How Empathy Can Improve Your Website’s Conversion Rate
You probably already know that empathy is an important part of interpersonal relationships, but did you know that it is also a critical part of great web strategy?
In today’s world, every business has a website. That means no matter what industry you’re in, you have a lot of competition. In order to take your user from visitor to loyal customer and eventually product promoter before your competitors, you’ll have to be intentional about everything single thing you do on your website.
So, how do you stand out?
If we boil it down, good web strategy revolves around having a clear roadmap that focuses on UX, UI, and content.
But great web strategy is deeper than that.
Great web strategy is unique and innovative. It makes it so every action on your website feels effortless and intuitive. It goes beyond focusing solely on conversions, but also focuses on nurturing, educating, and even providing assets to your internal teams like sales and customer success.
The secret ingredient to great web strategy is empathy.
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. When it comes to website strategy, empathy means putting yourself in your audience’s shoes and creating a website that meets their wants, needs, and pain points.
It sounds easy, but the reality is that things like internal politics, unplanned requests, and poor prioritization often get in the way of doing this successfully. Because of this, web teams are often forced into creating a website that revolves around the business instead of the user.
At the end of the day, the reason your business exists is because your user exists. That’s why revolving your strategy around your user is the key to having an extremely successful website that makes your business easy to find, elevates your brand, and generates revenue.
Below are some ways you can enhance your website strategy with an empathy-first approach.
Get to know your audience
In order to truly cater your website to your user, you have to have a deep understanding of who they are (demographics) and what they need (pain points).
With this information, you can put yourself in their shoes and directly connect their pain points to your product or service so that it feels natural instead of forced.
Below are two different approaches you can take to make this work, ideally you’d do a combination of the two.
Look at the data
Focusing on the data allows you to gain actual insights into users’ behavior and preferences instead of making assumptions.
- Web analytics
Use tools like Google Analytics or Hotjar to learn how people interact with your existing website. Information like what kind of content they like most, where they’re coming from, and how they got to your website can help you better understand who your users are. - User research
With research tools like UserTesting you can get feedback on different aspects of your website from actual target users. This research can also be done in the form of user interviews. - Surveys
Online surveys are a great way to gather a large amount of feedback from your existing audience asynchronously. Surveys can help you answer questions like “What types of content do my users like most?” or “What topic do users want to learn?”
Start workshopping
Team workshops are a great way to get to know your audience and find ways to connect them to your product. Doing this with folks on a variety of teams like marketing, sales, and customer success allows you to get a full-picture view of the user.
Use the data you’ve pulled from the step before to help complete the workshops so that this isn’t assumption-based.
- Personas
Persona workshops allow you to group your users into buckets based on shared interests, demographics, etc. This allows you to create a more targeted experience and messaging strategy throughout your website. - Empathy mapping
While personas focus on who your users are, empathy maps dig deeper into specific pain points, and zero in on attitudes and behaviors. With this exercise, you can dive deep into the emotional connection between your user and your product. - Building a StoryBrand
Donald Miller’s book Building a StoryBrand walks you through a seven-part framework that will help you clarify your messaging by creating a story where your user stars as the hero, and your business serves as the guide. With this framework, you highlight your user’s fears and concerns and help guide them to a solution. This is a great way to zoom into your user’s fears and connect them to your product/solution in a storytelling format.
Create a user-friendly website
Good user experience (UX) is what makes a website user-friendly. A user-friendly website feels intuitive and easy to use. With a solid understanding of who your user is and what their pain points are, you can tailor your website’s structure, content, and design to meet their needs.
Elements of a user-friendly website include:
Focused navigation
Your menu is the main way that users will navigate your website. This is what they use to go from visitor to customer, so being specific, targeted, and intentional here is extremely important.
Use your navigation to focus on the most important things to your user like the product/service pages, blog, and main CTA. Remember that anything that doesn’t live in the main navigation can live in the footer.
Avoid overcrowding your main navigation. This makes it harder for your users to find the information they’re looking for and leads to frustration and fatigue.
Access to educational content
In an ideal world, a user would go to a website and convert immediately. In reality, users need to be nurtured in order to convert, especially if your product or service is on the expensive side.
Having educational content like blogs, guides, whitepapers, and videos helps teach them about your industry and your product. It positions you as a thought leader and builds trust. This content should revolve around their pain points more than your business.
Clear calls-to-action (CTAs)
There are many different types of CTAs. Some focus on soft conversions like free downloads or webinars, and others focus on hard conversions like requesting a demo or signing up. Making conversions easily accessible should be a top priority for your website.
If users have to put in work to find your CTAs, you’re standing in your own way. Avoid this by always including a CTA in your navigation and placing buttons in every other row of a landing page. It may seem like overkill, but the goal is to avoid making them scroll to look for a place to convert.
Intentional layout and design
The way you design and lay out your pages should be tailored to your user’s pain points (i.e., needs), demographics (i.e., age), the types of content they usually consume (i.e., video-heavy vs text-heavy), and your conversion funnel (i.e., products/services that require more educational resources before conversion vs less).
