Guest post by Tony Ademi.
Conversion rates depend on several factors, and brand image and sales depend on multiple elements, from technical to marketing strategies. A range of technologies and experience considerations underlie conversion rate optimization (CRO), including psychology, programming, and graphic design.
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What matters most is that you design your landing pages or online shop in ways that make it easy and encourage your customers to make purchases or complete other calls to action (CTAs).
This post details the role of user experience (UX) design in optimizing conversion rates.
How is UX different from the UI?
User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) are similar terms with different meanings and effects. UI design is more related to the visual layer, while UX is the product design and requires positive interactions for success.
While they are somewhat related, UX designers need to ensure that a website meets the information needs of the target audience, while UI includes navigation, page layout, links, the overall interface, and more.
How are UX and CRO connected but distinct?
As a marketer, it’s important to know the relationship between UX and CRO. Though UX can impact CRO, they don’t share the same features. Moreover, here are some differences between the two:
- Goal: CRO and UX are not the same, even though they are both used for improving digital marketing strategies. CRO is focused on turning visitors into buyers, while UX is focused on making the user experience easier, thus leading to users wanting to buy.
- Focus: UX focuses on usability. If the design of a website is easy and reduces friction, it will convert more visitors.
- Success measure: The conversion rate is the number of visitors who complete a defined call to action divided by the number of total visitors to that page. For evaluating UX on the other hand, you can monitor users’ on-site behavior using heat maps or similar analytics.
How can UX approach increase conversion rates?
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Successful marketers focus on effective user experience optimization. A primary objective of UX design is to ensure visitors can quickly and intuitively scroll through your site to find the information they seek. Here are nine key ways UX can help increase conversion rates.
Actionable experiments
Create an organized process to test every element of your website and landing pages one at a time, so you can accurately assess the impact of specific changes. With repeated testing and optimizing for conversion rate, you can continuously improve through the process.
Random testing and experiments are never an effective way to get helpful information about your site or evaluate the UX on the best approach.
Product adoption
Your customers may have to change their daily routines in order to use your product. That makes it essential to provide both promotional copy to persuade them to make the change and educational content so they can use your product effectively.
Of course, to know if you’re doing product adoption right, you need the proper UX approach and software. One of the primary ways to do so is measure the time-to-value (TTV). For instance, you can try product adoption with Appcues, which will help reduce the time required to get familiar with your product. Additionally, it cuts down the time taken to put the pieces together, reducing the coordinated effort of everyone in your organization.
Transcription services
UX researchers say transcription services save them a considerable amount of time and help increase conversions by converting audio to text. Converting audio to text saves marketers time by not having to add the text on their own manually. Using transcription tools enables you to spend your time on higher value-added tasks.
For example, if you convert audio to text with Amberscript, you can save hours per day, letting you focus on other essential factors related to conversion rates. You can export transcribed audio to Google Docs and other Microsoft Word documents.
Additionally, most people don’t have the time to listen to videos with the sound on. According to statistics, 92% of people watch videos without sound.
Personalization
Personalization is a vital factor in optimizing conversion rates. It enables online retailers to match their offerings with customer preferences. Rather than delivering “one size fits all” messaging to all recipients, online sellers can customize important elements of the customer journey, including offers, emails, content, and paid ads.
Significant examples of personalization include purchase recommendations, personalized emails, notifications on emails, social media, and special offers. Personalization positively impacts customer satisfaction and is now expected by buyers.
First impressions
UX design can significantly impact the impression a prospective customer forms when they first visit your website. After all, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. And your site visitors will form these impressions very quickly; it takes as little as 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) to make a first impression.
Creating a favorable first impression depends on many factors, including the site’s speed, structure, UX design, fonts, and choice of images. Key improvements to evaluate include:
- Optimizing your content and CTA elements above the fold
- Using animations to change your page content
- Using alternative navigation to encourage scrolling
- Improving your site’s speed
- Minimizing the number and file size of images
- Using CSS icon fonts instead of only using images
Usability testing
A vital factor in CRO is usability testing. Increasing conversions is dependent on usability testing and A/B testing. Usability testing is there to answer the “why.” If you have two layouts, A and B, usability testing will help you understand why design A outperformed B in generating subscriptions.
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Did visitors dislike the layout of the page? Were the CTA’s not appealing? Or maybe the speed of the site was too slow? These questions can be answered once UX designers gain critical insights from testing.
If you and your team don’t have the time to conduct usability testing, you can hire professionals to do the work for you.
Load speed
Moving from point A to point B shouldn’t take more than three seconds. In order to keep your visitors focused and on track, minimize distractions such as ads, pop-ups, and links that will take them away from the navigation path you’ve designed.
Every page of your site should have a clean layout and fully load in less than three seconds. Be tenacious about cutting out features slowing down your page load speeds.
You can keep loading times fast by moving less important information to the bottom of your pages. You can also optimize images, reduce redirects, and cache your web pages.
Mobile optimization
Although B2B websites still typically get most of their visits from desktops, a growing share of visits are coming from mobile devices. Consumer sites may draw the majority of their traffic from phones and tablets. Optimizing your website’s appearance and performance for mobile devices is essential.
Payment Types
Appropriate payment methods may not be top-of-mind in UX design. However, many customers add products to their carts and need to have a payment method that works in their local area.
Understanding your local market is easy, but if you sell internationally, payment options get more complicated. Every country accepts different payment methods, and payment preferences will differ from one area to another.
To keep things simple, the best option is to offer the most popular payment method for each region.
Wrapping up
These nine tips will help you more effectively use a UX approach to increase conversion rates. Conversion rates depend on how well you optimize your site and what you can improve. Fast load speed, clean design, and clear navigation all help with CRO.
Focusing on UX can help you significantly improve conversion rates. Making the journey easy for users will get them more interested in learning about your products and services.
Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. He has been in the writing industry (sic) for three years and has managed to write hundreds of SEO-optimized articles. Moreover, he has written articles that have ranked #1 on Google. Tony’s main concern when writing an article is to do extensive research before writing and ensure that the reader is engaged until the end.