If you are making a significant investment in your digital marketing campaigns but not making a similar investment in your UX (user experience) strategy, then you may well be losing not only visitors but also money. It is actually more cost-efficient to convert your existing audience (into action takers) than it is to spend more money on more traffic before you’ve really worked on your UX housekeeping.
UX describes how your users feel and think about your website and how this affects what they do, how they behave and whether or not they convert or jump ship. Studies show over 94% of first impressions are design related; first impressions count. It’s critical that your site is not just a visually appealing environment but that it also is easy to understand, easy to navigate and easy to trust especially if you are not Amazon or eBay where the user experience is already pretty much a known and accepted part of the seller/customer relationship. UX has a direct correlation with conversion and that means sales.
Regardless of how a visitor arrives at your website (organic search, social media platforms, PPC advertising or other trackable marketing campaigns), it is the UX that will dictate the rest of that customer journey. If the expectation they had when they clicked on your ad, or the link from the blog post is not met when they land on whatever landing page you send them to then you are going to get a bounce (recorded in web analytics as a visitor who leaves your website without taking an action). That’s wasted money and effort.
So solid UX ensures that your digital marketing budget is not wasted; it makes sure that the customer journey is seamless from start to conversion and helps to maintain an ever-improving conversion rate (arguably your most important digital marketing metric because it dictates your ROI).
Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that engages in the actions you have defined as goals. If your desired goal is a sale and 2 out of every 100 visitors to your website buy something, your conversion rate is 2% (there is some debate about what a good conversion rate looks like). If you know the cost of those 100 visitors then it makes it easy to set budgets for that channel. If you can increase that conversion rate by improving your UX then you have the ability stretch that budget (and a strong argument for increasing it), it’s a handy metric to stay on top of.
Visitors and Google alike both love a fast, non-frustrating experience. A slow website will put off visitors and a fast site will actually boost your natural rankings in Google so it’s an SEO win too. Make sure you’re hosted on a fast, well monitored and reliable server and that your website is fully functional. You don’t want to end up losing traffic and ultimately sales simply because your website doesn’t work properly. Ensure that you don’t face this problem by taking advantage of the professionals at digivante.com. They will conduct multiple tests that will see your website performing at its best.
Make sure your visitors find it easy to find what they’re looking for. Optimize your menus (well laid mega menus are a good example) and your information architecture so that you don’t frustrate visitors with unrelated imagery or ambiguous CTAs (calls to action). It’s wise to utilize usability testing here, either via one of the many online resources or in-house using your own staff, friends, and family to undertake defined tasks so you can observe and make improvements to site navigation.
Effective and efficient digital marketing is all about connecting the right audience with the right information or proposition. When you invest in traffic, you should make sure you are sending them to the appropriate landing page; one designed expressly to elicit an action from the visitor. Your landing pages should be laid out appropriately and with well placed CTAs. Your landing page strategy should be continually tested (A/B split testing would be best) so that you can correlate your activities to your conversion rates and make continuous improvements.
If you keep an eye on your website analytics, you’ll see an ongoing trend showing an increase in traffic from mobile devices; this trend is not going away and by 2021 almost 54% of all online purchases will be made on mobile devices so it’s an important issue. You need to make sure that your mobile device is not only responsive (or designed to be mobile friendly) but also that your UX is also taken into account. Mobile and desktop layouts are very different and the way people navigate on a phone with a couple of thumbs is very different to how they move around a bigger screen using a mouse. Content is also read differently on a mobile device and even the environment your visitors are in (a bus stop, a shop, walking down the street) can be full of distractions that can pull them out of their customer journey.
UX must be an integral part of your digital marketing strategy just as much as it is part of the customer journey; your conversion rates are counting on it!
