How a Responsive Website Can Help With Customer Engagement

What is your goal for your website?

Most people answer that they want to increase conversions – be they customer queries or sales. To do that, you need to engage customers, which is where responsive web design comes into play. With a responsive site, you can boost your conversions by up to 11% and keep your customers coming back for more.

How?

Read on to find out.

What Is a Responsive Website?

The idea behind responsive websites is simple:

Your website has to adapt to not only the customer’s behavior on the site but also the way in which they use it. For instance, the site should display one route for desktop users and another for those accessing it via mobile devices. With a standard website, that isn’t possible – the site tries to look the same on every device, which often leads to a mishmash of design elements. For instance, a mobile site displayed on desktop showcases tons of unused space. Flip the script, and you will get a desktop website with crossed-over elements and an awkward design on mobile.

Neither is good news for business.

A staggering 94% of consumers say they’ll either mistrust or reject a brand outright if they have a poorly designed website.

Responsive design ensures that doesn’t happen – it’s your key to maintaining website consistency across platforms. Better yet, it also means you don’t have to build multiple websites, so there’s no need to register domain names for different sites. You just need one domain. The responsive design takes care of the rest.

How Does Responsive Web Design Boost Customer Engagement?

So, we come to the key question – what does this type of website design have to do with engagement? Consider each of the following as not only an explanation of how responsive design works, but a key reason why you should do it.

Boosting Conversion Rates

It was touched upon earlier and bears repeating – responsive design boosts conversion rates.

By a significant 11% in fact, meaning you get more for your business when you go down the responsive route. At this point, it’s a good idea to explain what a “conversion” is. When it comes to websites, a conversion is any action you want your visitors to take when they’re on your website. The most obvious example is a sale – you’ve converted the visitor if they buy something from your website. However, “conversion” can be a blanket term covering a host of other possible actions:

• Adding an item to a cart
• Sending you a query
• Signing up for a newsletter
• Registering for a membership on your website
• Downloading an eBook or whitepaper

Each is an action. Each is something that you can track through your website analytics. And most importantly, each is something that responsive design helps you achieve.

The question now is simple – why?

It all comes down to the consistency offered by responsive design. Because your website displays well across platforms and browsers, customers feel more confident using it. They identify that your brand cares about their experience. Your website looks professional, which reflects well on you, and the customer is more likely to convert as a result.

Catering to Device Preferences

The days when most people used desktop computers to browse the web are long gone. Today, mobile is king. According to Statista, 59.45% of internet traffic around the world comes from mobile devices.

That number is only going to grow.

The point here is simple – your customers expect to be able to access your site on mobile. In fact, they expect to be able to use it no matter what device or browser they use. They have their preferences and you have to adapt to them, not the other way around. On the customer engagement level, this means that a non-responsive site loses out on customers. Visitors bounce because they’re not getting the experience they want on the device of their choosing.

It all comes back to a stat shared earlier – 94% of customers mistrust websites that don’t display well. They’re uninterested in how much work you’ve done to make it look good on desktop if the site displays poorly on mobile. All they know is that the site looks poor on the device they use for browsing. Don’t let that happen – use responsive web design and you won’t encounter this problem.

Code and Asset Optimization

Moving over to the more technical side, responsive web design ensures the assets on your site load faster. Code, images, and video are collectively optimized for a simple reason – they need to display well across devices. In practice, this means images are compressed so they have smaller file sizes. CSS and JavaScript files are minimized for the same reason. It’s all down to delivering the site to the user’s device in the most efficient way possible.

All of which brings us to a question:

Why does page speed matter?

Web users hate having to wait around for a website to load. They hate it so much that you only have a couple of seconds to deliver your site before they’ll look elsewhere. Think with Google outlines this perfectly. It says that the likelihood of a customer bouncing away from your site increases by 32% if the page load time increases from one second to three.

In other words, a couple of extra seconds could cost you hundreds of visitors.

Add other factors into the mix – search engines often use loading speeds as ranking factors – and you have a clear example of improved customer engagement when you go responsive.

Solve the Engagement Conundrum

Let’s conclude by answering a question:

Why should you care about customer engagement at all?

Beyond the reasons stated in this article, it all comes down to better business. An engaged customer is more profitable to your company. A remarkable 23% more profitable, in fact – that’s how much more profitability, revenue, and relationship growth businesses report from their engaged customers during their lifecycles.

A responsive website isn’t a cure-all for your engagement challenges.

But it is a key step in solving them – responsive design keeps people on your site. The longer they spend on your site, the more they learn about you and your products. That learning is key. Familiarity breeds trust, with trust leading to you making more sales than you would with an outdated website.