Today, every business wants to reap the maximum benefits of the digital experience. Interactive web design is one way that to enhance a visitor’s browsing time when they land on your site, which is a great way to capitalize on visitor interest and potential business.

If you own a small business, take inspiration from popular interactive websites and find creative ways to use those ideas on your own site in a unique and interesting way. That doesn’t mean you can just copy their strategies, but it’s a good way to improvise your own content.

Interactive web design is the process of incorporating software into your web page to improve user engagement levels through a more pleasing and relevant visitor experience.

In this age of global competition, digital presence is not enough. You need to make the most out of online opportunities to grab the attention of genuine visitors. To achieve this goal, interactive web design is a major benefit. The ability to provide your users or interested parties in a more involved, curated way with your business or products might be the push you need to convert a lead into a sale.

Of course, sometimes interactive can also refer to the copy and tone of your site overall. If you talk to visitors in a self-important way, without designing your website around constructive and quality customer feedback, it can be hard to drum up engagement.

Your website should include plenty of chances for visitors to engage. Things like sharing, voting, playing a game, or any number of on page activities can get visitors thinking and involved in the content of your side. But make sure all of these activities are focused on one, main goal: showing users what you, your brand, and your website are all about. Let’s take a look at some of the top benefits and methods for implementing quality interactive design:

Build Trust With Buyer Psychology

Just imagine. How would you react if a charity website you’ve never visited immediately asked for a $500 donation? You’d ignore it, even if it’s a great cause, right? You have no idea where the money is going, how it would help the people in distress. There’s no info on the non-profit’s business connections, techniques, vision, or leadership.

Now, imagine the same website asking for $20 after you participate in a poll that shows how many people have contributed to the cause before you. Learning more about the charitable organization in question before hand can build trust, which makes it easier for visitors to consider donating $20.

The same is true for any business. In essence, you’re always asking people to trust you with their time and money. Whether that’s for a product, a donation, or some kind of service.

To reach your audience, you need to communicate with them and explain the value in an accessible and succinct way. That way people will be in a better mood, view your business more favorably and then, presumably, be more willing to part with their hard earned cash.

You can build trust all sorts of ways through interactive web design. Implement a quiz or a poll or a game that helps people learn a bit more about what you do or sell. These little things can make a huge difference when it comes to first impressions and building confidence in a new or captive audience.

Relate To Your Customer In Meaningful Ways

Did you know that around 90% of buyers today look for a website with self-service elements? Most say that it helps answer their questions and direct their decision making process. It’s important to remember that the majority of consumers will interact with a website as their primary form of interacting with a business.

Even if you are offering an excellent customer experience when interacting with people, neglecting the nearly 70% of people that choose strictly online interaction means you’re missing out on tons of opportunities to build better relationships with significant portions of your audience. With the abundance of choice, you can also be sure that your competitors are offering the experiences that you may not be providing.

Studies indicate that almost 3 in 4 people that interact with a local website will visit the physical store within one or two days. That means with a decent website that supports user searches and offers a clear, concise understanding of your business, you could even increase foot traffic through improved web design.

The point here is that relating to customers in a meaningful way means doing more than simply offering a good in person customer experience. You have to account for your entire audience, including the people online. An interesting way to add interactive elements to your website is to consider what makes in person interactions so successful, and try to translate that to an online experience.

Do your on-floor sales reps have a list of questions designed to help clients narrow down what they’re looking for? Turn it into a tiered survey that offers suggestions at each step. Maybe you have your store organized into several colorful sections that match a color to a specific type of product. Organize your website in a similar fashion so people familiar with your brand can connect the website to their in person experiences. Get creative with your web design and incorporate things that you’re already doing with some success.

Boost Rates of Conversions

The main goal is to build up a base of loyal customers. Interactive web design can be something of a double edged sword in this case. Returning to our flow-through suggestion example, where customers go through a series of recommendations to find the product they want, we see that it’s incredibly involved and interactive. The first time, at least. Subsequent uses could be annoying and take too long.

