How Implementing UX to Your Digital Marketing Strategy can Boost Your Business
The term “user experience” (UX) is thrown around a lot when discussing web design. But, have you ever wondered how user experience affects the work of digital marketers?
When you’re working with a piece of copy, like a blog post, a video, or even a website, have you thought about how it resonates with your audience?
What impact can design elements have on your marketing performance if they aren’t decisive, and what impact can they have on the overall customer experience?
UX is critical in the digital world, and it has long been a popular on-demand component. For many of us, user experience may not be in our mind’s eye, but it is the key to creating successful conversion. There are a lot of digital marketers who rely on good UX to help guide their audience through all phases of the customer journey.
What is UX?
The attitudes, responses, and emotions that a user has when interacting with a product, system, or service are referred to as user experience. This is related to browsing, reading, and interacting with individual pieces of content on a website, as well as watching advertisements online.
Peter Morville modeled the ‘UX Honeycomb’ which is a visual representation of the different aspects of user experience design. Peter believed that this new diagram would aid in client education because there are many elements of this field that go beyond usability. The honeycomb assists in finding a balance between the different aspects of a positive user experience.
“Marketing is what drives the target audience to your website, but a positive user experience is the key to retaining them.”
Marketing is a wasted effort when you use strategies and tactics to bring people into your business when the core of your user experience is bad. UX and Digital Marketing are inextricably linked, and one without the other would be futile.
I have listed down the benefits of incorporating UX with your Digital Marketing Strategies and why UX is crucial to marketing.
1. Delightful UX is Crucial for Customer Satisfaction
By the year 2020, CX will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.
Source: Walkerinfo
Increasing customer satisfaction and repeat business requires creating a positive user experience for your target audience. In today’s competitive market, this is also the best way to make your product or service stand-out. A positive UX fosters a positive relationship with your customers which in turn helps you create a loyal customer-base.
When a user visits our business website, UX entails to establish a seamless and memorable user experience. The user experience influences whether the user returns to the site or makes a purchase on his first visit.
If your front-end tools and websites fail because they are poorly designed, the customer experience is negatively affected. Although this is only part of the overall user experience, usability is critical to a customer’s positive and negative experience.
A single bad experience on a website makes users 88% less likely to visit the website again.
Source: Econsultancy.com
We can map the customer’s entire journey using the user experience. With “attract” and “convert” being the ultimate marketing goal, UX helps us marketers to identify the possible road-blocks in the customer’s conversion and therefore, create a definitive funnel for an optimized user experience.
2. UX Helps You Increase ROI
Intentional and strategic user experience has the potential to raise conversion rates by as much as 400%.
Source: Forbes
The Customer Journey starts even before a user becomes a customer. Users see our ads all the time and tend to scroll through if they feel that the content and visuals of the ad are not appealing to them. If they find it relevant, only then they are likely to visit our website to learn more.
This is when the UX comes into play. A good UX will seamlessly guide the user through the marketing funnel and increase the chances of conversion rate.
Judgments on website credibility are 75% based on a website’s overall aesthetics.
(Source: BCS — The Chartered Institute for IT)
Page speed, relevant content, color, image quality and clear CTA placements are the key factors of not just Marketing but also UX to foster user conversion, whether it is making a purchase from your website or simply signing up for a newsletter.
“A good marketing strategy will drive the user to your website and a good UX will guide the user to conversion.”
3. Responsive Mobile Websites are Pivotal to UX and Marketing
If a website isn’t mobile-friendly, 50% of users will use it less even if they like the business.
Source: Think with Google
There has been a drastic shift in the way people interact with the website ever since the dramatic rise in smartphone users. Building a website which is responsive on all the device sizes is both important and challenging.
Google began prioritizing mobile-friendly websites in 2015, which means that those that are optimized for mobile will rank higher than those that are not. This right here is one of the major reasons why we need to optimize our website to make it mobile-friendly.
When people have a negative brand experience on mobile, they are over 60% less likely to purchase from that brand in the future than if they have a positive experience.
Source: Think with Google
To provide consumers with the best user experience, your content and paid ads should be optimized for mobile and desktop screens.
4. UX Plays a Major Role in Lowering Bounce Rate
67% of customers claim unpleasant experiences as a reason for churn.
Source: Forbes
A proper SEO will get you a ranking on Google, but if the website does not match the user’s intent, they’ll just exit without even exploring further. Which means that if your website makes a poor first impression, users are less likely to return. The look-and-feel being the first thing the user sees when they land on the website, it is crucial for the businesses to have websites which are visually appealing and also easy to navigate.
If a website needs more than 3 seconds to load, 40% of the people leave the website.
Source: UXCam
Once you have engaged the user with the visual appeal, UX will encourage the customer to dig deeper into your content to learn more; thus, lowering your bounce rate.
The lower your bounce rate is, the more evidence Google has that your website is full of valuable content and meets the user’s search intent, securing a spot for your website on it’s first page.
5. UX Fosters Brand Loyalty
PWC found that 32% of the customers would leave a brand they loved after just one bad experience.
Source: PWC
Loyalty is not something that cannot be bought or coerced. Brands spend a lot of time and effort to harness customer loyalty through positive, engaging and productive customer interactions.
A well-designed website can have a positive impact on the customer experience, not only in terms of user satisfaction, but also in terms of brand image.
Businesses need brand advocates to gain more visibility and expand their customer base.
84% of customers say being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business.
Source: SalesForce
A good digital marketing strategy infused with a delightful user experience will help you build a very strong loyal customer base. With a positive user experience, your brand’s overall lifetime customer value will increase.
Conclusion:
Digital marketing, when done right, leads to an incredible customer experience and UX is the key to doing so. It is rightly said — UX in digital marketing is equivalent to oxygen in the heart. It breathes life into it.
It is reasonable to expect that the roles of digital marketers and UX designers will continue to overlap, but brands that find the best way to combine them, win. The fact that UX designers often work very closely with the Digital Marketing teams has increased in recent years as these designers can adapt to most users and help optimize various campaigns.
Having a user experience designer as part of your digital marketing team will help correct this imbalance. If your website design is too confusing, it can affect your digital marketing results and customer journey. There is no point in pursuing a digital marketing strategy if the website is not user-friendly.
