You are either selling a product or providing a service through your website. And your site’s every visitor has a clear purpose in mind: to consume or to gather information. The conversion funnel is the journey of your visitor from the landing page until their check-out. And UX is the essence of your conversion strategy. When a visitor becomes a customer, that right there, is conversion. Most likely that you have been making an effort to pull visitors in through SEO and social media targeting. The visitors you acquire as a result are too valuable to be lost due to a poor UX throughout the conversion funnel. The journey needs to be as simple and clear as possible. It is important that it both serves your visitors’ and your business goals. Through good UX in your conversion funnel, you can nudge visitors to make better decisions.
So how exactly can you detect the problematic aspects on screens? You need to use analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Woopra, etc. to measure and analyze traffic. Analytics with custom tracking is the best way to know how well your site is performing and which problematic screens should be tested with users. After detecting the screens, you need to conduct a test with users with the help of tools such as UXapply in order to understand the reason behind the drop-out in your conversion funnel.
Let's look at what can be keeping your visitors from reaching their goals on your website:
1. Bad CTA Placement
When it comes to CTAs, the above-the-fold area is a goldmine, so make sure to place your most important action triggering elements there, but also don’t abuse this segment. Call-to-action elements like buttons, arrows, hyperlinks, etc. need to be in the right place at the right time. As you can guess they are an integral part of leading the visitor through a certain flow. They need to be clear, eye-catching, goal-directed, inviting. To guide your visitors well, the placement and visual aspects should be optimized after analyzing your customers.
2. Lack of Dedicated Landing Pages
Your visitors, you and therefore your landing page has got one goal in mind: to convert. It is therefore very important to focus on one single goal above the fold on your landing page. A profitable built-in landing page is created to achieve a predefined target as quickly as possible. Perhaps you want to sell something, establish an email list, or present a new product. The point is that you’ll need to make a separate landing page for each goal, as you should only encourage visitors to take the action that you have chosen (or exit without converting).
Landing page objectives from your perspective as the website owner can be as follows:
Triggering clicks: In this situation, the landing page does not contain the ultimate offer, but it does assist navigation, such as to a specific product during a Black Friday promotion.
Purchasing: You want to sell the product straight on the landing page in this situation. The visitor can place an order at the bottom of the page (and even pay for it at once)
Lead Generation: The purpose of lead generation in this scenario is to collect information about the visitors. These can be utilized for follow-up initiatives in the future.
3. Mobile-Irresponsive Design
Mobile devices are not going anywhere, in fact, our brains slowly get rewired to assume they are one of our limbs, cognitive researchers say. They make 50% of the web traffic! Therefore it is not an option to not consider the mobile version of your website while designing. Your visitors need the information to be easily accessible regardless of their device and even while they are on the go. Luckily there are well-defined industry standards by now, one of them is the 3-second rule for the website load speed. Visitors tend to bounce if a website does not load for more than 3 secs. Certain tips and tricks will let you avoid these issues, it's just a matter of being aware through analytics and periodical testing.
4. Not Considering the Short Attention Span
Staying away from long and boring videos is one of the best strategies for creating a user experience fit for the 21st century. People enjoy identifying with others and seeking affirmation. As a result, product videos on the internet are a useful resource. According to Hubspot’s research, 71% of consumers prefer product videos. Whether it’s a product that shows how to utilize a specific product or just a “slice of life”.
5. Not Having a Goal-Oriented Visual Design
The UX machine kicks off as soon as a visitor lands on your page and enters your conversion funnel. Avoid stock photography cliches by using a lot of high-definition, distinctive, and natural photographs. The first two are self-explanatory; however, do not rely on Google Image Finder to pick the –frequently low-quality– image that will represent your company online for an extended period of time.
When it comes to font selection, there are two common “issues”. The first scenario is when the website’s owner/designer overlooks the relevance of typography. Arial, Impact, and other fonts can be found here. Don’t get me wrong: these typefaces are perfectly fine. There are literally thousands of more options to pick from to give your website a unique vibe. The second situation is the polar opposite of the first. Using too many different typefaces in an uncoordinated manner will create chaos and lead the visitor astray. You’ve made the first step toward creating a clear user experience if each font has its own well-thought-out purpose. Depending on how you use the colors and thickness in that context, you can use a particular typeface to communicate information in a variety of ways. You can use a custom font set, but keep in mind that different browsers and devices may not be compatible.
In conclusion, user experience is not negligible if you want to turn the website visitors into your customers. It is key to design your website from the landing page to the check-out, with the users’ goal in mind. There are plenty of tools that are there to make the optimization of your conversion funnel rather easy. With some mindful planning, set up your analytics and testing structure and get to know your visitors. Making their journey as simple and comfortable as possible will ultimately get you ahead of the game and help you achieve your business goals.
