Tips to encourage user registration and participation
One of the many challenges of running a Website is attracting an audience that will stay loyal. It’s a jungle out there and there may be a dozen of Websites that offer similar content to yours. How can you differentiate yourself?
| To build loyalty, you may want to engage users by including a community. Setting up social tools can be relatively easy but actually convincing your users to sign-up can be a challenge. There are a few hurdles that the typical user faces before deciding to adhere to a site. Most of these are related to poor user experience design. Understanding these common mistakes will give you insight on how to avoid them. |  |
- Clear Website purpose
Sometimes the purpose of a site just isn’t obvious. Most users will likely quit any website after a few seconds if they don’t understand its goal the first time around. It must be obvious in order to capture their interest. The challenge is to appeal to all types of users even the skeptical ones. They have to be able to understand what’s in it for them and what are the benefits of subscribing. Only then will users take a deeper look and consider signing up. - Tedious signup process
Once they get past signup, users will then have to get through the sign-up process. This is another step in which they can easily get discouraged and quit. This process has to be optimized with the user in mind: less forms to complete and fewer steps. If you don’t need a signup process, great! Users don’t want tons of conditions imposed upon them while signing up. - Retention problems
Getting your users through the first hurdles is hard enough, but the toughest challenge is yet to come. After all, filling out a form isn’t that time consuming. After registering, you’ll need to motivate your users to actually invest time and effort. To encourage this behavior, it’s recommended that you get them to use your site as quickly as possible which will also make them discover its benefits. - User interest
Once you get your users to regularly visit your site, you have to keep them interested. It doesn’t have to constantly reinvent itself to stay ahead of competitors but it has to stay relevant in the mind of your subscribers, who might be tempted to leave for other similar sites. If a visitor hasn’t logged in in a while, he has to be reminded of your site and why it’s the best of it’s kind.
 |
As you can see, retaining users is a challenge. Just getting someone to sign-up is hard, keeping them interested in your site, even more. User loyalty is a difficult thing to achieve because there are various sources of information on the Web. That’s why it’s essential to not only implement social tools, but to do it with a top notch user experience in mind.
Suggested Reading
Like this post? Stay Connected with us and Receive Updates Right Away (via RSS)
Asking people to complete a large form to become a member is indeed, not the way to go. Instead you can just ask for a username and password, which will be send over by mail to the subscriber. When the new subscriber logs in, you can ask to complete the other necessary information.