The importance of UX design in the conversion funnel
A guide to designing user experience for a conversion funnel in the digital marketing landscape.
In this modern world, a website is a necessity for businesses to succeed. However, it’s not enough to simply have a pretty website; it must have functions or goals that can convert visitors into loyal customers.
As digital marketing rapidly evolves, businesses must constantly experiment, analyze, and innovate to stay ahead of the competition. Take the SaaS industry, for example. Ten years ago, offering a free trial strategy helped build trust and attract visitors. Nowadays, simply putting free stuff on your website doesn’t guarantee high conversion rates anymore. Building trust and converting visitors into customers requires significant effort. A good UX designer needs to understand the conversion funnel.”
Understanding the Conversion Funnel 🔑
Realistically, it is unlikely that you will ever achieve a 100% visitor conversion rate on your website. As a UX designer, it is crucial to understand the conversion funnel in order to design a seamless user journey that encourages conversion. The funnel process helps brands turn potential customers into actual customers. This can be as simple as sitting down with a pen and paper and mapping out the ideal user journey to reach your business goals.
The process consists of different stages that show how familiar customers are with your brand, how interested they are, and whether they are ready to buy. Each stage requires actions that can move them towards closing the deal or making a purchase. Here are the four stages:
Awareness — The process consists of different stages to attract customers’ awareness of your brand, their level of interest, and their readiness to buy. In the Awareness stage, customers first learn about your brand through various channels such as word-of-mouth, search engines, social media, or ads.
Interest — At this phase, customers show curiosity about your brand and its ability to solve their problems. Providing free content in exchange for their contact information can help identify potential leads.
Desire — You need to showcase the benefits of your products or services and convince customers why your brand is better than the competition. Reviews, partnerships, case studies, and webinars may help to hype up your brand and encourage customers to move further down the funnel.
Action — They are ready to take action! Whether it’s reaching out to a representative or downloading your product, whatever action your company defines as a conversion.
Design with Goals 🏆
You can create multiple user journeys depending on your users’ buying stage. To create empathy, start with the discovery session by asking questions such as “What solution are you looking to achieve?” and “Who are the users/customers?” to your clients, stakeholders, and users (more on key discovery questions). Being empathetic not only allows you to free yourself from any bias but also enables you to collect useful information to design a definitive solution that meets the users’ needs.
Once you have identified the goal you want your customer to achieve, whether it’s to contact you, download an asset, or purchase a product, it’s best to work backward to create an ideal user journey, also known as the “happy path.” This approach helps you visualize the steps the user will take to reach the end goal and identify potential roadblocks or areas for improvement. By starting with the end goal in mind and working backward, you can create a streamlined and efficient user experience that is more likely to lead to successful conversions.
Keep the copy and imagery relevant to your conversion goal while making it clear what your brand offers. It’s important to avoid flooding pages with information and wasting users’ time. Apply UX personalization in your content strategy by segmenting your customers and identifying their backgrounds. This will allow you to understand their pain points and serve content that is relevant to their problems. Knowing your users will help you generate material that is more interesting and relevant to them. By doing so, you can increase the likelihood of your visitors engaging with your brand and being interested in your products or services.
Keep Improving 🚀
Once you have designed your ideal user journey and identified what to track, implement tracking tools to gather page and audience data. You can quickly do this by installing code tags such as Google Analytics (GA) or Mouse Flow on your website. You will need a few weeks to gather data and establish your website’s baseline.
Once you have analyzed the data and how users interact with your site, start optimizing the user flow to improve conversion rates. However, it’s important to note that not all user experiences exist in a linear way. Pure player brands understand that their content will not be consumed by a general audience. It’s essential to understand your customers’ stages and create content and an experience that aligns with the interests of their segmented users.
This effort may involve improving the content design of the funnel and applying “growth hacking” strategies to boost engagement in your funnel. Do not approach the conversion funnel as a standalone marketing tactic, and always strive to understand your target audience to create the best possible user experience.
To design a successful conversion funnel user experience, it is important to have a comprehensive understanding of the funnel, customer segmentation, and their buying stages to create user experiences and content that can resonate with your audience. It is essential to remain creative and continuously experiment, analyze, and innovate improvements to help your funnel grow. Remember that the conversion funnel should not be approached as a standalone marketing tactic but should aim to understand your customers and provide them with the best possible user experience.
Thanks for reading! If you’re looking for creative ideas on how to add value to your campaign design, check out these 5 cool things you can apply on landing pages that might spark your creative juices! 👩🎨
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