Optimizing Your Business Site for Smoother Customer Experience
In 2021, there are anywhere between 12 to 24 million online shops across the internet, with more being created every day. With this amount of competition, online businesses must discover effective strategies to attract more customers and maintain their loyalty.
One crucial factor that affects your brand’s success is customer experience. A Walker study found that at the end of 2020, customer experience overtook price and product as the key brand differentiator.
This article will dive deeper into what customer experience is and its importance to your business. We will also take a look at nine ways to improve customer experience on your business website.
What is Customer Experience
Customer experience or CX covers all the interactions between your company and its customer throughout their customer journey. It starts from the point they discover your business and eventually become loyal customers.
Improving CX is important because happy customers are more likely to remain loyal to your brand. When customers reach this loyalty level, they may also become advocates for your business and promote it to their peers.
Because customers are the core of your business, investing in their experience can positively affect your business’s growth and longevity.
How to Optimize Customer Experience on Your Site
There are various methods to optimize CX on your business website. Let’s take a look at nine important steps that may help you provide more satisfying experiences for your customers.
1. Secure the Site with SSL
A secure socket layer (SSL) is a system that encrypts data transfers during the connection between a website and its users. It protects any sensitive information from being stolen by hackers when you or your customers do activities on a website.
Having an SSL certificate is a norm for almost every website nowadays. However, it is essential to secure your site with SSL when it contains personal and confidential data such as customer’s payment details or employees’ payroll information.
Around 92% of consumers say companies must be proactive about data protection. Therefore, securing your customers’ personal information can further improve the user experience.
2. Make Decisions Based on Customer Insights
One of the best ways to improve your visitors’ experience is to understand customer insights. Knowledge about clients’ behavior and preferences is valuable and should be the basis of your improvement strategy.
There are various tools to help you gain customer insights, including heatmaps, form analytics, and session recordings on your website. These tools can give you in-depth information about your customers’ journey and allow you to identify the best way to improve your site.
Another way you may want to consider is by directly asking their opinions and feedback regarding your website. Encourage them to leave a review after each purchase or distribute questionnaires through a mailing list channel.
3. Focus on Website Design
Like most products, business websites should also have a good appearance to attract more customers. Nowadays, customers associate great design with product quality. In fact, 75% of people base the credibility of a business on how their website looks.
Websites with a good sense of typography, color combination, and layout can make visitors stay longer and possibly make more purchases. Remember that factors such as audience demographics and the market trend should be considered when designing a website.
4. Ensure a Smooth Site Navigation
There are various factors that make it harder to navigate your website. When people need to do unnecessary clicks to find a product, close a pop-up every minute, and deal with the auto-scrolling feature, you might need to rearrange your website.
Hubspot reported that around 76% of consumers expect websites to make it easy to find what they want. Therefore, obscuring products under unnecessary features may drive away many potential transactions from your website.
Simplify your check-out process, use clear and accurate navigation titles, and ensure your search feature works smoothly. These changes can help customers use your website more efficiently and potentially encourage them to do business on your website.
5. Create Long-Form Content
Producing longer content packed with helpful information may let your site attract more visitors. Recent research shows that the optimum post length for SEO appears to be from 2,250 to 2,500 words. Shorter content has many limitations and makes you miss a lot of opportunities to engage your audience.
Don’t forget to make your content relevant, engaging, and eye-catching. Consider adding elements like pictures, videos, audio files, and infographics to make your content more engaging.
Long-form content can also contain more backlinks to improve your site’s exposure. Some content formats suitable for longer word count include how-to tutorials, product reviews, and guidebooks.
6. Improve Content Quality
Make sure the content you post on your site has the best quality possible. Ignoring small mistakes and details might have a negative impact on your business’s credibility. Take your time to recheck your content before publishing it to the public.
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For example, check for any misspelling and grammatical errors on your blog and articles using tools such as the built-in spelling checker and Grammarly. If you post video content, pay attention to basic aspects such as audio quality and how you cut each clip.
7. Increase Page Loading Speed
A site’s load speed plays a significant role in an online business’s success. According to some research, most customers expect a website to load its content within two seconds. Failing to meet this expectation may result in a significant increase in bounce rate for your website.
Popular search engines like Google also include page load speed as one of the factors when determining a website’s position in search results. This means that website speed can potentially drive more traffic to your website.
Minimizing the use of plugins and optimizing the size of media files are excellent ways to improve website performance. Use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to check if your site needs loading speed improvement.
8. Personalize the Customer Experience
Personalization is a prominent factor that affects users’ experience on your website. With modern technology, businesses have more opportunities to customize elements of their websites to match customer’s unique preferences.
Having a personalized sales and customer support experience can make or break a business. Studies have shown that 71% of customers feel frustrated when their experience is impersonal. Therefore, it is in your best interest to know strategies that can make your interactions with customers more personal.
Some methods to consider include using tools like Google Analytics to track customer behavior, utilizing features such as live chat to proactively engage customers, and sending a personalized follow-up email after each purchase.
Also, pay attention to customer support personalization by solving customer complaints immediately and providing context-based support for them.
9. Add Consistency
Emphasizing consistency across all points of your customers’ journey can also help improve CX. It is important to have a standardized quality and characteristic in all aspects of your business, including products, marketing initiatives, and customer service.
Create a straightforward system to help your team understand their roles and responsibilities in the customer experience. Don’t forget that regular communication across departments within your company is vital to maintain this consistency.
Conclusion
Customers’ satisfaction during their interactions with your business is a core factor to your success. One way to gain their trust and loyalty is to provide a smooth experience when using your website.
In this article, we have learned about what CX is and its role in your business growth. We also looked at nine ways to provide the best customer experience on your website, including:
- Secure the site with SSL
- Make decisions based on customer insights
- Increase page loading speed
- Focus on site design
- Ensure a smooth site navigation
- Create a long-form content
- Improve content quality
- Personalize the customer experience
- Add consistency
People will notice when you put a lot of effort into nurturing positive relationships with your customers. The golden rule is to always pay attention to your customers’ feelings towards your business and maintain their satisfaction.
