How to Increase Engagement by Communicating with Visitors

Creating a website is a great way to open the channels of communication with your audience members. Visitors can interact with your content, reach out through your social media platforms, and submit forms with their questions and comments. However, even the best website in the world will miss out on growth opportunities if you don’t develop and support these website communication channels.

Great site communication can help you grow a loyal audience, increase brand awareness, and attract more supporters.

There are multiple ways to use your website to increase communication and engagement with your audience. Let’s discuss the importance of nurturing website engagement.

Grow your audience through engagement

Site engagement helps to increase your audience size through recommendations and search engine friendliness.

Cultivating website communication helps your site visitors feel as though they can trust you, which makes them enthusiastic about your brand.

When a customer is enthusiastic, they may be more inclined to post about you online, recommend your site to their friends, and even convince others to make purchases from your online store.

By engaging with your audience, you can dramatically increase your site supporters. The primary question left unanswered is how to get started.

Keys to effective engagement

Before making the commitment to increase your audience engagement, acknowledge that doing so comes with added responsibilities. You’ll be expected to respond to questions or comments in a timely fashion, and take audience suggestions to heart. This way, your audience will know that you value their opinions.

You or a member of your team should take the time to regularly respond to all queries. Every single customer interaction deserves a response. It can help to write down guidelines for answering questions to adhere to an agreed upon tone, and how your business will respond to the most common interactions.

For example, if you own a flower shop, you can offer a discount code to customers if deliveries are ever delayed. Alternatively, if you’re a hairdresser, let your clients know about any upcoming specials, or leave positive comments whenever someone shares a photo of a fantastic new hairdo.

How to open website communication channels

If you want to build an engaging site, use multiple communication channels so that visitors have options for submitting comments, questions, and concerns. You can also create multiple types of content to capture as much attention as possible.

Here are some ideas for engaging with your site customers:

1. Enhance your content

If you want your audience to engage with your site, make it an outlet that people enjoy visiting.

Think about the types of content that your audience might respond well to, like blog posts, tutorials, or Q&A sessions. Creating this content will capture your audience’s attention while giving you the chance to build a narrative that subtly persuades customers to make purchases.

Once your visitors become genuine fans of your site, they’ll be more likely to leave comments, follow you on social media, and convince their friends to take a look at your great content.

2. Value all questions and concerns

Feedback is really important, and listening to your customers is an essential component of website communication.

Keep an updated FAQ page to answer commonly asked questions. This will demonstrate your willingness to help, while aiding with that all-important search engine optimization component.

You can also encourage communication by using Jetpack to create contact forms and placing them in prominent locations on your website (in the sidebar, the footer, or on a contact page). By allowing customers to offer their feedback and ask questions without having to leave your site, you can encourage open lines of communication while sending a message that you take their comments to heart.

3. Cultivate your social media presence

Of course, there are few better ways to grow engagement than being active on social media.

Posting regularly is critical for staying top-of-mind and engaging with your audience members. If writing new social media posts multiple times per day seems overwhelming, use Jetpack to automate your social media activity with Publicize.

You should still log into your social media accounts regularly and respond to any messages or comments you received. Making time to respond to posts and comments is crucial for keeping conversations active.

One great way to connect your social media efforts is by encouraging fans to use a hashtag. This way, when someone tweets to customer service or posts a photo of their purchase, you will see every relevant social media post, allowing you to respond and engage when appropriate.

4. Tie social media back to your website

Jetpack offers handy tools for pulling social engagement into your website, tying the two elements together.

The My Community widget compiles a gallery of users who liked, commented, or followed your website. It’s a great way to show the support that your site receives, and can make your visitors feel like they’re part of a community.

The Facebook Page Plugin widget reveals followers who liked your Facebook page, and encourages new visitors to like and engage with your brand through Facebook as well.

The Twitter Timeline widget embeds content from your Twitter timeline into your site. This way, site visitors will see your timely tweets about new products and promotions. Even for those who don’t use Twitter, observing these trust signals and your influence on social media sites communicates that you’re eager to engage with customers.

Communication is key

Support and nurture your site channels to help foster your website communication, brand engagement, and customer enthusiasm.

We’d love to hear about your communication success stories, and ways that you successfully developed relationships with your audience members through open lines of communication.