User Experience & Conversion Rate Optimization

User Experience 

“User experience” (often abbreviated to UX) is a term used to describe, assess, and optimize the experience that an individual has of something that has been designed for them. Broadly speaking, this may be an application, a website, a product or service, or even an event. In this case, by sparing you endless scrolling through unnecessary lead-in paragraphs and simply offering you a plain English definition of this concept, we’ve optimized your experience of this page as a source of information.

When popularized in the early-mid ’90s by Apple User Experience Architect Don Norman, the concept of UX typically encompassed the relationship between a user and a computer. With the evolution of the internet, web and software design, mobile technology, and digital marketing, it’s come to refer to a far broader range of interactions. Today it’s a highly practical concept for business owners like you to better understand and improve the way people engage with your business, but your website is by far one of the most important.

Why Should It Matter to You?

Every good entrepreneur is constantly on the lookout for sophisticated & effective ways to keep their audiences and customers engaged, happy, and loyal. In our Web-driven world, a site that prioritizes strong UX design is essential to this. Your website determines the presentation and appeal of your products and services, the way you communicate yourself as a brand, the principles that guide your business, and so much more. As a result, how you approach UX design can mean the difference between growth and stagnation for your business.

Consider, for instance, that video content can convince 73% of users to buy your products or services, that 94% of visitors stop trusting a site that has outdated web design, or that 47% of people expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. The vast majority of customers will go to a competitor due to a poor customer experience, and the expectations of your website are core to this dynamic. A company that takes the UX of its site seriously will benefit from much higher conversion rates, better customer satisfaction and retention, and a more polished image.

Great Content, Great Experience

In addition to the influence that design and functionality have on the overall experience offered by your site, it’s crucial to consider how you create and utilize content. UX has played an increasingly important role in content marketing over the years, and it’s a testament to how dynamic this concept can be. A user’s experience is not only about how aesthetically pleasing your site is or how intuitively they can use and understand it on a functional level. It’s also about how engaging and useful the information on it is, and how that information made them feel.

A strong content strategy not only lends value and usefulness to your site as a resource—it adds the kind of flair and variety that a positive user experience requires. A well-written and consistently updated blog, engaging video content, eye-catching infographics, and downloadable content like case studies & white papers are just a few of a vast spectrum of possibilities. Truly understanding UX means appreciating just how much your business website depends on great content. Without it, even the fanciest site can fall flat as an experience.

UX & Mobile Technology

It’s impossible to overstate just how influential mobile technology has been in shaping the way we use the web and engage with businesses. It has radically streamlined our ability to discover, research, and select between the brands that compete for our attention. Unsurprisingly, then, the close bond between mobile-centric design and UX is one that shouldn’t be ignored. The quality of the experience that your site offers — and in effect, how well it converts and retains customers — depends hugely on the degree of attention you devote to mobile-optimization.

Mobile users, which comprise roughly half of internet traffic today, are 5 times more likely to abandon a task when using a site that isn’t mobile-friendly. A poor mobile experience will make 52% of users less likely to engage with a business overall. If your site doesn’t load in 3 seconds or under, 53% of users will leave. The reason for all of this is quite plain — expectations for a mobile-based experience are high when it comes to immediacy, clarity, and convenience. A UX strategy that doesn’t properly account for mobile is therefore hardly a UX strategy at all.

The Human Element of UX

User experience can be quite technical in nature, but it also requires a deep and intuitive understanding of how the human mind operates. Even with a well-designed, mobile-friendly site that’s loaded with distinctive and engaging content, the ideal user experience isn’t quite there. UX encompasses not just a set of perceptions, but a relationship, and that relationship won’t take shape properly if visitors feel that they’re interacting with a mechanical or impersonal entity.

Your site and its users should therefore be interacting with one another in a reciprocal, fulfilling way. Customer surveys and feedback, live chat, and targeted landing pages are all examples of how this sense of reciprocity can manifest. Want someone to sign up to your email list? Give them a valuable resource in exchange for a completed subscription form. Want to spark confidence in your products or services? Use your site to offer free trials or consultations.

In this sense, the user experience should be thought of as a core component of the overall customer experience. Your website is the place where the two principles intersect and blend together. It should exemplify the strongest attributes of your business while serving as an indication of what it’s like to interact with your team. Trust and esteem must be earned, and we can help you do it by creating a user experience that is as human as it is professional.

Communication, Confidence, and Care

A sale requires trust and confidence. 86% of customers will charge more for a good customer experience, and this is defined by a variety of traits that a good business website must secure. It is, after all, one of the primary means by which you communicate with potential and established clients, not to mention the jumping off point for countless customer support interactions. The visibility and accuracy of the contact information on your site is a key example. 50% of your visitors will be discouraged from choosing you if that information is outdated.

Meanwhile, there’s also a pretty good chance that sensitive information is going to flow through your site, whether it’s a lead’s full name and phone number or a customer’s credit card details. If your visitors feel the site is not secure, 84% of them will not make a purchase. This highlights the importance of SSL certification, trust symbols indicating safe payment processing and information security (such as from PayPal and McAfee), and an easy-to-find privacy policy.

You’ll also earn a considerable amount of trust with your site when you display testimonials, awards, and accreditation from organizations like the Better Business Bureau. These and other contributors to customer confidence should be just as important to you as the sales numbers themselves. Following these principles not only drives revenue and loyalty, it makes for greater entrepreneurial integrity and a happier community overall.

