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| Image courtesy of Pixabay |
Today I’m pleased to share another guest post by Lexie Lu of Design Roast.
How do you turn site visitors into raving fans? You spend a lot of time and money driving traffic to your website and reaching out to new potential customers. Once they land on your site, it needs to finish the work you started and convert a high number of visitors into customers. However, your conversion funnel may be lacking, creating a problematic customer experience (CX) rather than a positive one.
Only 22 percent of business owners like their conversion rates – the other 78 percent seek improvement but aren’t always sure where to start.
Fortunately, there are some clear CX design updates that improve your overall conversion rates and funnel site visitors through the areas you want them to go.
1. Know Your Audience
“Know your audience” is advice you’ll hear over and over again. It is one of the first things you should do before working on your customer experience. How can you improve your website and make it user-centered if you don’t know who your customers are?
Start by digging into your website analytics through tools such as Google Webmaster Tools. Look at various complaints your customers filed with you that are related to their experience on your website. Poll your customers and do split testing to see at what point in your sales funnel customers leave your site.
Armed with this knowledge, move forward and improve the rest of your conversion funnel on your site with a customer-based approach that turns visitors into fans of your brand.
2. Improve Your Headline
When a visitor lands on your page, is it obvious what your purpose is? Your landing page headline turns up in search engines, appears on social media posts, and sums up the main topic. Your headline should entice readers to visit your page, explain its unique purpose, and sum everything up in a handful of words.
Researchers found some phrases work better than others for headlines. For example, the phrase “will make you” had more than twice the engagements on Facebook as other phrases.
3. Declutter Your Page
Do you want visitors to take action once they land on your page? Streamline your design and remove any clutter. Over time, designers add various elements and features, but this creates a cluttered look and confuses readers as to the purpose of the page.
Sum up the singular purpose of your landing page – perhaps collecting user emails or sending the visitor to a shopping page. Remove anything that doesn’t point the user toward the goal.
4. Gain User Trust
Consumers are less trusting than ever before. A recent survey shows that people’s trust in business, government, NGOs, and media is in a sharp decline. Gaining the confidence of site visitors is more difficult than ever before.
One of the best ways to show consumers you’re trustworthy is transparency. Explain your return policies clearly, for example. Consumers also look at how professional your design is and how easy your site is to use. Broken links or nonworking forms harm trust levels. Include any prominent organization memberships or BBB ratings, as well.
5. Voice Search
The use of voice-based search exploded in recent years, thanks to devices such as Alexa and Google Home. Around 20 percent of American adults own a voice-enabled speaker.
Improve the experience of those tapping into this new technology by enabling voice search on your website. Voice search also makes your site more accessible to those with vision impairments.
6. Find Pain Points
Identify the main problems your typical buyer faces and address the issue on your landing page. Convert visitors by offering a simple solution to their problem.
The needs of your customers are what drives them to your site in the first place. Address the need and offer a solution, and they’re more likely to convert into customers. Address needs on your landing page before the user reaches your call-to-action (CTA) button.
7. Keep Old Customers Engaged
Although new customers drive growth in your company, your old customers are far more valuable. Improving customer retention by a mere 5 percent ups your profits as much as 25 percent. Current customers often spend more than new ones per transaction, too.
A smart conversion strategy considers both old and new customers and treats them equally in importance. You may require more than one landing page to address the needs of both current and potential customers fully.
Add a community area for current customers and provide a login as a perk of remaining loyal. Offer specials and deals no one else gets, such as discount codes and first looks at new products.
8. Personalize Calls to Action (CTAs)
Your CTAs should speak directly to individual site visitors. Personalized CTAs have approximately 202 percent better conversion rates than basic CTAs. Adapt the CTA based on the visitor’s geographic location, the language they speak, or if they’ve visited your site in the past.
Even the language of your CTA has an impact on your conversion rates. Use first-person language for a more-personal feel.
9. Confirm Orders
One of the essential elements in your conversion process is a follow-up. Once a customer places an order with your site, they want to know their order went through and what the next step is. If engagement is one of your goals as a brand, order confirmation emails have a 70 percent open rate.
Include a message that lets the user know the order went through, and follow up with an automated email. Keeping new customers informed about where they are in the ordering and shipping process builds trust and increases the chances they’ll do business with you in the future.
Improving the Conversion Funnel
Every little change to your landing page that enhances the customer experience gives you a better chance of converting visitors into customers. Customer acquisition is about far more than merely getting an order from a new person. A strong CX strategy includes changes to your site’s design
and a focus both on gaining new customers and keeping them as lifelong fans of your brand.
Lexie is a web designer and typography enthusiast. She spends most of her days surrounded by some HTML and a goldendoodle at her feet. Check out her design blog, Design Roast, and follow Lexie on Twitter.
