users ‘Stick’ to your Site
By Melissa Bennett @i_love_copy
27 October 2010 | Category: Design
‘Sticky’ refers to everything you do to your site to make people stay there longer; return, and keep returning - and I don’t mean trapping them there! What makes your site stand out from competitors?
Is it visually appealing? Is the navigational route seamless or is your site a fountain of knowledge? Whether you regularly update content, have cutting edge design, or pull in users with your blog, site stickiness is key to the success of your brand’s online lifecycle.
So How does Your Site Become Sticky?
It won’t miraculously happen overnight but a site can improve its stickiness with visuals, branding and its structure. By beautifully balancing usability and an immersive experience, you can create something people will want to come back to time and time again.
Give Them What They Want
Carry out research on what your audience wants from your site and gather as much information as you can (without annoying them). This valuable data is key in reflecting their needs across a fresh digital space. Make sure you maximise your product or service exposure before users commit to a purchase.
Create intelligent real estate use, product visibility and functional interactivity; this gives your user a more fulfilling and engaging environment they will want to return to. Remember: Engagement is key to site stickiness.
Does Social Media Effect The Stickiness of my Site?
Yes. Fact. Social media is huge. Make the most of platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. If done well, the benefits for your brand are endless. What better way to connect with your audience and gain even more followers for your product?
In its simplest form, social media is a quick and cost effective way to engage with your target audience. People have become accustomed to real-time conversations that they can tap into and take part with at any time, and they will expect this from you as well.
However, “Social Media Marketing” isn’t just about ‘continuing the conversation’ – brands need to meet strategic objectives and users need reasons to engage with those brands. The reason will always come back to an offering of value – be it through entertainment, intelligence or tools that empower. For a brand to create value there is always a cost, whether it is money or through creativity, thought, time and effort.
Uniqlo are always on the money with their social media campaigns – pushing sales to their site. This example is so simple, ties in with their 26th birthday, encourages participation with users and offers incentives to every 26th person in the queue.
Use it to your Advantage
Use Facebook and Twitter to offer customer support and build up relationships and awareness. Run social media campaigns, link them to your website, let customers know about your latest offers, new products, and create online competitions.
With Facebook’s aim at becoming the social center of the World Wide Web and ‘Places’ set to be the next big thing, a new way of personalising sites to suit individuals’ preferences is emerging. Open graph plug-ins allow users to ‘like’ products on Facebook and see what their friends ‘like’ too.
By allowing users to like products, make recommendations and share what they’ve bought or want to buy in the future, you raise awareness of your brand name and build deeper connections with your audience.
These new social tools fundamentally permit users to explore and share – taking your offerings to new consumers and digital platforms.
It’s all There for You to Use
By taking information from users’ activity feeds and walls, companies can determine their likes, dislikes, favourite colours or products, and customise their site to suit this. Things are no longer just public on Facebook, they are public to any site that is linked to your social graph, and this opens up endless possibilities for consumer engagement.
In the near future, what one person sees when viewing a site after signing in with a Facebook account will be completely different to what one of their friend’s will see. What we are now witnessing is just the beginning – sites will soon have separate entities for every user who logs in to view it – making content completely relevant to each individual user’s interests and needs.
Harnessing what Facebook and other platforms have to offer, can enhance your visibility and make your site extremely sticky – by catering to what people want to see, you will create loyalty and encourage users to keep coming back for more.
And how do you do all of this well? Just make sure you keep talking to your audience – not at them. Conversation is key in building digital connections. Creativity is key in keeping those connections.
Don’t Slow your Site Down
Audiences are used to dealing with efficient and speedy sites – that are quick to load. Site’s that are slow and inaccessible will lose out.
A user has arrived at your destination to fulfil a purpose. Whether they want to gain information or purchase a product, the last thing you want to see is users turning to competitors’ sites because they a) don’t have the time or b) couldn’t be bothered to wait for your site to load any longer.
You could have the most beautiful, visually appealing display – but if it’s Flash-heavy and painfully slow to load – people may never get the chance to see it. The key to keeping users at your site is ease of use… How quickly things load, how little the user has to do to obtain information, request it or buy products. Don’t put obstacles in their way – a user can choose to leave at any time.