A/B Split Tests

In running any kind of business, one of your primary goals is to minimize uncertainty as much as possible. The better you understand how successful a given decision will be, the more confidently you can make it. This is just as true about a business website as it is about managerial or strategic decisions made within your company. At MGS Partners, our A/B split testing methods can guide even the most subtle details of your site in the right direction every time.

Designing and developing a business website involves a serious amount of decision-making on multiple scales, much of it directly affecting how successfully you land conversions. Even seemingly minute details, such as CTA button designs and simple word choices, can make or break conversion rates. So why open just one door and stick with it when another could potentially outperform it and give you better results? This is the beauty of A/B split testing. It can show you the way towards better customer acquisition and retention.

Anytime you need to determine the course of action that will most empower your website to convert, a split test can be carried out. During this process, our team at MGS Partners will implement more than one option simultaneously and traffic will be directed to them through randomization. In a basic A/B test, the existing version is referred to as the control while the one you’re comparing it to is called the variant. A hypothesis is typically established to determine a variation that is worth testing and predict how it will improve results. Through skillful monitoring and analytics, we’ll settle on the version that performs best and is positioned to get you the most business.

Get a Closer Look

When we carry out split testing to strengthen your website, we’re not simply looking to find out whether something does or doesn’t work. We want to know why, and this means learning as much as you can about the behaviour of your visitors. It’s a crucial form of insight that our team at MGS Partners can provide you with through effective A/B tests and the analytics that accompany them.

For instance, you may very well be getting plenty of traffic to a landing page thanks to a great social media post or ad campaign, but traffic does not guarantee a conversion. This is why bounce rate is one key metric that split testing will take into consideration, as it indicates how much of the traffic to a page is made up of visitors who simply navigate away from it rather than converting. A/B split testing with MGS Partners means zeroing in on the version of your landing page that will get you the lowest bounce rate possible.

Successful split testing should also reveal the precise ways in which visitors interact with the pages you depend on for conversions. This is often done through the use of heat maps, which offer detailed visual representations of click and scroll behaviour on the page you’re monitoring. giving you a closer look at precisely how visitors engage with what they’re given. When integrated into an A/B testing procedure, tools like these can be powerful assets in achieving the high conversion rates you need.

Everybody Wants Conversions

You want website visitors to perform certain actions that indicate their interest in your company, guiding them on their journey towards a long-standing relationship with your business as a loyal customer. Such actions may include signing up to your mailing list, scheduling an appointment or consultation, or purchasing a product. Whatever it may be, in marketing lingo it’s called a conversion. Typically, it happens thanks to landing pages, which are the pages we design specifically to convert visitors.

When you calculate the percentage of traffic that ultimately completes a conversion (whether to a specific landing page or to your website overall), you have a conversion rate. This is one of the most important pieces of data in digital marketing. It’s a concrete indication of how well your site is generating business for you in proportion to how well it’s drawing in visitors. The contrast between these two factors speaks to the fact that high traffic in and of itself doesn’t not necessarily mean excellent sales. Our team at MGS Partners will use the sharpest CRO tools available to take that traffic and direct it towards precise customer decisions.

The concept of conversions may be simple enough, but the process of getting visitors to convert as often as you need is far from it. This is the often challenging mission of conversion rate optimization: to sharpen just the right aspects of your site in just the right ways to make conversions as likely as possible. When a visitor arrives, what do they see? Does the site speak to their specific needs? Does it swiftly and conveniently provide what they’re looking for? Does it offer a rewarding and engaging experience? The MGS Partners approach to CRO will ensure that the answer is always a resounding “yes!” Because of its influence over a website’s ability to create new customers, business owners who adopt an effective CRO strategy have found it to be indispensable. When companies increase their number of conversion-optimized landing pages from 10 to 15, they can see a 55% increase in new leads. CRO has even been found to increase ROI by an average of 223%. Despite its track record, however, some entrepreneurs are slow to catch on to its potential. Over 20% of companies have admitted to not having an effective landing page testing strategy, so it’s no coincidence that 22% are dissatisfied with their conversion rates. With our CRO expertise, we’ll see to it that you’re never one of them.

CRO, Your Website, and Your Marketing Strategy

While much of your quest for conversions will be focused on creating high-converting landing pages, it’s important to appreciate how complex a role your site plays in this journey. For one thing, even the smallest details can have a considerable effect on how well a page converts. Simplifying a contact form by reducing its number of fields from 11 to 4, for instance, can boost conversion rates by as much as 120%. This sense of detail is central to the way we do CRO.

The countless details that comprise your site don’t just affect the converting power of a specific page in a particular moment, they also contribute to an overall user experience. Page load time, aesthetic decisions, usability, mobile friendliness and the use of moderated live chat are all key factors. Even a 1-second delay in the speed of your site can reduce conversions by 7%. MGS Partners will keep your site strong on all fronts so that it can secure the conversions you need.

CRO will perform at its peak when it empowers and is empowered by all of the other marketing efforts you pursue. Organic traffic brought in with SEO will only get you so far if you can’t turn it into customers. Neither your PPC strategy nor your email campaigns will be able to do their job successfully if the landing pages they link to can’t convert. All that great content and social media link building will be in vain if users aren’t guided toward that converting action. With this in mind, it’s easy to see why our holistic marketing philosophy has served our clients so well!