7 interactive website features to engage and convert e-commerce visitors

You can take a page from Disney's playbook when creating your e-commerce website by building stronger connections through a more immersive, interactive experience.

This article will explore 7 interactive website features you can use, including quizzes, surveys and videos. We’ll also highlight examples of these elements in action, and show how to make your site more interactive.  

Quizzes are a fun way for website visitors to interact with your brand. And they don’t require the customer to put in as much effort as they do when completing surveys or forms.  

You can use quizzes in many ways, for example:

• Run competitions: Offer to send a prize to people who get all the questions correct

• Learn about product preferences: Ask people to choose between multiple products

• Recommend products: Use the quiz answers to provide personalized recommendations

The best thing about quizzes is that they can attract newsletter subscribers, which is useful for your e-commerce email marketing efforts. 

Just add a signup form that encourages participants to register for your newsletter. If someone signs up, you can send content to bring these people closer to your brand. 

Cosmetics store Spongelle’s quiz is a great example.

The quiz helps customers choose a product. Before showing the results, the company offers to send participants a 25% off voucher if they sign up for the email list. 

You can easily use MailerLite’s quiz template to build interactive quizzes with multiple question types. Click here to see an example of one of our quizzes in action.

Just select the quiz block in the page builder and then choose the questions you want customers to answer. Then add a signup form to collect email addresses.

Build a quiz for your website with a 30-day free trial of MailerLite. 

Surveys and contact forms are interactive elements that help you learn about your site visitors. Use this knowledge to optimize your website user experience. 

You can discover what customers think about:

• Your products

• Your website experience

• The checkout process

• Your tutorials and learning material

• The quality of customer service interactions

• Whether they are likely to recommend your brand

This knowledge helps you tailor your website towards your customer's needs. 

The MailerLite survey feature is an easy way to add surveys to your website. You can create your own questions in formats like multiple-choice, image, or like/dislike.

You can also use templates for common surveys like net promoter score (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT). These are surveys designed to yield data about the quality of your customer experience (CSAT) or whether customers are happy to recommend your brand (NPS).

You can add surveys to any page on your website. Or you can create specific pages with your survey. Increase the number of people who see them by adding promotional pop-ups that direct visitors to the relevant page. 

And while surveys are a great way to encourage website interaction, you can also use them in other customer interactions. 

For example, you can add surveys to your email newsletter. Or you can use a transactional messaging tool like MailerSend to automatically send surveys to customers after every purchase or service interaction.  

Videos and image galleries are an easy way to make your website more interactive. 

Adding videos to your pages can increase time on page significantly. Wistia found that people spent on average 1.4x longer on pages with video than without. This was a difference of almost two minutes per page. 🤯 

Adding a video to your website or homepage is easy—just grab the embed code from the video hosting site and paste it into your page. You can use your own content or even videos produced by someone else. 

If the video is on YouTube, just follow these steps

1. Head to the video you want to upload.

2. Click share.

3. Click embed.

4. Copy the HTML code.

5. Paste it into your website where you want the video to appear.

You can see how it looks below. The video about MailerLite’s website building features is embedded from YouTube.

Image galleries are another interactive form of visual media. Website visitors click on the gallery to view the photos on your webpage. They can then click through to view each picture in more detail. 

You can use this feature to showcase high-definition images of your products. This helps people gain the information they need to buy. 

Image galleries are practically essential if you sell visual products like clothes, art, or furniture. You can see how H&M uses image galleries in the image below.

You can also use them in blog posts to showcase further information about the topic you are writing about. 

Most website builders have an image gallery feature you can use when creating your e-commerce website. With MailerLite, adding a gallery is as simple as choosing the image gallery block when building your landing page or website. 

You can then add all the images you want to include and configure their appearance.

Once it’s live, visitors can view your images in a grid or click on each one to view its full size.

Adding social proof to your website is an effective way to build brand trust. It works because people who visit your website see how your product has impacted real people. 

Testimonials and reviews help website owners present these customer opinions interactively. 

Reviews work because they show the visitor how other people experience your product. They also answer common customer questions. 

Testimonials can be just as effective. Add these to product landing pages to showcase how your product has benefited customers.

Shoe brand Allbirds has an excellent interactive review feature. Each product page has a search bar website visitors can use to find reviews about the product they are interested in. 

The reviews provide detailed information about what customers think about the shoe’s fit, quality, and style.

Maps are a useful feature if your business has a physical location. 

Customers can see exactly where you are based by interacting with the map. They can also click on your Google Maps business profile to get directions or discover company information. This makes it easier for people to find your business and buy from you. 

Adding maps to a website is straightforward thanks to the Google Maps embed feature. 

Just follow these instructions:

1. Search for your business on Google Maps.

2. Open your Google Map profile and click share.

3. Open the “embed a map” tab and copy the HTML.

4. Add this code to your website where you want it to appear.

You can see how this looks in an example for the Nike Town in London below.

MailerLite customers can also add maps to their websites or pages using the map block. 

Just drag the block to the place in your page where you want it to appear. Then highlight a location by adding an address.

The benefit of using this block over embedding code is that the block has easy customization options. You can edit the map's spacing, background color and width. Use these features to get the map's design just as you like it.

Live chat widgets provide an incredibly interactive experience. And most tools allow you to customize the content in the widget based on the page it’s on. 

They typically have features that let customers:

1. Connect to real-time live chat.

2. Communicate with a chatbot.

3. View blog posts or articles relevant to the page they are looking at.

4. Search through knowledge base articles.

This has several uses. Buyers can use it to connect with customer support during the buying process to find answers that may have stopped them from buying. For example, they can learn about payment options or product features. 

Existing customers can use the tool to discover information about delivery or returns. Making this information easy to access can reduce the number of customer service tickets your team has to answer. 

Warby Parker’s chat widget is a great example. It contains common questions potential customers may have about buying a new pair of prescription glasses. 

There are many ways to use social media to increase website interaction. 

The simplest method is to add share buttons. With these in place, visitors who enjoy your content can share it with a single click.

Maximize the impact of this by optimizing the social share settings for each of your pages. This lets you choose exactly how your content appears when shown on social media. 

You can customize the:

• Title: Write a title that is likely to stand out on social channels

• Image: Choose which image shows on social media and ensure it is the optimal size

• Page description: Write a description that makes people want to click on your page

Adding this information is vital because when social networks pull content from your page to add the link, they don’t always choose the best content for the job. For example, the description might be too long, or they may choose the wrong image. 

With MailerLite, you have the option to add these features whenever you publish a page with our landing page or website builder. This makes it easy to configure this information without using code. 

Another way to add social media interaction is to embed posts into your website content. 

This is easy to do by copying the embed code from the post and then embedding it into your website in the appropriate place.

People can then click on the social media post to share or comment on it. There are several ways to use this type of content. 

1. Embedding content from your own social media channels can turn website visitors into social media followers.

2. Embedding content from your customers is social proof that highlights how people use your product.

Skincare brand Glossier does the latter well. It has a gallery of Instagram content generated by real customers. Customers can click on the images and even shop for the items used by the person in each image.

Tools, plugins and website builders are a straightforward way to add interactive content to your website. 

It’s often just a case of embedding content, adding a plugin or integration, or choosing from the existing elements in your chosen website builder.

For the next steps, consider the types of website interactivity that will benefit your visitors and help you reach your goals.

You can then start to research and use tools that enable this kind of functionality. 

Sign up for MailerLite to access our interactive website features. Add them to your existing website, or create a new site with our website builder. Try all our premium features for free for 30 days. Click here to get started.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in August 2020, but has been updated with new examples of interactive website features.