The Technical Stuff
Reduce your site’s HTTP requests by combining all of your CSS files into one single file and do the same with your JavaScript files. This is beneficial, when your browser is asking for content from its web server. Creating single files speeds things up and prevents overloading.
Don’t forget to clean up your codes – your Javascript files should be developed sensibly with reusable functions and classes, your CSS rules as generic as possible and your HTML mark-up as simple as possible.
Be sure to compress images on your site and use image sprites for commonly used items, such as link arrows, custom bullet points and menu backgrounds. Image sprites allow for all commonly used images to be loaded in a single file/HTTP request.
Finally, enable Gzip on your web server – this reduces the overall file size of content being sent to a browser by up to 70%, which can make a huge difference to the time it takes for your site to load.
It’s all in Your Content
No one will visit your site more than once if it has poor content. People want to be met with inviting, helpful and useful information. They don’t want to be faced with a site full of dull or poorly written content. Make it fun and entertaining. And don’t overwhelm your users with pages and pages of text – keep it short and sweet.
A site where conversations are started and engaging stories created, taking the user on a journey of exploration.
Give users the key messages they need, or their attention will soon stray. Without nailing this, the other factors to achieving site stickiness are pointless. It’s important to remember that not only do you need to create good content – you also need to regularly update it – this will help make your site sticky by offering fans an incentive to keep coming back. Write about what you know, the services and products you offer and the industry they fall into.
Mobile World Congress 2010
See how social media can enhance your users’ experience with an example of what we created for Sony Ericsson earlier this year: We produced a social media strategy including a Facebook page to support the launch of their new range of handsets at Mobile World Congress (MWC).
We designed a dedicated section on the Sony Ericsson Facebook page that was used to promote MWC, driving Facebook users to discover more on the campaign site and enhancing their experience.)
At the heart of the campaign site was a 3D interactive space, creating engagement and starting the story of the Sony Ericsson Mobile World Congress event. This was supported by social media feeds from Facebook, Twitter and the Sony Ericsson blog, generating trust within users – by providing socially relevant content.
And Now for that Little Bit Extra
RSS feeds, subs invites, newsletters and community areas all add to a site’s stickiness. Capturing users contact details through a newsletter or sign up request is highly important. It allows you to follow-up, let users know about new products, ask them about the service they received, and continue an ongoing relationship. Your chances of getting someone to return to your website are far higher if they receive a monthly or weekly newsletter with new product links and offers.
See How This Can Help
At We Love… we create monthly love letters, providing a brief summary of what’s been happening at the manor over the past month. The content includes links to our blog, articles and examples of our work.
One of our monthly love letters, highlighting how you don’t have to stick to traditional layouts and designs.
Previous newsletters have shown amazing click-through rates, resulting in large peaks in traffic on the We Love blog. Our recent newsletter highlights how you don’t have to stick to traditional layouts and designs. Keep aligned with your brand identity, but newsletters can be as fun and inspiring as you want them to be: http://clients.welove72.com/newsletters/magic/
Regular newsletters are not only a route back to your site but also continue an ongoing relationship with the user. Sign up rates of the newsletter and Twitter provide another route to continue conversion within a qualified market. Proving that asking your audience to sign up and follow you is a positive way to activate site stickiness.
Remember: Make sure you are providing unique benefits to fans – exclusive content, competitions, priority, and insider access.
It’s Time to Connect with your Audience
Now we’ve broken down the elements of how to make your site sticky, it’s not so difficult. The key is to make things as easy for your user as possible, streamline your navigation and most importantly keep updating relevant content. If you don’t have anything relevant to update, leave it as it is. It’s far better to have a solid message on your site that is a few weeks old than content that is of no value to your user.
Audiences want to soak up information, news, latest products and guidance. If you don’t supply them with this, they may begin to stray. As long as the product or service you offer has value, you can successfully create site stickiness, generate loyal traffic and reach out to new users by following these steps.
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