There’s a popular notion that the quality of time people spend with you is a sign of how valuable you are to them. You are wondering how this relates to your online store.
For you to record any sales as an online retailer, customers have to spend a certain amount of time browsing through your store. We can then conclude that the average time spent on site by customers has a relationship with whether they buy an item or not.
Getting customers to visit your store is one thing; making them spend more time on your site to improve your store’s ranking and service is another.
The average time on site for a visitor might be proportional to how quickly they make their purchase decision, the number of products they add to their cart, and whether they check out their carts.
While a visitor or customer is in your store if they spend more time one of your marketing strategies can influence their purchase decision. First, they need to spend time on your site to come across the offers and goodies you can offer them.
The average time spent on your store will be determined by other marketing strategies combined with the average time spent on your store.
That is why to increase sales, you need to make your customers spend more time in your store. There is no way you can boost sales if visitors spend a split second when visiting.
What Is The Average Time Spent On A Website?
The Average Time Spent On Site is the average time a visitor spends when they visit your store. This is determined from the time a user clicks on your store’s URL till the time they exit your page.
The metric for deducing the average time spent on site for your store is dividing the total amount of time all your customers spent while visiting your store by the number of users or customers you have.
To discover how long visitors stay on your site, you can use Google Analytics to get the average time spent on site.
As much as the time customers spend on your store can be a determining factor for their purchase decisions, there is no validation that there is a correlation between the time spent on site and the checkout rate.
However, customers need more time to browse through your product catalog before they can make a purchase decision. Thus, the average time spent on your store can eventually improve your sales.
Benefits Of Average Time Spent On Your Shopify Store
1. Increased Revenue
The longer a customer stays on your website, the better your chances are of influencing their buying decisions with marketing tools you have in place.
A countdown timer could be the reason a visitor is persuaded to buy. Another customer can be influenced by a discount they come across as they browse through your Shopify store.
In all ways, a longer stay on your store’s website can boost sales and revenue. The other advantage is the possibility of increasing ad revenue if you allow other brands to advertise on your site.
The average time on site of visitors can attract advertisers to place an ad on your site. Your revenue chances for promotional ads increase as a visitor spends more time on your site.
2. Increased Conversion Rate Chances
In trying to reduce cart abandonment and increase the checkout rate, customers need to spend more time on your store to achieve this. If a visitor stays longer on your website, there is a better chance that they will convert into a customer.
A first visit might not convert into a sale but can influence them to take action, such as signing up for an email list.
For Shopify merchants looking to improve sales conversion, you should be looking at how to make your visitors stay longer than they intend to.
How Average Time Spent Can Improve Sales
How to know that the time spent on a store’s webpage can determine how much a customer will spend is to compare what it is like when shopping from a brick-and-mortar store.
When shopping for items from a physical outlet, the chances are the longer you stay, the more items you tend to pick which means that you spend more money as you spend more time.
This can also be effective when correlating the average time spent on a webpage with how much a customer spends or the number of items they are able to add to their cart. For a customer to add multiple items to a cart that means they need to spend an average time of 2-3 minutes as analyzed by DataBox.
The question now is, how do you make your customers stay longer when browsing through your store to increase their chances of purchasing an item or more than they planned for.
Actionable Steps To Increase Average Time Spent on Your Store
1. Optimize website performance and speed.
The first thing to increase the average time spent by customers on your store is to improve the time it takes for your store’s URL to load, the design, and usability of the website.
When a visitor finds a site struggling to load, it might tickle off their interest to know what is going on in your store and might even cause them to exit your page faster than expected. You need to optimize your site’s performance to help customers navigate the store comfortably.
The way this helps you increase the time spent is that, once customers can navigate from page to page quickly, they get to see more of what you have in store. And while they browse through your products, a customer might find an item that grabs their attention.
Read: 6 Ways To Create A Sense Of Urgency In Sales
2. Plan a strategy for maintaining the average time spent by customers.
To get a customer to patronize you in this modern e-commerce day where there are millions of alternatives, it will be hard to stay on your customers’ minds for a long period.
Keeping your brand in their faces simply serves as a reminder of their activities in your store. The most relevant way to do this is to create an email broadcast and notify customers of their pending activities.
Using an Inactive Tab Message can serve as a reminder for customers that they were in the middle of browsing a product in your store or that they have some items abandoned in their carts.
The inactive tab message also helps customers who navigate away from your store to recognize that they were searching for a product. This is achieved using the tab title. As little as the tab title space in browsers is, it can be converted into a marketing technique.
StoreBundle features an Inactive Tab Message app that helps keep your customers active when browsing your store. When a customer navigates away from their cart page, the tab title indicates the number of items they have in their cart.
3. Use social proof to gain trust
You can add the reviews you get from your customers to your store’s index page to create social proof and help first-timers make a purchase decision based on what they read about your service.
This can help you convert more first-time visitors into customers and then returning customers.
Most people, when planning to buy from a store for the first time, they tend to check out the reviews the store has from existing buyers. This is to guide them against purchasing from the wrong hands.
Having your social proof on your store’s website can increase the average time spent on your site by customers.
4. Lead offers
Welcoming visitors to your store with a welcome bar or pop-ups with offers attached can help you gain more stay time from visitors.
Their curiosity would want them to check out the offer you have in stock for them. And most of the time, customers tend to use this offer on their first purchase.
Using offer leads does not only increase the average time spent by customers, but it also increases your chances of getting more sales.
StoreBundle is a Shopify app that features a Welcome Bar and a Pop-Up Bar app that can help you create lead offers for your store in less than a minute without any coding skills. Get started for free.
5. Easy navigation
The first impression a customer gets after landing on your index page determines whether they will stay longer or close the tab.
That is why, from a customer’s first view, they should be able to understand how your store works. When navigation is understandable, it will be persuasive to a visitor to stay back and check other pages.
6. Use images and videos
Using visual content like videos, pop-ups, quality images, and infographics can enhance readability and improve the average time spent on site for your store.
As a Shopify store with the goal of getting sales conversion, having high-end, quality photography for your products can increase the chances of a visitor staying longer on your site.
Images and videos can help visitors navigate your store easily. It also can be an avenue to show them how a product is used or the many ways to maintain a product if they eventually buy the item.
This way customers get an extra advantage and they are not only persuaded to buy, but they also get a how-to-use guide for the product.
7. Upsell on product pages
When a customer checks out a product to get the description or a better view of the item, you can suggest related products on the product page. This way the customer can be attracted to checking out more items. This way their interest in the site increases.
Upselling is a marketing tool for e-commerce store owners as well as a channel to improve the time customers spend on your store.
You can also upsell in the cart. This way you use a fast-selling item as a trigger for a slow-moving product. Once the customer adds item A to their cart, they get a pop-up of item B. Many times, customers want to see what that item looks like.
The StoreBundle toolkit has a Cart Upsell app that can help Shopify merchants increase their customers’ average time spent on site.
Wrap
Increasing the average time spent by visitors on your store can give you the result that you’ve always wanted with regards to sales.
An improvement in average time spent is a chance to make other marketing strategies you have kept in place effective.
Remember, to get a customer to buy your product, you need to get them to stay on your site for some time.
