How to Reduce Your Bounce Rate and Skyrocket Sales (4 Tested Strategies) | Syed Balkhi | NewsBreak Original

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Do you want to reduce your bounce rate and skyrocket sales? If so, you’re in the right place!

Your website’s bounce rate can seriously impact engagement and performance. In case you don’t know, your bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website without visiting a second page. This phenomenon is known as a single-page session from an analytic point of view.

The average bounce rate varies by industry and type of page. For instance, a product landing page has a much higher bounce rate when compared to self-service portals. Generally speaking, the lower your bounce rate, the better.

If a user only interacts with one page on your site, there’s a slim chance they will come back and sign up for your email list or become a customer. The best way to build your audience and increase sales is to keep people from leaving before they understand your value proposition.

Below, you’ll find a selection of strategies I’ve used to lower our bounce rate over the years. I’m confident these strategies can help you achieve similar results.

Have you ever hit the back button on a website after it took too long to load? Most people have. In fact, the average shopper expects a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. If your site takes longer to load, there’s a good chance you have an abnormally high bounce rate.

Several factors can contribute to slow loading times, including:

Reducing unnecessary software and streamlining your design can drastically improve your loading times, which usually means a lower bounce rate. I suggest developing speed and performance guidelines so you can consistently create a positive experience for your customers.

Speaking of performance, let’s talk about mobile users. The average person spends a little over 3.5 hours using smartphone apps every day. If your site doesn’t look good on mobile, expect users to leave without taking action.

Google has a free mobile-friendly test you can use to see the status of your website. I like this tool because you can get actionable suggestions to optimize your site and keep users engaged with your brand.

Did you know that around 47% of online shoppers read 3-5 blog posts before buying a product online? I believe this startling statistic can help business leaders and marketers reduce their bounce rate.

Here’s why; when someone visits a website specifically for information, like a blog post, they are likely to leave as soon as they get an answer to their question. If you can convince them that there’s more to learn by sharing relevant content, you can keep visitors on your site for more than one page, which will decrease your bounce rate.

There are a few clever ways you can show visitors more relevant content. For starters, you should develop a strong internal linking strategy. In other words, look for opportunities to strategically link to old blog posts throughout your content.’

Adding links to specific words and phrases, especially if they’re relevant to the users’ needs, will result in them spending more time on your site.

Another way to show more blog posts to readers is to display popular blog posts on the sidebar of your website. It only takes a few minutes to get this feature set up. We saw a dramatic dip in single-page sessions after showing our readers interesting, relevant content.

If used correctly, exit popups are another excellent way to reduce your bounce rate and turn visitors into subscribers. Simply put, an exit popup is an alert that shows up when users are getting ready to hit the X in the corner of their tab.

The goal of this type of popup is to convince visitors to engage with your business instead of leaving. In my experience, the best way to get users to stick around is to offer them something valuable. The key to delivering personalized lead magnets is to create different exit popups for various aspects of your site.

For instance, a marketing firm might use an exit popup on their email-focused blog posts that ask readers to subscribe for their ultimate email marketing guide. Meanwhile, if a user tries to leave an article about social media marketing, they will have the option to download a detailed social media guide.

This level of personalization can severely reduce your bounce rate and help you grow your email list. People are usually willing to engage with a brand that shows interest in their specific goals, needs, and pain points.

Finally, let’s talk about creating landing pages for your site. Landing pages are essentially entry points for your visitors. The most common example that comes to mind is your homepage. However, websites can have plenty more landing pages, depending on their audience size and segments.

For instance, a pet supply store that sells bundles for pet owners would likely have several different landing pages. People interested in the cat-themed bundle probably won’t care about the dog bundle and vice versa.

This is another way to make sure users can easily access the content and products that matter most. If you’re able to tap into the needs of your audience, many will stick around and may become customers.

When it comes to optimizing your landing pages to reduce your bounce rate further, videos can help. Research shows that adding videos to landing pages boosts conversions by a jaw-dropping 80%. I believe this is directly tied to the fact that there are more smartphone users than ever before, and many of these people prefer watching videos instead of reading.

You’ll also want to think about your call-to-action (CTA). Your CTA is essentially what you want visitors to do when they are done engaging with your landing page. For example, you may want users to accept a discount, join your email list, or follow you on social media.

We found that personalizing CTAs to match each audience subset resulted in more clicks. In fact, personalized CTAs typically saw 42% more conversions when compared to their generic counterparts. People clicking your CTA are not bouncing from your site, which is our goal.

It’s easy to see how your bounce rate can impact the success of your small business. The tips presented today will help you keep visitors on your site, which will reduce single-page sessions and help you drive more conversions.