Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

Hi,

Let follow a structured approach.

1. Information: Rich content on the website in the respective topic is a must. Just work on the psycology of the customer and find what he/she wants out of the website, and provide that.

2. Customize your website and allow customer to play around with different options. Just see in case of google there are different options for searching. If a person wants to search for pdf files, he can mention that. This will save customers time and will increase the frequency of customer visiting your website again and again.

3. Always have a colum, which blinks and say - New ... Suppose a person is searching for product innovations and you provide a link saying Latest/ New Innovations of this month, the customer will be forced to stick to the website for long

4. The website should not be cluttered with irrelevant information which the customer dont want.

5. There should always be a site map on the website, which will allow customers to move fast in the data

6. All the major data in form of different categories should be presented on the front page. Suppose, there is a company QAI which deals with quality consulting. SO they have links for CMM, CMMI, Six SIgma etc on the front page, so that users can directly go there

7. Use of menus are very helpful. It is like a shortcut of not visiting several webpages and directly reaching the sub sub category. As in above example, there should a menu with CMM, CMMI .. with sub menus of for software, BPO etc so that the software guys can directly go to their respective page.

Being empthatic will help you win the heart of the customers.

Let me know for any specific details

Nitin Kochhar
Email address deleted by staff

thiti_rath,

We tend to look at this problem differently, so my answer would be a question, why do they need to spend more time on the site?

Unless you have statistical proof that longer visitor sessions translates into higher conversion rates, or in the case of sales increased average order size, then you may not really want longer sessions.

Except in the case of our clients establishing themselves as subject matter experts, or possibly also portal sites, we focus our efforts each month on reducing average session times for sites with aggressive call-to-actions goals.

So which average is better, 3 clicks in 2 minutes for a sale, or 20 clicks and 10 minutes for a sale. Obviously there is more to consider then the amount of time, and that is my point.

If your entry pages are not helping with conversion, then improve the pages so that they move the person into the sales process.

Hope that help,

I'd follow ROIHUNTER's path, but in a very aggressive way. If I didn't have the following on staff, I would contract them for a quick project tomorrow:

a) WEB ANALYTICS expert to analyze the past year's worth of your site traffic data - most viewed pages, links to and from, sources (to prove how much really comes from search engines) etc etc. Let that person make the case as to what the definition of your problems and challenges are. Any other way is just guesswork.

b) INFORMATION ARCHITECT who can review your whole site top to bottom, and make "quick hit" fixes to important things such as consistent navigation. For example, if people are "searching" their way onto a deep page that is just about one of your service offerings, there should be a navigation menu on the left side (or top, wherever) that lists ALL your services. This person can check all your back buttons, and recommend any calls-to-action to move people to the right locations elsewhere on your site. Hopefully, most of the fixes would be related to the problems identified by the Analytics person.

You should also be certain whoever is running your search engine marketing program is up to date on the practice of search engine optimization - you might be simply suffering the fate of suboptimal search key words (or suboptimal tagging in the case of organic search).