The “customer experience” is defined as the product of an interaction between a customer and a company. Today, a successful customer experience strategy should be enjoyable from the customer’s point of view while also leading to sales. And, the vast majority of customers will primarily interact with your business via your website.
Building great customer experiences means investing in your own customers and making sure their journey on your website is seamless, from your home page through to checkout. If your customers have a negative experience, it leads to high bounce rates as well as lost opportunities and business. If you want a low bounce rate on your website, then you have to boost the customer experience on your website
Conversely, when the customer experience is good, engagement is almost inevitable – and they’ll keep coming back. In this blog, we’ll illustrate five effective ways you can boost the customer experience on your website to improve conversions and encourage customer loyalty.
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
People shop with mobile phones on the go, in the restroom, while watching TV, while eating, and doing just about anything that can permit them to still use their phones. In fact, 92% of internet users access the internet via mobile devices. And 66% of users are likely to buy from a mobile-friendly website. So, if you don’t have a responsive website, you’re missing out on valuable traffic and risking permanently losing leads.
In fact, it’s not enough for your website to just be compatible with mobile devices – it needs to be user-friendly on those devices. Some sites, when loaded on mobile devices, aren’t fully functional. Be sure to complete a “mobile-friendliness” check before launching your site – or, if you already have an established site, check what it looks like on mobile, and make changes accordingly. Responsive websites dynamically fit into any screen size, which allows your site to look good across all devices and browsers. This will help you increase your site’s user engagement and conversions.
You can use a tool like Google Search Console to test whether your site is mobile-friendly. You can also quickly assess how your website will appear on mobile by right-clicking on your webpage, choosing “Inspect,” and then select the symbol of two screens displayed in the toolbar at the top right corner.
Make Your Website Load Faster
Did you know that 53% of website visits are abandoned if a site takes longer than three seconds to load? Sounds crazy, right? Another study showed that more than 47% of customers expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds, a statistic that is even scarier. With internet speeds getting faster all the time, consumers’ expectations have changed.
So what does this mean? It means that there is very little time for you to impress your potential customers who will leave your website if you can’t quickly grab their attention.
Knowing this, it’s easy to see how your website’s speed can have a direct impact on your customer’s experience and therefore, your sales. There are many tools available to run a website speed test and find out how you can improve your page load time.
A few extra seconds to load your website could result in catastrophic effects in terms of revenue. This is a vital step that will drastically boost customer experience on your website. And the better the experience, the more likely consumers are to stay on your site!
Here are some tips for speeding up your websites load time:
- Reduce the number of HTTP requests your site makes: When a webpage loads, it downloads different kinds of pages like images, scripts, etc. An HTTP request is made for every element of a page. And, the more elements, the slower the page load time.
- Check your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files: They make requests too. Reduce them by making them small and combining them. Eliminate even the simpler things like extra spaces, line breaks, and indentation.
- Reduce your server response time: The amount of time your DNS lookup takes can affect how quickly your page loads.
- Use a DNS monitoring tool to perform a speed comparison test to get an idea of how fast your provider is. If your DNS provider is too slow search for a new one that offers higher speeds.
These are all things your website administrator, whether in-house or outsourced, should be able to do.
Make Navigating the Site Smooth and Easy
No one wants to spend time on a website that’s difficult to navigate around. That’s a recipe for failure and higher bounce rates. Visitors will get upset if you make it difficult for them to navigate your website and find what they want.
A HubSpot survey shows that more than 76% of the people surveyed said that the most important factor in the design of a website was – “The website makes it easy for me to find what I want”.
The key to making navigation smooth is to organize the site and make as many categories as possible which can reduce unnecessary clicks on your website. An easy-to-find Site Search will also make it simpler for users to find what they want seamlessly and faster, with a minimum of clicks.
When thinking of your website’s architecture a simple rule of thumb is to make the flow of navigation as intuitive as possible. This will enhance your customer’s experience and keep them coming back.
Less is Always More with Content
Good content is undoubtedly a great way to boost customer experience on your website and generate more business. Don’t clutter your site with wordy content. Most visitors to your website know where to go when they need to read lengthy posts. They are on your site for a specific purpose and that’s for finding products or information that they can peruse.
Make your content easier to understand by using relatable and transitional words. Prune the longer sentences by getting rid of redundant words and replacing them with the use of power words across all your posts.
And you should know that the attention span of humans is getting shorter by the day. Ensure your content is well written with the right elements so you’ll hold onto readers’ attention with content that is interesting and not boring. Tell your customers how your product or service can make a difference in their lives.
Check the grammar of your website copy as well. It has to be error-free and simple enough that it could be understood in a single reading. Although it is better to hire a professional proofreader you can also use a free tool like Grammarly to polish your content.
Incorporate Live Chat
With a live chat feature using a chatbot, customer questions can be answered instantly. Granted, sometimes it can be annoying to have these chatbots popping up when navigating around the site, but they certainly come in handy when there’s a need.
Today, most customers prefer a self-service customer support system like chatbots, where they can quickly get answers to their most pressing questions on their own. This not only takes the load off your staff but also reduces your customer service overhead.
It also saves the customer the trouble of waiting on the other end of the line for a representative to attend to them.
FAQs also enable self-service, which is why you should make sure that your FAQS are not filled with unwanted information and are to the point.
Remember, good customer service sometimes is the best experience for customers.
In Conclusion
Your website will be successful if you make it a priority to satisfy your customers with the best products, information, and service available. But your customer experience on your website needs to be smooth enough for the customer to come to your site over and over again.
Your website is the primary source of information for your potential customers, and in most cases, it is the point of sale as well. As a responsible business that wants to thrive, you want to ensure that your customers enjoy their visit by doing everything you can to boost customer experience on your website.
The happier you keep your customers, the more they are going to come back and recommend you to their friends. As people nowadays have higher expectations from websites. They want it to be simple to use, and it should help them find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. Additionally, they expect a great design that is well-maintained and up-to-date so they can trust what they see.
At Obsessed With Success we understand how important your website is to your business and are dedicated to making sure our clients are as user-friendly and easy to use as possible. That’s why we offer all prospective clients a free, no-obligation, strategy session to help you identify how you can improve your marketing and attract more clients. Here’s a link to schedule a time for us to meet. We’d love to talk with you!
