We’ve become increasingly dependent on our smart phones, tablets and laptops.
That’s a fact.
As such, one of the main ways we find out about, well… anything is through using one of the many devices on which we invest so much of our time.
Whether you’re looking for a new phone contract, a well-reviewed restaurant or even something a little more niche, chances are your first port of call is the Internet.
As a business, it’s crucial to acknowledge and act upon this not-so-new form of consumer behaviour. You must always place an emphasis on the website experience in order to retain and convert visitors when they choose to click through.
To shed some light on the real significance of creating an amazing user experience, here are three important benefits:
Conversion Optimisation
If the core objective of your website is lead generation, placing a focus on UX (user experience) will help to drive more visitors to high value areas on your site such as the contact page.
Acquiring all of that lovely traffic is only half the battle as you’ll need to make sure your website is thoroughly optimised for when users eventually choose to click through.
By creating a more enjoyable, intuitive experience, visitors will be far more inclined to explore your site, register their interest by signing up for a newsletter or submit an enquiry.
Until you begin this process, you may be unaware of some (or many) of the issues that are apparent on your site – and that’s completely fine.
Placing yourself in the shoes of your target audience and taking an impartial wander through various important pages will help you to identify problem areas and decipher ways to improve.
For instance, it may be difficult for visitors to reach your “Contact Us” or ”Services” pages due to a lack of links, poorly designed navigation or small text that is difficult to find.
Creating large, prominent calls to action with ‘Contact Us’, ‘Book Now’ or any other phrase that best describes the user interaction you desire for your site is just one relatively simple change that can make a big difference.
Fixing issues such as this will encourage hesitant visitors to convert and facilitate stress-free exploration for more eager users by removing unnecessary experiential obstacles.
Tools such as HotJar allow you to analyse how people explore areas of your website in an amazing granular fashion with visual and numerical representations of users’ clicks, scrolls and mouse movement.
Coupled with conventional analytics, this allows you to pinpoint underperforming pages and devise UX-focused strategies, which will help to streamline the user journey.
This can be particularly powerful for companies looking to improve their ecommerce potential for users on mobile devices as this platform typically requires a more minimalist checkout design to be successful.
SEO
Whether you’re a digital marketing guru or just getting to grips with the basic principles of search, you’re bound to agree search engine optimisation is a pivotal aspect of successful online businesses.
In addition to its already sizeable ranking criteria, Google now factors in how people behave once they arrive on a website in its algorithm.
This means companies with sites that are slow to load, difficult to navigate and supply insufficient content will find it hard to best their UX-savvy competitors.
Superior websites help to keep visitors excited, informed and hungry for more information – all of which will reflect in key analytics metrics such as ‘bounce rate’, ‘session duration’ and ‘pages per session’.
This data is extremely useful as it can provide a quantifiable, objective insight into which areas of your website are performing well in addition to those in need a bit of digital TLC.
Tailored Design
The inherent characteristics of UX testing provide your business with a website that is far more in line with the wants and needs of your customers.
By completing UX testing, you can avoid making subjective changes to your website that may prove to be futile and even detrimental to its performance in the long run.
Analysing assets such as fonts, colours, layouts, and page copy means the changes you implement will naturally resonate with your audience and will create an environment where visitors love to spend their time.
Companies that rely on customer service as a major differentiator need to ensure their site is on top form at all times in order to retain the attention of visitors and prevent them from choosing a competitor instead.
It’s important to understand that, for customers, it’s not just the product or service you’re offering them that counts.
Every interaction with your business, every blog post and every page of your site is a reflection of your business in some way or another and you’ll need to make visitors feel special in order to win them over.
As is the case with the majority of contemporary sales and marketing strategies, placing your customer first by implementing informed UX improvements will inevitably result in tangible results further down the line.
Moreover, now that Sales and Marketing are entering a new era whereby your audience is taking control of the sales process, it's important now more than ever to understand your audience and how to appeal to their interests.
