Your visitors closed the browser... oh no! Will you ever see them again? 

Take a deep breath. This is not the end. Well, not yet. 

Bounce happens to the best of us. But if your bounce rate is high, then it's time to put some effort into enticing visitors back and keeping them there. Or you may risk losing them forever. So what can you do to get users to return after they bounce?

First, you have to get them back on your site. Then, you need to improve your website's user experience (UX) to engage them with your content to prevent them from bouncing. Here's how to cover all your bases:

1. Collect Visitor Information

If you want to reach out to visitors after they bounce, you must know how to find them. Implement a lead generation mechanism to capture prospects' contact information (e.g., subscribe to your email list to get a discount code) so you can continue communicating with them after they leave the site. A pop-up can be an effective way to collect information, but don't overdo it! Otherwise, it'll annoy visitors and increase your bounce rate.

2. Use Email Marketing

Now that you have your visitors' information, you can engage with them after they leave your site. Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to build audience relationships and stay top of mind. Besides promotional content, you can provide helpful and relevant information to build trust with the recipients. Many brands send a welcome email series to educate prospects about their products and share their brand stories.

3. Leverage Retargeting Ads

Get in front of bounced users with retargeting ads — you can show the products they were interested in and offer a discount code to entice them back to your site and complete the purchase. Alternatively, you can upload your email list and create a custom audience to target your ads. Make your ads more relevant by segmenting the audience using various criteria, such as location, preferences, and interests.

4. Create Dedicated Landing Pages

If you're promoting specific products via email or online ads, don't just send people to your homepage — it's like kicking them back to square one to start all over again! Instead, build dedicated landing pages that reflect the content or offer in the email or ad to place visitors further down the sales funnel. They can help create a seamless customer experience and make it easy for customers to complete their purchases.

5. Implement Marketing Personalization 

71% of consumers expect brands to offer personalized experiences and interactions. Use a centralized customer data platform (CDP) to help you deliver relevant content, offers, and product recommendations based on each visitor's profile information and past interactions with your brand on various channels. When visitors return to your site, you can pick up where they have left off to progress them down the sales funnel.

6. Provide Real-time Customer Support

Many visitors will leave a website if they can't find the information and products they need or hit a snag when placing an order. But many will stick around if they can get assistance right away, and live chat allows you to do just that. In fact, 79% of companies find that live chat can help improve sales, revenue, and customer loyalty because it helps you keep more visitors on your site, build customer relationships, and facilitate the buying process.

7. Improve Website Loading Speed

If you drive people back to your website, you don't want them to bounce again! One low-hanging fruit to minimize bounce rate is to improve your loading speed. Get this: Google found that when page load time goes from one second to three, the bounce rate increases by 32%! You can improve site load speed by optimizing the images, minifying the code, reducing redirects, using asynchronous and defer loading, and enabling browser caching.

8. Diversify Your Content Types

Different people prefer to consume content differently. Some visitors may want to read every detail about a product, while others prefer to look at pictures. Meanwhile, some buyers may choose to watch a demo video. Diversifying content formats can help you communicate with visitors more effectively and deliver an engaging experience for a wider audience.

9. Simplify Your Website Navigation

People will get frustrated and leave your website if they can't find the products or information they want. Simplify the navigation and include robust search features to help users achieve their goals as easily as possible. Also, highlighting relevant products and surfacing the most searched-for information can help streamline the website user experience.

10. Optimize For Mobile

Mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 58.99% of global website traffic, so optimizing your website for mobile is key to lowering your bounce rate. Build your website with responsive templates and ensure it's easy to navigate on the small screen. Test it on different browsers and devices to check that critical content and interactions (e.g., call-to-action buttons) are displayed at the top of the page to minimize scrolling.

11. Troubleshoot with Analytics

Your website analytics can tell you which pages have the highest bounce rate. Use the insights to prioritize your effort and focus on the most problematic pages. Remember to consider context — people may leave a page when they have achieved their goals (e.g., after reading an informative blog post or completing a purchase.) You can cross reference a page's bounce rate with its dwell time to see if visitors engaged with the content before leaving.

12. Give People Reasons To Come Back

Visitors (even your most loyal fans) leave a website without making a purchase more often than not. And that's ok! Keep them coming back by creating engaging experiences such as an online community, current and valuable content, insider scoops from influencers, and a loyalty program where visitors can earn points by interacting with your website or sharing their feedback. These "hooks" can get visitors to build the habit of returning to your website and engaging with your brand.

13. Ask Your Visitors

Ask visitors simple questions via live chat about their experience with your site (e.g., if they can find what they need), or send them a quick survey to see why they left your website. Gathering user feedback and letting people know how you act on their comments can help you improve the user experience and build trust by showing customers that you value their input. 

Putting It All Together

It isn't too late to take action when you see your bounce rate rise. But even better is incorporating the tactics above into your overall website strategies from the get-go to increase engagement. 

Building an effective website involves many moving parts that must work together to deliver a seamless and engaging customer experience. Besides design and development, you should conduct user testing and design an audience and revenue model to ensure that you're addressing your target market's needs — and that's what we do to help our clients engage with their visitors and drive conversions.

Get in touch to see how we can help you build an engaging website to achieve your business objectives.