The Importance of User Experience In Digital Marketing
With great opportunities come great challenges - those in the digital marketing world should know this. Just as we can market our brands and products online for an audience without limitations, everyone else has the same chance. This means big competition, and with it - big expectations.
What do we know about today’s consumers? We know that they are smarter than ever when making online purchases. We also know that they are spoiled with choices and well aware of it, so they are picky. On top of that, consumers are time-starved and expect to get what they need right away.
A hand writing “user experience”. Source: Canva
They all expect the same - an excellent user experience.
In the end, it all comes down to this. Over half of the brands (55%) are performing UX testing at this very moment, trying to work out a way to optimize the online consumer journey and keep the leads to themselves.
UX makes a big difference in your brand’s marketing strategy. In this article, you’ll read all about it.
Why is UX important for digital marketing?
Users' experience on your website can determine everything from the bounce rate to the number of conversions to your SEO ranking. Ideally, your site should create a user-friendly, clean-cut journey for the customer, with excellent support and dynamic content.
Combining all these elements is far from simple, but it is vital to boost your digital marketing strategy. Let’s see how user experience can shape your digital efforts.
1 - UX can improve your marketing strategy
Over the last couple of years, digital marketing has become a more significant challenge. The competition is enormous, and expectations are high, so companies need to invest more time and money for its effectiveness. Nowadays, businesses can collect data to make smarter decisions. An innovative UX-focused approach, based on research and testing, can do wonders for the overall strategy.
Let’s talk about some ways in which you can improve your marketing strategy through UX.
A/B testing
What is A/B testing, and why is it important for your business?
A/B testing is a research method used to compare the performance of your digital products, such as your website, app, advertisement, etc. It compares variants A and B from the user’s perspective.
When you perform A/B testing, you are asking the user to rate and choose between the two versions. The data you capture via this form of testing will tell you which design or product your audience best responds to. You can also learn if a design change or new feature is a good idea or if you need to avoid it.
A/B testing will help you test everything from the text on your site to the headlines you inserted, images, buttons, colors, features, and layouts. Ultimately, it will take the guesswork and risk away when you want to make a change and ensure a positive user experience.
A/B testing is not a difficult process today. UserZoom’s intuitive platform will help you create and implement A/B testing, and you’ll get the ready data in organized reports whenever you need it. Thanks to the platform, you can test all your design changes and additions against each other and optimize your digital products.
Continuous research
Another well-established practice is continuous research. Maze, a top-ranked research tool, discovered that 83% of digital marketers believe research should be conducted “at every stage of the product development cycle ”.
Based on the continuous research trends , 82% of companies have at least one UX researcher on board, ready to perform tests and collect data to improve the user experience regularly.
The majority of businesses research at least once a month, and many of them do this daily. Whether it is surveys and questionnaires for your audience, or data you collect by tracking analytics on your website, the best thing you can do for your user experience is to do this continuously.
2 - Positive UX brings customer satisfaction
Improving the consumer journey has a lot of potential in terms of customer satisfaction. It can increase it by 20% and boost your revenue to 12%. That being said, your business should ensure that the users' experience is seamless so that they are happy with your brand.
Good customer experience equals satisfaction. What does this mean for you?
Repeat business
Better reputation
Higher revenue
This makes UX and UI the two pillars of digital marketing, the recipe to succeed in the online world.
So, what can you do to optimize the user journey and offer them great experiences? You can boost yourteam's skills by providing them with UX/UI education and training opportunities. Their knowledge will then reflect in an improved customer journey, and you can reap the benefits that come from it.
3 - UX isn’t just about usability or interfaces
Many believe that user experience is about creating a beautiful interface - and that’s it. The truth, UX is much more than this when it comes to digital marketing. Interfaces are just a tiny part of what UX designers do.
Fundamentally, it is about the connection between technology and people and ways to improve it. It is a way to facilitate conversions and stand out in a competitive market. If your business is to stand out from a big online crowd, it needs a clear, accessible, and concise connection to its targeted audience.3
4 - UX drives customer loyalty
Loyalty is one of those things that you cannot buy - you need to win it from your customers. For your target audience to become loyal to your brand, it has to happen gradually with good interactions and continuous satisfaction. There’s a magic formula for boosting customer loyalty - it is UX. This means focusing on every customer touchpoint, from your website and landing pages to your cloud-based contact center software and even those pop-up forms.
