Users value a website UX that’s easy to use and navigate. Your user experience can help casual website visitors become customers by communicating your business’s value and guiding them through navigation.
Your website is your best chance to make a good first impression on new users and potential customers. It should provide information to your customers and to convert them to customers based on your website's goals and objectives.
For example, is the goal of your website to have your users provide an email, download content, or complete a purchase on-site?
Identifying your ultimate goal is the first step before you can design your website around that user objective.
In the normal course of events, a stranger finds your website, becomes a prospect. That stranger then takes some action, such as clicking on a button or entering an email address and becomes an inbound lead.
Your website helps that stranger become a paying customer. This is usually the typical sales funnel which most companies hope every customer goes through.
Today, we will focus on maximizing conversion numbers most efficiently and thus decreasing the length of your sales cycle while increasing your average value per website visitor.
Here are 4 steps to ensure your user experience design converts online traffic to sales.
How to Ensure Your UX Converts Online Traffic to Sales
- Make your website efficient
- Communicate your value propositions
- Use micro-conversions and goal-type conversions
- Eliminate distractions
1. Make Your Website Efficient
Users don’t have the patience for inefficient websites. Many will abandon a website if it’s slow to load or unreliable.
Website efficiency means repairing every broken link, increasing your site speed, and making sure all redirects are accurate.
Essentially it means optimizing every aspect of your visible website including optimizing your website's technical performance.
It won’t matter how good everything else seems on-site if your website visitors are clicking away from the home page after a few seconds simply because the home page took too long to load.
2. Communicate Your Value Proposition
You want your most important messages to be front and center, big and bold. Does your page discuss your product or service’s key features clearly and concisely?
People hate being bombarded with a wall of text, but today's users don’t mind reading brief phrases broken up by whitespace or graphics.
Spotify, for example, puts its value proposition front and center on its homepage – “Music for everyone.”
Right below Spotify’s value proposition is a call-to-action that drives users to download the product for free.
Make sure to use appropriate colors and accent colors in your web design while maintaining a clean overall look for a user to scroll through easily.
A good rule of thumb is to create your content as if a 7-year-old will be reading and navigating through your website.
Optimize the readability of your content and crawl-ability of your website structure with them in mind.
Design can help you communicate your value proposition effectively.
3. Use Micro-Conversions and Goal-Type Conversions
Never attempt to sell someone on something that you haven’t primed them for. You want people to enjoy their time on your website and to learn more about you before being asked for their business.
That is why it’s important to incorporate micro-conversions into your overall user experience strategy; such as pop-up windows that have email opt-in fields, social media follows, video views and specific page visits that are of significance.
By defining different micro-conversions or goal completion types, you can more accurately assess the part of the buying cycle your customers are currently in; such as awareness, research, consideration, and purchasing stages.
Knowing this information helps give an even deeper level of insights and attribution to each user of your website.
4. Eliminate Distractions
If someone ends up on your landing page, the last thing you want is for them to leave or to feel overwhelmed with their next potential action. So why include any other links or Call-to-Actions (CTA's) on that page that doesn't match your goal objective?
Eliminate all distracting content or links that don’t serve the purpose of moving a prospect towards the buy button, or towards the next step in the sales cycle.
Content that runs parallel, or gives depth to your core service area can be extremely useful on blog pages and can do wonders for SEO.
When it comes to your most important content, such as your sales or services page, the primary goal objective should always be to convert your online traffic into customers by properly moving them along your online sales funnel.
Design Your UX to Convert Customers
Overall, here’s what you want:
- A well designed and efficient website
- A clear value proposition and clear calls-to-action on appropriate pages
- Push notifications, pop-ups, or other visual elements that entice user engagement without requesting information
- A distraction-free landing page with your goal conversions clearly defined.
With these tools in place, you will be able to optimize for increased conversions and conversion value in your sales funnel.