Growing your community – Features that set you apart part II
Last week I talked about the importance of developing new and unique features to make your forum community stand out above the crowd in order to win & retain visitors. But the story doesn’t end with adding features, there’s a lot on off the shelf forum software to customize and customize it you must. In the second part of this series I explain a few of the prime areas to change because at the end of the day to win the user over your site needs to get them back.
When it comes to using features to drive site usage and interest, what you do shouldn’t end with new developing something new. As I mentioned in my first post, a great deal of forum development is done by programmers without thought to User Interface or best practices [this is especially true for the lower-tier products]. As a result there are some fundamentally broken parts of almost every forum out there, things which simply doom sites to have low conversion rates and high bounce rates.
Take a look at your site from the perspective of a user – how do they get there? Most forums find the bulk of their traffic coming in on subpages – forums, threads, photos, etc… I’ve seen some sites that had their top organic search term drive less than 1% of traffic, when you have stats like that you know people are entering all over the place. This means a lot of wandering users but again, most forums aren’t setup to talk to new visitors at all, in fact most forums treat them like they must know the site to be that deep. Think about it – a visitor google searches for a long phrase topic, a forum pops up since the forum has content on the subject but what the visitor gets is a thread. There’s no way to get to a Q&A on the subject, nothing telling them they can participate in the discussion, no next step, no direction. So unless all of your visitors are forum pros, the experience is lots of confusion, little direction. Most forums have huge bounce rates as a result.
Step forward a few ticks and assume the visitor does hang around enough to figure out that the site is a user community. They want to join so what’s next… click some button called register and this is what they’ll likely see:
If this was a lead gen form on any commercial site someone would be fired. Boxy layout, a page that scrolls when there’s all of 10 fields on it and absolutely no sense as to benefits, costs or next steps. If the visitor wasn’t certain about the site’s purpose or the process this page isn’t going to help much.
So how do you fix these issues? Take a traditional approach. Redo the registration page to something simple like in the example below which I’ve successfully launched for several clients. The results? Funnel completion rates for one client went from under 50% to over 85%. 15% abandonment is something most lead gen sites would kill for.
Here’s an example of a basic, moderately optimized registration page:
Fixing millions of potential “landing pages” to guide visitors in topic by topic isn’t possible but with some basic checks, you can make a great step. Greet guests with a message explaining the site, listing the options (other tools, registration benefits, etc…). If you have the technology resources and the time to do it, develop a logic tree and link topics to other pages, micro-portals. If you have a wiki this works wonders… someone hits a page on a very refined topic and at the top, after their welcome greeting, is a simple list of related topics. Boom, they get more content.
Every aspect of the site is up for change and should be reviewed. Most forums use a stock support page to get help, many never change their error message in the event of an outage, or their welcome email which reaches every member and so on and so forth. I encourage every one of my clients to visit their forum as a guest, register again and review the interface and copy in detail, you should too. If you really want to go further ask a few friends or family members to go through your site and complete goals, their feedback is invaluable at understanding how someone with no experience with the site sees it.
As a final thought, consider for a second who makes it to your forum and what your goals should be. I know most forum owners outside large corporations have never considered personas but they should – you should. There’s a few rules tossed around out there that explain just why. 10% — Out of tens of thousands of visits you’re lucky to get 10% to register and 10% of those will be active at any given time. With that mind, you need to treat people properly. The typical guest is at your site for information. Not to participate, no to talk… just to get information. Thus your goal for them is to get a second pageview. To get a third and a fourth. Get them involved just enough to build a little awareness in hopes they return later and maybe, just maybe, increase the registration rate a few ticks.
Another persona set exists in your current membership. It’s great to say you have 100,000 members but if those 100,000 came over an 8 year period and only 5% are active, the new competitor with 25,000 visitors 25% of whom are active has you beat. For those that do register only part will ever post and far less will keep posting but many will or would “lurk” [browse without being active]. Again, you can’t stop this, people will fall out of the activity cycle, but you can respond to and embrace it. You can use messages and email to direct people to be more active but there’s no way to get them all to be active. So instead communicate to keep them engaged as well. People who don’t post lose touch faster which means you need to be reaching out to them. Newsletters with information [content], event reminders, whatever makes the most sense for your niche use it. This keeps you top of mind and increases the odds that someone returns to you later. People don’t have to be actively adding to be of value, the more they read the more traffic you have and the more likely they are to jump back in overtime and use those new features from before.
Look at your community in terms of who is there, what their goals are and develop features, navigation and messages that corresponds to all of them, not just to your power users. When you do this your overall activity increases as does your participation and satisfaction. One size fits all just doesn’t work in an area with so many types.
Remember, there’s always another community looking to target the same niche, that’s the nature of something with such a low cost of entry. To stay top or become top you have to offer more than the guy next door and that means implementing ideas that are not just what you think is good but features that people actually have a use for, can figure out how to use and can find.
