You got someone to your website. Just as important, you got them to “stick.” they didn’t leave but clicked through to another page.

This is like hooking a fish. That first tug on the line. Don’t start cooking dinner, just yet, but this is a real prospect, Someone is interested.

Now what?

ENGAGEMENT

As the dictionary says, get the person involved in, participating in. Attract and hold the attention or interest.

When the housewife is so into her soap opera, she doesn’t notice the dinner burning, she is engaged.

When the kid clowning with friends doesn’t even notice he is bleeding because he is laughing so hard, he is engaged.

When the shy young man is so enchanted by a girl, that he overcomes his terror, walks up to her and starts talking, he’s engaged.

While there is such a thing as an impulse buy, which requires little involvement, or a forced purchase (such as buying car insurance), many purchases – certainly any larger purchase – requires a considerable amount of engagement for a sale to occur.

A crude measure is simply the amount of time spent on it. A more accurate measure is “non-bounce pages per session.” Meaning the average number of pages on the website someone who doesn’t bounce, visits.

In short, they go to a third and maybe a tenth page. They’re shopping. They are finding out about your product or service.

They’re engaged.

You can’t force people to do it and really, you can’t trick people into doing it. Governments force people to engage with them (shudder) and con artists try and trick you into it.

But this is salesmanship at its purest we are talking about. Ultimately every sale occurs because of the buyer’s willingness to buy. It shows up most starkly in engagement – that part of the process where a person is spending time on your website not because they are being forced to but because they want to.

This is the same stuff that makes a reader of a good novel keep turning pages. It would be a highly productive way to go about improving your website: think of it as an effort to enthrall and get that site visitor turning pages, entirely out of the fact they are enjoying, interested in, or are fascinated by what they are reading.

Maybe you think I’m straining the point. People aren’t going to be THAT interested in a website selling toaster ovens. Maybe not. Or maybe there are just too few good writers out there.

It’s a viewpoint you rarely see realized in marketing and in websites. You could sum it up as: Don’t be boring.

I think of the Geico campaign from 2004, “So easy a caveman could do it.” If you haven’t seen it, look it up. That ad is selling car insurance, and other insurance companies have been trying – and failing – to bottle that same magic for the last 20 years.

Think about it. Maybe you can help make it a less boring marketing world.