How to Convert more ‘Known Unknown’ Prospects Hiding in Web Traffic
Be warned, you’re going to discover new and exotic terms like ‘UX’ and ‘UX teardowns’ — though it won’t put any more greys on your head than the pandemic crisis perhaps already has.
To give ourselves a head start, let’s dig into the jargon.
‘UX’ (short for ‘user experience’) has been a concept of industrial design for decades. Today, it’s often used to descibe the digital experiences our audiences have when interacting with the online technologies we design for them.
The idea behind powerful website UX is to design into the website vistor journey intuitive, meaningful and relevant experiences that remove friction and facilitate propsects’ path from the ‘A’ in ‘AIDA’ (attention), trough to the final A (action) going past ‘interest’, and ‘desire’ on their way.
If you can design your website UX just right, then you’ll be designing relevance into your sales process. In other words, your website will become an active player in subtly communicating your value to your audience.
Just How Important is UX for Website Conversion & Sales Pipeline?
Let’s not keep anything under the table — ‘user experience’ is essential to the success of your sales pipeline. With more and more being done online after 2020, audiences will show preference to brands and websites that are able to remove the chore from online experiences.
To put it into perspective, in a 2019 report entitled ‘Milliseconds Make Millions’ consulting monolith, Deloitte found that latency and slowness on websites browsed on mobile phones can cause…
- A reduction in mobile sales
- Loss of competitive advantage
- A decrease in consumer engagement
- Increased consumer frustration and bounce rate
- Negative brand perception and reduced consumer advocacy
And ultimately…
“An increased abandonment in favour of a competitor who offers a better mobile experience.”
From: Deloitte — ‘Milliseconds Cost Millions’ 2019 Report.
There’s really no part of that sentence worth liking.
Over a 4 week period, the study analysed mobile site data from 37 retail, travel, luxury and lead generation brands across Europe and the US.
Based on a 0.1-second mobile phone website speed improvement, the study found:
- A direct correlation to improved funnel progression.
- A positive change in the number of page views, conversion rates and average order value across all verticals.
- Retail conversions increased by 8.4% and average order value increased by 9.2%.
- Travel conversions increased by 10.1% and average order value increased by 1.9%.
- Luxury brand page views per session increased by 8.6%.
- Lead generation information pages bounce rate improved by 8.3%
What are the implications of this?
However beautiful your website, it’s worth little unless it’s optimised across all devices to provide what the audience want and need absolutely seamlessly.
The on-the-ground fact is, websites that quickly signpost visitors from arrival, past the things they want to know, through to purchasing or contacting you, will convert more busienss than those that don’t.
Building a website without designing a flawless user experience is akin to opening a beautiful shop with no door, or a door lined with barbed wire — it’s not going to end well, for you or the customer.
Finding & Converting ‘Contact-Shy’ Prospects With a UX Teardown.
Getting prospects to materialise from your web traffic as paying customers means looking at what isn’t working about your website, rather than what is — the things you can’t see rather than the things you can.
That’s where ‘UX Teardowns’ come in. So what exactly is one?
UX teardowns are more straightforward than at first glance and, actually, much more cost effective than traditional website UX research methods.
Think of them like a swift, effective drive-thru car wash when you’re in a hurry, vs a more time-consuming manual buff-and-shine. The gloss and wax stuff can be done later when you’ve proven value.
In essence, a UX teardown involves three steps.
1. Analysis
Using your existing data and website analytics to diagnose what is and isn’t working.
2. Persona Insights
Defining your ideal buyer to determine why things are working, or aren’t working.
3. UX Recommendations
Drawing up a nip-and-tuck plan of what user-experience tweaks should be made to start turning more passive ‘dark-matter prospects’ into active, visible paying customers.
That wasn’t so jargony in the end, was it?Hopefully we’ve illustrated exactly how your own website, if not properly geared up for a seamless user experience, can be the hole in its own net.
If you’re interested in running a website UX teardown as a first step to planning website UX changes that will improve the user journey and conversion, get the attention of the IUX team and they’d be happy to oblige — in just three weeks they’d have your results and action plan ready. Many thanks for reading.
