Engage Visitors With "Favorites" - The Web User Series
The "Favorites" feature is a game changer in the directory industry, and is a major focal point of our "Web User Series". In Part 1, we talked about four goals you should set to help make your website successful. In Part 2. we tackled how to leverage some cool features and settings that were developed to improve the user experience. We now turn our full attention to the "Favorites" feature.
With the Favorites feature, your website is now an interactive playground for visitors wanting to drop by and save whatever catches their eye. Websites like Pinterest have caught fire because of the ability to "pin" something that you like to your board.
What's the point of continually browsing a site if there is no opportunity to take a step back and check out all of the things you've liked?
Part of what makes "pinning" so exciting, is that you get to feel as though you are shopping, but it's not costing you a single dollar.
See a recipe you like? Favorite it! See a pair of shoes you'd like to buy? Favorite it! Found a couple of homes that caught your eye? Favorite them!
How Does The Favorites Feature Work
Each feature post, and members themselves, now have a "Favorite" icon next to them. This is currently a heart by default, but you can easily switch out the heart for any awesome font icon you prefer.
When a visitor of your website sees something that they like, they can click on the heart to "favorite" it. This is where the magic happens for you as the directory owner. If your website visitor wants to "favorite" an offer to their personalized dashboard, they will be prompted to sign up or log in if they are already a member.
Clicking on the join now button can take them straight to the signup page where they are only required to enter their email and password.
Once the website visitor registers, they are taken to their dashboard where they can access the items they've favorited, as well as complete their profile. The website visitor dashboard experience is completely different from your business listing dashboard experience. There are no "Listing Details", "About" or "Service Areas" tabs.
You can even fully customize the general user contact details form to provide a truly unique experience. To learn more I suggest watching this video.
You can also easily set your website visitors to not get indexed by Google and of course, to never be found in any type of search result on your website. This is key since a website visitor does not expect to show up on your website should he or she ever google their own name.
Once your website visitor has "favorited" a few items on your site, they will be able to reference these items at any time on their dashboard. One of the highlights of the "Favorites" feature, is that each item that is "favorited" is categorized in its proper list. This means I can view all of my favorited coupons at once, or perhaps all of my favorite members at once, rather than having them all mixed up with one another.
In this example, our website visitor found two deals they may possibly want to take advantage of in the future. The special offers that were singled out are now visible in their custom dashboard under the category "coupon":
