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5 Ways to Reduce your Bounce Rate
When it comes to your email marketing, measuring your bounce rate might seem like the be all and end all.
But it's important to remember that marketing success varies from business to business, so you don't always need to sweat the small stuff.
For example, a new start-up might find a bounce rate of 50% a massive success.
Yet a well-established marketing agency might be disappointed with the same result.
Whatever your metrics, there's no denying that bounce rates are an indication of how relevant your website is to your visitors.
If it gets too high, it's likely you've got some technical or content issues.
Knowing where to start is often the hardest part. That's why we've put together the best ways to keep your bounce rate in line with your marketing goals and keep them as low as possible for your business.
Consider other metrics
Generally speaking, marketing metrics should never be looked at in isolation.
There’s usually a whole host of reasons why something is smashing it or underperforming, creating a knock on effect across the rest of your analytics.
If you’ve noticed your bounce rate is increasing, then don’t start making changes until you understand what’s going on. A good place to start is looking at the average time a visitor spends on your site.
This will give you a good idea as to what is turning your prospects on (so you can deliver more of it), and what is turning them off. This part is usually the most important.
For example, if you can see that overall, visitors are spending a healthy amount of time browsing your site, you know there’s decent buying intent.
But then they hit the blog page. And all of a sudden they disappear. It’s likely the issue is the content you’re producing.
You can also back this up by checking out your user flow. You can do this with Google Analytics by looking at Behaviour Flow.
This will show you the path your website visitors tend to take as they navigate through your site. If they’re dropping like flies on a certain page, you’ll be able to double check here.
The good thing is you’ll also get an insight into your visitors’ thought process before they make a purchase. You can use this to tailor your content at each digital touchpoint accordingly, another sure way to reduce that bounce rate.
Similarly, if you want even more granular analytics data here, why not take a look at CANDDi? Use our 30-day free trial to monitor your website visitors journey on an individual level.
You’ll know exactly which visitor has come from where, the exact pages they’ve each visited and the time spent browsing. If that’s not enough, you can get their contact details too to reach out when they seem to have disappeared.
Whatever you choose, the key is to conduct a thorough investigation before making significant changes.
Optimise page load speed
Page speed is everything. Whether it’s customer experience, SEO or bounce rates, if your landing page is taking ages to load, you can kiss your prospect goodbye.
In a digital age when everything is available instantaneously, your website visitors aren’t looking to wait around. In fact, 47% of your website visitors won’t wait for longer than 2 seconds.
It might seem a little impatient, but we’ve all done it. If something isn’t loading we hit that ‘x’ button and look elsewhere.
That’s not what you need for your bounce rate. After all, if you can’t even get your content across to your website visitors, how do you expect them to stick around?
So to optimise your page load speed, you should follow SEO best practice.
You can start by ensuring any images you’ve used are optimised in line with metatags, your content is compressed and HTTP requests are kept to a minimum.
Include a clear CTA
Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But in a panic to make sure your prospects are actually converting, you can fall into the trap of littering CTAs everywhere.
Unfortunately, the more CTAs that you place on your landing page, the more confusing the website journey becomes.
At the end of the day, the purpose of a CTA is to guide your website visitors to a desired outcome.
Multiple CTAs may seem like a good idea to hammer the message home, but by giving your website visitors so many options, you’ll overwhelm them.
And what happens next? They bounce.
Instead, consider each type of visitor you get to your website. What is their intent? What are they looking for?
Once you know this, you can create a range of landing pages that suit each buyer’s preference by showing them how you’re ready to help them achieve their goal.
A one size fits all approach just doesn’t work here. It doesn’t in most marketing, to be fair.
Of course you should also design a clear CTA to support each page too.
Personalise your content
As we’ve just discussed, personalisation is key.
It’s key to customer experience, it’s key to building trust, and it’s key to reducing bounce rates. Why? Because it grabs your visitor’s attention immediately.
You can implement real-time personalised website banners or pop-ups that you allow to showcase an image, message, or offer that is most likely to appeal to each visitor.
They could be based on the categories they regularly browse, previous products purchased, industry or location. Another good one is whether they are new or frequent visitors to your website too. Don’t be afraid of exit intent pop-ups either. If a website visitor is just about to bounce, then why not try to stop them? The likelihood is they’re looking for your help anyway.
An exit intent pop-up appears just as your website visitor hovers over the top of the page or ‘x’ button. It will automatically pop-up with a targeted message to try and keep them online.
You could tailor your message to direct them to your help and support team/ page in case they can’t find what they want. Or maybe try a product offer to entice them into making a purchase.
A simple email sign up is super effective too so you can reach out to them at a later date.
If you want a hand getting started, our CANDDi Capture is a helpful little tool. It’s a pop-up form for your site that you can personalize however you see fit.
Want to target a certain demographic? No problem. Want to include time delays for long-lasting visitors? Sure thing. Whatever it takes to slow that bounce rate, we’ve got it covered.
Not to mention it can increase your conversion rate by 400%, too. No biggie.
Mobile optimisation
Last but not least, there’s mobile optimisation. We spoke about page speed before, but catering for how that page is actually being loaded is equally as important.
If done incorrectly, your webpage will be all mashed up or not load at all, neither of them good for your bounce rate and more importantly, reputation.
Even in the B2B market, mobile devices account for c.50% of website traffic worldwide, meaning if your website isn’t optimised for mobile, visitors will bounce quicker than you can say competitor.
Launching an entire website as mobile optimised is no easy task. So start off by ensuring that any new or particularly important landing pages are optimised first.
This could be anything from your landing pages for PPC ads, or your most popular product pages.
If you need a hand getting your bounce rate under control, reach out to the team at help@canddi.com and see what CANDDi can do for you today.
