Five Steps To a Sticky Web Site
If you build it,
they may come. But will they stick
around?
By Joyce L. Bosc
VARBusiness | Aug. 20, 2001
It's a question as old as advertising itself: "How can I get my message to
stick?" Today, advertisers are having the same old problem with a brand-new
medium. This current conundrum
is known as "stickiness," and refers to
the ability of a Web site or ad
to retain the visitor's attention
(page views or minutes per page) for an extended period of time.
When you get down to the basics, Web site stickiness is really not so different
from the three R's of advertising--reach, relevance and retention. These three R's
have played a major role in shaping messages, outlining
markets and advising clients in buying traditional media for years. The same principles
apply to stickiness on the Web--you want to reach and retain page hits by providing
relevant information.
Here are a few helpful hints on how to add the stick to your site.
1. Use In-House Ads--Encourage users to explore your site by displaying
in-house ads that feature particular
portions of your site. Sometimes,
users won't know you provide a
certain feature unless you tell them. This can promote stickiness because you establish
a reputation for providing added value to visitors. In a recent European study on
stickiness, nearly 60 percent of respondents declared that they stayed on sites longer
when they were encouraged in some way to explore further.
2. Meet & Greet--Chat rooms are perhaps one of the most frequently used methods
to create stickiness. They not only allow visitors to interact with each other, but
they help build a sense of community
that visitors can associate to your site.
3. Who's got mail?--Another way to bring visitors back to your site is by providing
a free e-mail service hosted by your site. This not only creates stickiness, because
users would have to visit your page in order to check their e-mail, but it also allows
for some viral marketing tactics. For example, you can send e-mail subscribers notifications
that they have new mail and at the same time let them know about a new feature on
your site.
4. Empower the User--Some sites that are considered to have sticky content are
those that provide users with tools. For example, financial sites that provide budget
calculators, insurance sites that provide online quotes and portals that provide
online translation. These types of tools bring value-added content to the visitor.
5. Keep it Clean--Finally, let's not forget about content and functionality. If
your site is not visually appealing and is difficult to navigate, your visitors will
not stay very long regardless of any bells and whistles you use. Be sure you have
a solid information architecture that makes it easy and logical to get from point
A to point B. The easier you make things for the visitor, the more likely they are
to stick around.
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Joyce L. Bosc is founder and CEO of Boscobel Marketing Communications
Inc. in Silver Spring, Md., one
of the most respected and sought
after branding, public relations and marketing consulting firms in the mid-Atlantic
region. A branding pioneer, Bosc launched the corporate identity and branding of
America Online from its infancy, including AOL's first free software direct mail
campaign. In 1995, she co-founded ESTN Communications Group, to provide niche services
for government outreach.
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