To boost conversions on initial interests, you’ll want something interesting and involved. Something interactive that grabs and keeps a new visitor’s attention without wasting their time. But for return customers? It might be too much. So you want to make sure there’s an option to bypass the process or allow returning visitors to auto fill their answers.

In short, it’s about balance. Provide a solid, eye-catching experience for new folks, and fast tracks for people that know what they want. Choice is important, after all. You might have the most amazing website with an incredibly rich and layered interactive design, but after the fifth visit? You get the idea.

You can look up platforms such as BigDropInc having decades of experience in interactive website designing for its clients. They have a solid portfolio of designs that strike a great balance between functionality and engagement.

Remember if visitors did not find your web pages interactive the first time, they will not care to return to your site. That is because the first impression is the last impression. Drab content, poor web design elements and poor user experience will drive your visitors away. On the contrary, an interactive web design will boost user engagement and motivate them to stay longer on your website.

More Personalized User Experience

Interactive websites are great, but you should do what you can to actively track the engagement or it’ll be impossible to know what works and what doesn’t. Using screen capturing and recording software can help you understand how your users interact with the site, which is great for personalizing and tailoring the interactive elements of your website to offer a better overall user experience.

Based on the findings of a Salesforce survey, 64 percent of individuals cited that they prefer customized brand experiences and another 73 percent said that they want brands to use the information or data they collate to build an even more customized experience. Again, 49 percent of the respondents cited that they would give businesses more information if it uses the data to build a seamless customer experience through interactive web design. 

You can do numerous things based on the data received like guide visitors to what they want, develop relevant content, display offers that are hard to resist, provide an extremely personalized experience, enhance user interactions for more investment in your business, and make things automated. 

Interaction is possible without the requirement for daily, direct involvement with your website visitors and prospective buyers. Therefore, you need to focus on closing deals with interactive web design components and qualified leads. Did you know that your interactive web design helps in nurturing cold leads automatically? You can turn them into hot leads through a customized experience for the users. That is how you can make the most of your limited budget, and optimizing your valuable time. 

Ensure a Promise and a Task to Completion

The online audience has a short attention span and fast web connectivity means they can click away from your website if they do not find your web design elements interactive enough. The visitors want to feel connected without any feeling of loss and their valuable time. If they see your competitor’s more engrossing, they will land up there. 

A good way to keep people on the page is by offering an easy task, or making a bold (but easy to ensure!) promise. Grab the reader’s attention, and then deliver on whatever was implied by the attention grabbing statement. Walk a fine line, however. Going too hard on sales can push people away just as easily.

For example, a wine or tea store could have a banner that reads “Find your perfect tea”. It’s not super exciting, but it might grab a few readers, and it can easily be made into a clickable CTA.

Now if you re-frame that same phrase as a “Perfect Tea Quiz” or something of that nature, where the user is led through a series of questions that identify their tastes and preferences to narrow down recommended tea selections? It’s engaging, it makes people feel involved and recognized by identifying their tastes, and it keeps them on the page to see what their ideal tea is.

It may seem like a silly idea, but the prevalence of interest in simple quizzes and “what kind of character am I” programs and apps is evidence that people are easily influenced when the process has to do with witnessing themselves.

Just be sure to make the engagement practical. At the end of the tea quiz, recommend four to five flavors, then brand out and show what people who liked those flavors went on to purchase. A quiz or interaction based gimmick that doesn’t lead anywhere is almost useless, and users will feel the same way.

Final Words

Many small businesses do not like to invest in interactive web design because they think the process is beyond their budget or once implemented, the website is hard to maintain. Many of these businesses do not have the required skills to design interactive design components and integrate those into the web pages. They do not realize that a lackluster website will not help them drive quality traffic and leads in the long-term. This is where the importance of interactive design comes into play. The design components turn myths into reality and businesses realize the same when they see enhanced user engagement levels. 

Make sure you have an interactive website that helps you to connect with your targeted audience that helps in conversions and squeezes out the competition. When you have interactive web pages, even Google notices that and pushes your site up in the search results pages. It leads to increased traffic and leads.