You might wonder why people like us keep saying it is so important to get the
customer experience
right for visitors to your website? It’s because every day, digital professionals work with companies who, for one reason or another, have not thought about this.
In an online world where there is increasingly less person-to-person contact, your website becomes the face of your business and
brand. So, just as in the face-to-face world where customer experience is a huge part of what makes you successful, you want your site to shine brightly as a true representation of the way you care about your customers. The more personalised, well thought out and unique your customer experience is for your visitors, the better placed you are to keep customers loyal, and win new business.
All digital communication must have experience of the user as its main consideration, and this can be boiled down into two key aims:
- Make the customer experience easy
- Make it a pleasure
Here are a few ways of doing this:
Know your own brand, how it looks and what you stand for
To engage and connect with your audience you need to have a
brand identity. If you are not really clear about who you are, how will your ideal customers and how will you be able to resonate with visitors and turn them into purchasers?
The answer is that you won’t - or at least it will be a much more difficult task than if you’d invested time and energy focusing on a clear and unique brand that reflects your product and business personality.
Branding is where you make a memorable impression
on your visitors and is part of what sets you apart from others in the market. You want to get this right and your ideal consumers want you to get it right too.
Make it a visual pleasure
The aesthetic of your website
requires attention. We are sure you have the most fabulous products, and offer the most caring service, but if it looks boring or messy, your website just won’t back this up and people won’t get far enough to find out. As a result, your calls to action won’t have the desired effective and the uptake is lower than would otherwise have been.
Remember, your website is the forefront of your business presence online. You want it to look sleek, stylish and be easy to navigate. You want to ensure the user experience
is positive and encourage consumers to revisit, purchase and spend time browsing what it is you have to offer.
Make it really easy to navigate
The layout
of your website should put the user experience first, always. The journey through pages should be seamless and smooth and the number of pages to click to get to where the consumer needs to be should be as few as possible.
It reduces people’s confidence in you when the site is over-complicated, and people can’t find what they want. It also very often means that there are dead pages on your website that have useless content on them, that are out of date and no one has bothered to unpublish them or worst of all, with broken links.
You should ensure that there is prominent contact information on your website
as well as a ‘click to call’ facility on the phone number, and email addresses should be ‘live’ – i.e. the site visitor only has to click on it, and an email opens for them automatically. Make it easy.
Your logo should be visible on all pages. Simple yes, but you would be surprised how many people actually miss this.
Make the words and pictures evoke the desire to engage and buy
Even when you feel as though you’re regularly putting content
out but receiving little engagement, consumers will be paying attention. Spelling mistakes are a big no-no. Rushed content is also a big no-no. Careful, considered content works.
Remember people are less likely to trust a company that falls short of getting the basic details correct.
The motto is to give extra information so that customers can make a well-informed decision on what you offer. Reviews, pictures, videos, and other additions to your website will make your content more appealing to customers. Highly informative content such as blogs will add value, consumers will be more likely to share with others and in turn your Search Engine Optimisation
(SEO) will improve.
There are various reasons why you might find it hard to get all this right. You might be too close to your business. You might not have time. You might not feel you have the expertise.
In cases like these, a professional content
creator will be worth the investment. They will know how to say what your customers want to hear – and they make sure there are no grammatical or spelling errors.
How can LCM help you?
We know how to make it easy and a pleasure to use a website, and we can talk to you about the benefits this can create for your business. From improving the user journey on your website, through working on your brand, to giving regular, easy-to-understand analytic reports, we can help.