By working on the UX design, you’re ensuring that every time your consumer interacts with your business in some way, whether by using your product or your website or speaking to your support team, they leave satisfied with what you offered them.
5 - Good UX improves your SEO ranking
Good UX can significantly increase search visibility and make your brand findable for your targeted audience. Not only that, but the good experience will encourage the people that find your business to explore your content further. This is why good UX contributes toward lower bounce rates.
Digital marketing these days revolves around SEO. Google algorithms crawl the sites’ content and design to rank the best brands on the market and hand them on a silver platter to the audience. If your website is full of useful content and has good navigation, it will satisfy the user's search intent. In return, this helps you get a winning SEO campaign.
6 - It shows your visitors that you care about their experience
The ideal journey for a customer is a user-friendly one. Customers these days love websites that combine the following:
Clean-cut buying journey
Seamless navigation
Dynamic, easily digestible content
Mobile device compatibility
Top-notch customer support
Optimizing these features falls under the UX umbrella. If you offer this to your audience, you’ll show them that you’re attentive to their needs and expectations.
Why is this important, you wonder?
For starters, 79% of users look elsewhere if they don’t perceive your website as reliable by looking at its pages.
Even though most people search on their mobiles now, 96% of users have found and abandoned websites that are not designed for mobile devices.
All the numbers point to the same point - customers expect brands to know what they need and offer it to them as soon as they communicate with them. Whether by visiting the website or using the product, customers need a design that fits their needs. Otherwise, they’ll move to the next choice on the market.
7 - UX affects the first impression of the customer
First impressions are crucial for your brand. Most people would leave your website if the single page they landed on does not meet their expectations.
It’s not just about making your brand findable or leading people to your pages. It would help if you created the perfect landing pages to keep them there, which is where UX comes into the picture.
A well-designed website can have a 200% higher conversion rate compared to a poorly designed website. In other words, if you take care of the UX, you’ll make sure that the people who find themselves on your website stay there - and eventually become your customers.
8 - UX builds conversions
UX has a great impact on your site’s conversions. Good digital marketing strategies inform consumers of everything they need to know about a product or a service. If you learn to put yourself in their shoes and adjust your strategies accordingly, you can design a great experience and boost conversion rates.
Good UX design guides the users in the right direction without any barriers. As a result, the user finds the information they need fast and with ease, and if they find it useful, this will drive them to learn more or take action.
Part of UX design is to create clear CTAs and place them in the right places. As UX guides the user throughout the website, it uses CTAs to guide them to make a conversion.
Hands drawing rectangles and squares with lines inside them. Source
Some tips to drastically improve the user experience
Before we wrap things up and wish you luck, we’d like to give you some actionable tips for improving the UX for your business. At times, a total redesign can be the ideal solution - but who has the time or budget for it? If you want to make small changes that will drastically improve the UX on your site, follow this list of tips:
Make use of white space, especially around your titles (white space around the text and titles can increase user attention by 20%)
Make your CTAs clear and attractive
Optimize the loading speed of your pages (It takes 5 seconds extra of page load time to increase the site’s bounce rate by over 20%)
Use high-quality images and other visuals
Use hyperlink differentiation
Find those 404s and deal with them
Optimize your website for mobile users
Use bullet points to segment the key information
Insert well-written, attention-grabbing headlines
Keep the pages on your website consistent
How good is your website’s UX?
Long gone are the days when digital marketing was limited to posting product descriptions and images on a website. Today’s digital world is more competitive than ever, and if you want to thrive in it, you need an online presence that boosts user satisfaction and provides them with what they need.
This is why UX is vital for your digital marketing strategy, and you should treat it as such. There’s always room for improvement, so work on it continuously to boost your results.
Author bio:
Nadica Metuleva is a freelance writer who’s passionate about creating quality original content. She holds a Master’s degree in English teaching and a Bachelor’s degree in translation. With 8 years of experience in the freelance writing industry, Nadica has become proficient in creating content that captivates the audience, drives growth, and educates. You can find her on LinkedIn.
