Here Is Why Your Website Customer-Experience Is So Important

A company’s web analytics account is a treasure-trove of information about everything that is right and wrong with the website. What percentage of people bounce back from the page they landed on? How long does an average user spend on your website? How well do smartphone visitors convert compared to desktop visitors? An analysis of each of these different parameters will help a marketer take decisions that can impact their business bottom-line.

At the outset, the process of identifying parameters that impact conversions appears to be a sales problem. However in reality, this is a customer experience issue. Why do people who make the effort to visit your website not move beyond the first page? Why are smartphone users less inclined to make a purchase compared to your desktop users? Are there factors making it difficult for your customer to trust you? Are you providing the information that a customer seeks? Just like it is in a brick and mortar shop, if you do not make it easy for a customer to see and pick the things they need, they may rather bounce away instead of actually making the purchase.

So how do you go about benchmarking the “customer-friendliness” of your website? Here are a few things to check out.

Is Your Site Easy To Navigate Through : Studies have shown that the average customer spends 7 seconds on a web page before deciding whether to continue exploring or go back. What this essentially means is that your website should have a simple and elegant interface that would not be intimidating to a layman customer. You can test the navigational user experience through services like User testing.

Do Customers Understand What You Want Them To Do : Business owners spend a lot of money and resources bringing targeted traffic to their websites. But are you doing enough to nudge these customers towards taking action? Services like CrazyEgg help website owners understand how their customers engage with their website. So if you can see that people aren’t really noticing your blue colored ‘Buy’ button, then you could potentially change it to red and test if that helps.

Does Your Website Work Well On Smartphones : There are more mobile internet users today than are desktop users. As a result, it is extremely important that you make your website “responsive” in order to help customers on a mobile phone navigate better. Quite recently, Google introduced algorithmic updates that penalized websites that did not provide a good mobile user experience to their customers. So as it stands now, good customer experience on a mobile platform is no longer an option, but a necessity.

Customer-friendliness of a website is not a hollow metric. As we just saw, user experience impacts other areas of marketing like SEO and SEM as well. According to Matt Cutts, the former head of spam at Google, the most critical aspect for businesses seeking SEO services is to make their website customer-friendly. Unless your website is easy and intuitive to use for customers, chances are you may stop seeing traffic from search engines.

There are dozens of tools available in the market today to help businesses analyze the user-friendliness of their websites. It is important that marketers make use of these services as much as possible to render a website that is not only good-looking but also intuitive and trust-worthy in the eyes of the customers.