Follow the UX Laws to abide by industry guidelines that have been proven to create a positive user experience for any industry.
Accessible design and content
Your website should be accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. To do so, read up on WCAG guidelines. This may involve updating your website’s design, coding, and the way your content is written.
You can also use tools like accessiBe to do the heavy lifting for you.
Focus on building trust
In order to show true empathy for your user, you have to build your website with the understanding that trust is earned not given. Your job is to find out how to earn your user’s trust so that they continue to explore your website and eventually become a customer.
Here are a few ways you can leverage your website to build trust:
Be transparent about your business
As consumers, we want to feel connected to the brands we use. That’s why being open about who you are and what you stand for as a business can help build trust with your users.
You can do this by creating an “About Us” page that provides information about your company’s history, core values, mission, and team members. Having an active social media presence and linking to it from your website also helps users connect to your organization.
Showcase strong social proof
Every article you read on web strategy is going to talk about social proof. We all know it’s important and helps build credibility. But I want to get specific about what kind of social proof will serve you best when leading with empathy.
When you put testimonials on your website, the best three things you can do are:
- Get permission to post the person’s photo with their quote. This is going to make it feel more human and relatable. Text-only testimonials feel cold and sometimes even made up.
- Choose quotes that talk less about you and more about them. At the end of the day, users want to see what’s in it for them, not how your business saved the day.
- Ask testimonial givers to also record a video testimonial using Loom or their phones. People don’t love recording themselves so you won’t always get a yes, but on the off chance that you do, video assets are the best form of social proof you can get. They are more emotive and easier to connect with.
Demonstrate your commitment to customer service
Everyone at one point has purchased a product that they weren’t happy with. What comes next is up in the air.
Are you going to sit on hold for 3 hours only to be told that you can’t get a refund? Or are you going to be transferred to somebody who is ready to hold your hand through the process?
Demonstrating your commitment to customer service before somebody converts is a great way to build trust with your user. It tells them that, even if this doesn’t work out, you’ll still have their back.
Tell users what’s in it for them
Every single time you build something on your website, ask yourself “What’s in it for the user?”
Often, web teams are given requests that focus more on benefits for internal teams like sales or marketing than the user. That’s because those team members have goals and pressure from their boss to hit those goals. So what happens? They come up with quick ideas and throw them at the wall to see if they stick.
This often results in web strategy that is not thought through and goes against best practices. Doing things this way can even lead to worse conversion rates and have a negative impact on the business.
The question is, how can we meet those goals while also ensuring that the things we do on the website are thought through and benefit the user?
Here are a few ways to shift your website strategy toward your user:
Use “you” content vs “we” content
In order to write content that your users can resonate with, write less “we” content and more “you” content. This makes your user the hero instead of your business, which empowers and allows them to see themselves as a part of your story.
What does “you” vs “we” content mean in practice? See the two sentences below and imagine them as body copy on an electric biking company’s website.
“At ABC Bikes, our goal is to help you find the perfect electric bike.”
vs.
“Find the electric bike you’ve been looking for and start exploring the open road today.”
In the first example, we’re framing ABC Bikes as the hero coming in to save the day. In the second example, we don’t mention ABC Bikes at all. We place the user at the center of the story and focus on what’s in it for them.
Write benefit-driven content
From the product page to the customer service page, every piece of content that mentions your company should be coupled with the benefits your users will experience.
By doing this, the reader is constantly aware of how their lives will improve with your product or service.
Tell users what to expect on form pages
Forms are scary, and nobody wants to fill them out. That’s why building these pages with empathy is so important. Form pages should be very descriptive and should clearly set expectations.
Your form pages should tell users three things:
- What they get out of filling out the form
For example, a white paper, an appointment with a salesperson, or access to an on-demand demo. - How that benefits them
For example, what they’ll learn from the whitepaper, what will be discussed on the sales call, or what is covered on the demo. - What happens after they fill out the form
For example, how they’ll access the whitepaper, whether they’ll receive an email confirming their appointment, or how long they’ll have access to the demo.
Monitor your progress and experiment when you can
The only way to know if your strategy is working is by paying attention to the data. Keeping an eye on metrics like traffic growth, conversion rate, time on page, and bounce rate can help point you in the direction of optimization opportunities.
Aside from monitoring your data, the most proactive thing you can do is start experimenting on your website with A/B testing. This will allow you to quickly see exactly what kind of messaging, layout, or design is and isn’t working. This kind of testing can be a great way to keep your finger on the pulse and ensure that you are always listening to your users.
Summing it all up
Having an empathy-first approach to web strategy is the key to a successful website that meets the wants, needs, and pain points of your audience.
By creating a website that revolves around your audience’s needs and provides them with a positive experience, you’ll find that both your conversion rate and brand reputation will improve.
When visitors feel understood and valued, they’re more likely to take action and become loyal customers and even product promoters.
That’s what makes empathy the secret ingredient in great web strategy.
