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User experience is the way in which the end user perceives your product or service as a whole.
As users conduct more of their daily business interactions online it’s becoming harder to provide a frictionless experience which doesn’t leave room for confusion and fits into their everyday routine. Users expect their experience to be seamless and optimized throughout all devices and platforms. The challenge here is huge because the quality of their experience conditions the further development of a mutual business relationship.
It’s vital for omnichannel conversion performance
Users will most often use several channels to interact with your business. Let’s run a scenario.
A person may learn about your business on a Facebook ad using a smartphone. He leaves his phone as he doesn’t have enough time to read through your UVP (unique value proposition) and decides to come back later to it. A few hours (minutes, days) later, the user gets to his PC and Googles your business name. He lands on your site, scrolls through your offer and doesn’t make up his mind immediately. He bookmarks it for review and reference and sometimes later, visits it via a direct link and completes a goal or desired action – becomes a converter.
Even though the conversion is measured as the last hit interaction on your website, the channels in getting them there variate. All of these channels have different layers of complexity and interactive paths that variate. Designing a user journey which takes all of these channels into account as a part of a greater whole with a common KPI (key performance indicator) requires a lot of tracking, measurement and data analysis.
In order to get a clear picture of where your users come from, what steps do they take and find gaps for improvement, you will need to visualize all of your acquisition channels as a whole, an omnichannel. You need to mark and measure each interaction point of every acquisition path and use that data to predict outcomes and improve overall conversions. This type of analysis makes the core of a great UX.
It helps shorten the sales cycle
Not only do users take several channels to find your business, but oftentimes they require several steps of interaction before they make a conversion. It takes seven to over thirteen touches before closing a sale. This is mainly because people are becoming immune to traditional marketing and advertising strategies. They require transparency and personalization throughout your sales cycle in order to become “sales ready” and ultimately convert.
When collecting data from various checkpoints of the user journey, you can isolate specific paths which are confusing, time consuming and hurt your sales and conversion outcome. By employing UX techniques (design, development) with a lean approach, you can identify these breakpoints and make iterative changes. You remove the confusion and shorten the user journey by providing simplicity to the complex structures. Also, you will be enabled to personalize various paths to specific target persona and entice them towards conversion. This type of personalization requires a lot of work, analysis, and testing and it’s the best that you seek out top web development companies skilled in UX design to help you out.
This will give you the opportunity to not only grab but hold the users’ attention while leaning towards building strong business relationships and providing great, transparent and personalized experience for them.
It helps improve user and customer retention
Business cannot be sustainable nor scale if it relies heavily on new customer acquisition without nurturing retention. For a business to succeed and scale, you need to build relationships with your customers that go beyond the completed sale.
Once a user completes the sales cycle, his customer journey doesn’t end. That same user will engage with your product/service, recommend it to other people, seek guidance on how to use it and find gaps and flaws in it. Following up on these requirements requires constant engagement and innovation. As a business, you will need to make surveys, case studies, improve and innovate your product/service and sales process. Aside from improving the engagement rate on your current content structure, you will need to look for and identify new opportunities and target groups to outreach.
Great user retention means you are bringing value to your users and designing great experiences for them throughout their whole journey.
(U)X marks the spot
If you can give clarity to why users engage with your business, who they are and what are their needs/goals, you will give the rationale and pathways for optimized user experience. UX methodology enables you to effectively impact your business by devising targeted, personalized strategies across your market and it’s digital ecosystem.
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