What’s the goal of any business? You can formulate the answer in different ways depending on your operations, but in the context of digital marketing, one can argue your goal is to increase conversions.
Conversion optimisation is an elaborated process that helps support your activity and generate better results, be it sales, increased user participation, downloads, or whatever else your business counts as a conversion. User experience is something most people associate with a website, specifically how well it can address the expectations of the public.
But what do the two have to do with each other?
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What Is User Experience?
To say that user experience (UX) is simply a term that describes the quality of a website is to overlook a lot of essential layers the term actually encompasses.
Your target audience has certain expectations when it comes to the websites they are visiting and using to satisfy a need, be it informational or otherwise. These expectations can change drastically over time, as consumers are looking for easy access to the things they want, and they generally don’t want to put a lot of thought and effort into figuring out how to navigate a website.
So at first glance, user experience concerns itself with:
- The font size
- The user interface (the look and feel)
- The website structure (navigational elements)
- Being responsive to allow the platform to work on different devices and browser
- Being mobile-friendly, etc.
However, user experience, particularly great user experience, achieves much more than that. It’s a design process tasked with envisioning the entire process of integrating a product or offer, which apart from the technical aspects can include elements of branding too.
The website is like the modern business card, in a sense, and UX design aims to ensure the card isn’t just readable, but also that people like to read it. If you want to learn more about UX design, UX Collective founder Fabricio Teixeira dives deeper into the subject in his Medium article series.
What Are Conversions?
You can argue that conversions are whatever you say they are. It’s a term used to describe that the desired action has taken place and that a user has completed the sales funnel.
For instance, if you run an ad trying to sell a particular product, your conversions are the number of items of that product you’ve sold. That’s just in the context of this particular ad, but you can also have different types of conversions, at different scales.
If you’re also running a lead generation campaign, your conversion, in this case, is sales, but the number of people who’ve signed up for the newsletter, for example.
How User Experience Boosts Conversions
So when one is focused on how the user interacts with a site and tries to support that interaction, and the other is about completing the sales funnel. At first glance, it’s easy to see how website design can help a conversion optimisation strategy.
Having a good website that answers consumer expectations obviously helps them stay on the site, lowering your bounce rates. And that could potentially give them enough time to convince themselves to make a purchase, but there’s actually a lot more to it than just that.
Great user experience doesn’t just make pretty websites – it looks into user behaviour and lets that guide the design decisions, to ensure people can have a seamless experience. And some of these decisions can lead to a higher conversion rate:
More Accessible Websites
UX design can help your website be better, and more accessible for your target audience not just because the site is functional on different devices. It can also help make it more inclusive.
Studies show that people with disabilities encounter a lot of barriers when trying to access the web, as the idea of inclusive design still doesn’t cater to their particular needs. In business terms, this translates into a lot of financial losses (or conversion losses), simply by not ensuring these individuals can access your site.
Reveals More About Your Users
When you design a landing page, for instance, a good rule of thumb is to create it with the target audience in mind and ensure they can easily navigate the page to complete the funnel. Of course, to do that, you’ll have to look into your target audience a lot closer and get to know them.
And this process can unveil a lot of valuable information about your target, which you can use outside of the website design too, in your other digital marketing efforts, from social media campaigns to email marketing ones.
Can Show Flaws in Your Sales Funnel
Since you’re designed the page to support your conversion goals, having a visual representation of that funnel can help you uncover a few bumps along the way you might have missed.
For instance, one of the funnel stages could be seriously unrepresented, which is not indicative of a good customer experience. You cannot jump from awareness directly into the call to action – first, you need to tick the boxes of interest and desire, before you move to convert.
Strategising with Your Target in Mind
UX is not the only thing that can help you increase conversion rates, but it certainly plays a bigger part than a lot of people think. Still, if you want to improve your conversion rates, it’s worth building a detailed strategy that can help your business reach these goals effectively.
At Australian Internet Advertising, we can help your business with a good conversion optimisation strategy tailored to your specific needs. To find out more about our digital marketing services, contact us online, or give us a call at 1300 304 640 for a chat.
