Boost Your Website’s Engagement Potential with These Header Design Tips

Visitor engagement is an important metric that can help you increase your conversion rates as well. If the people who land on your website like what they see and want to learn more, you will have numerous opportunities to demonstrate your value. On the other hand, if they aren’t engaged and bounce from your homepage, that opportunity will be gone.

Here are six tips for boosting your engagement potential with your homepage header design:

Provide a Content Window with Intuitive Search Functionality

A splendid way to increase your engagement rate is to allow visitors to search your website as soon as they land on it.

Most leads will come to you for the first time without extensive knowledge about your brand and offer. Some of them may have the time and interest to browse, check out several pages and gauge what you are about. Others will just want to know if you can solve their pain point as soon as possible.

Search provides an instant engagement avenue, and it’s incredibly valuable. You’re not just offering a point of interest: you are letting visitors create their own experience with your brand, entering search terms that match their personal needs and interests.

By placing the search option in the header of your homepage, you are enabling this option immediately. And your hasty visitors will very much appreciate it.

The key is to make the search highly functional and intuitive. It’s meant to add value to the basic navigational experience a main menu provides, and it certainly needs to be very easy to use.

For example, stock market news site MarketBeat has a high-quality search function that ticks all the relevant boxes:

• Search results appear even before you start typing. This will help you get a general idea of what you can look for, and you may even immediately see something of interest. It also testifies to the website’s size and organizational scheme.
• There are several search categories to explore: companies, data, articles, and cryptocurrencies. This lets you find more than the latest stock data via the search option and provides all kinds of valuable information in a matter of minutes.
• The results change as you type, so you are likely to get a relevant match in less time. You can also take in more information this way, even if you just read the latest news headlines.

Source: Marketbeat.com

Stimulate Emotions That Trigger Interest

A great way to boost visitor engagement is to make them feel something. The fear of missing out is often used to trigger engagement. However, it makes customers feel a somewhat negative emotion. They are made to contemplate a purchase because they’re afraid, not because they’re excited.

This tactic works exceptionally well, of course, so if you are in the e-commerce space, you can certainly use it. Make sure not to continually dangle something in front of your customers, as they will start to resent constantly being made to feel like they need to spend money, even if they’ve just come to check out your latest collection.

You can also aim to trigger positive emotions. You can make your visitors feel calm and relaxed, happy, and make them laugh. Look at Lords and Labradors. They have gone for cute in their header, and the sleeping puppy makes you feel safe and at ease. It just puts you in a good mood. You’re likely to keep browsing, at least to see more cute puppies.

Source: Lordsandlabradors.co.uk

You can also make the visitor think. If you pose a question that they may not have the answer to, or if you present them with an interesting fact, they are likely to keep exploring, just to learn more.

This is what ATH Sport does with their Are You Getting Enough Protein question. Anyone who is looking for supplements has probably considered their daily protein intake already. They want to improve their health and fitness levels, so the question is likely to trigger an inquisitive response. Are they, in fact, getting enough protein?

The brand immediately offers a personalized solution, which is the only way to make this tactic work. If you make the visitor look for the answer, you are using it wrong. The answer needs to be right there. In this case, you can immediately access the protein calculator, see where you stand, and check out the brand’s protein supplements.

Source: Athsport.co

Be Super Clear About What You’re Selling

A simple tactic for keeping visitors engaged is clarity. You’ve probably seen numerous websites yourself that are not at all clear about what they are selling. They’ve written complicated descriptions in an attempt to use the relevant keywords or make themselves sound professional. It just ends up confusing leads.

Your best bet is to communicate clearly. Highlight what makes you different and why a customer should care. You will never appeal to everyone, and some visitors will bounce. But that is never your goal. You want to appeal to a certain audience segment, and you are writing for them.

Check out Vivion. They have several great messages in their header, most notably the one highlighting their ethics and product safety. This is what the majority of their audience will care about: is this product actually any good, can I use it safely, will it be harmful? Overcoming this initial obstacle is a simple matter of one great sentence.

Source: Vivion.com

If you have the budget for it, you can take your messaging to the next level with the use of video. Create one that will tell your brand’s story, differentiate you from the competition and frame your product the right way.

You can do this by shooting customer interviews, creating a story-based narrative, or even doing an animated video. The choice is yours!

GetSafe is a good example of a brand that uses a bit of wit and humor in their video to help their audience understand why their product matters. They show you how the product works, clearly highlight its benefits, and let the story speak for itself. Nothing too over the top, but a great way to stand out and make themselves memorable.

Source: Getsafe.com

Overcome Obvious Conversion Obstacles

Your header is a great space for overcoming some obvious and common conversion obstacles.

Most of your visitors will come to you with a worry. There will be something they are concerned about, and the sooner you are able to assuage that fear, the better.

Some of the most common conversion obstacles include:

• Shipping rates
• Returns options
• Product quality
• Price
• Delivery times

By addressing them in your header, you will put your visitors in a better mood and make them want to engage with you further.

You don’t have to address all of these points, though. Pick the ones that most likely apply to your audience, and start there. For example, if you offer a free trial, you can make it clear that you don’t require a credit card to sign up for it. This is likely to get you more signups, which you can then nurture into paying customers.

Mixtiles have, for example, chosen to focus on their free worldwide shipping option. They make note of this fact twice, in their header and just below it. They understand that it’s probably what would deter most of their customers from converting, so they have put this information front and center.

Then, they also make note of their satisfaction guarantee and the fact that their frames stick to any wall, so you don’t even need to damage your space with a nail. These are great points to note before you start looking at their actual products.

Source: Mixtiles.com

Provide Tangible Social Proof

Speaking of overcoming obstacles, another great way to address them is to provide some social proof. That way, you may not need to speak about a specific issue directly — you can highlight your quality and value by referring to others.

There are plenty of ways to include social proof in your header.

You can use a customer testimonial as part of your unique selling proposal. Since customers are more likely to trust a review than your own copywriting, this tactic can make quite an impact.

You can also feature your star reviews from major third-party websites that have a proven track record. Trustpilot and Capterra are great choices, as they lend a lot of their own credibility to your website.

This is what Visme does on their homepage. Since they have some pretty high ratings, it’s easy (and effective) to boast about them. They also have another great social proof element, which is this sentence: Used by 20,525,288 people in 133 countries and counting.

This one statement is the best engagement and conversion spark you could ask for. If there are already 20 million people trusting this brand, they must be doing something right. Why wouldn’t you check them out?

Source: Visme.co

Include a Video

We’ve already touched upon the benefit of using video as a way to tell your story and to be clear about the product or service you are offering. It is a great way to boost engagement rates if used in other ways as well.

For example, video can be purely used to show your product. A short clip of your key items in action, being used by different people and shown from different angles, is a great engagement booster.

If your product is complicated or if you need to offer some concrete proof that it works, you can do an explainer video. Customer testimonials can also be used in video format in the header, and you can also film a brief video of a member of staff or management talking about the brand.

The point of this video is to establish a connection with your audience. Make them relate to you, make them feel something positive, make them want to see more.

Obe Fitness is a great example of this. Their header videos are dynamic, inspirational, positive, and uplifting. They literally want to make you move, which is the entire point of the brand. After all, the brand created its entire message around “movement changes everything.”

As soon as you land on their homepage, you want to put your workout wear on and start moving. You’re bound to click on another video, check out their programs and classes, and see how much it would cost to become a part of the gang.

Source: Obefitness.com

Wrapping Up

Consider these header design ideas to improve website engagement. Don’t forget to first consider what your audience is looking for, and align your header with their pain points and interests.