For excellent conversion rates, a business has to go through so much of circus. From providing flawless service to ardent marketing, promotions, and whatnot, it takes so much to get your business going. However, a significant determinant that many people overlook is excellent user experience or UX.
The quality of user experience of your website or landing page directly affects your conversion rates. Jason Goldberg, founder, and CEO of Fab.com says,
“User experience matters a lot. More than most people realize. The best-designed user experiences get out of the way and just help people get sh*t done. Less is more. If you have to explain it, you’ve already failed.”
In this guide, we will discuss a few simple things you can take care of to boost your conversion rates. Before moving on, you must make a clear distinction between UI and UX, so that you don’t press the wrong dials.
UI and UX
User interface (UI) is an amalgamation of interactive elements through which a visitor communicateswith the website. It is a place where human meets the code.
However, User experience or UX is the experience of that interaction with the website. To give an analogy, ‘the user interface is like the reins, the saddle, the stirrups of the horse, and UX is the feeling of riding that horse,’ as Dain Miller puts it.
The beautiful and functional interface can merely add to the UX, but it is not the entire UX on its own. As many UX designers believe, totally taking out the UI’s contribution to UX can conclude in major UX blunders. Thus, a usable and functional UI must be considered while crafting an excellent user experience.
Let move on and look at how you can boost user experience to affect your conversion rates.
Load Speed Matters
Excellent user experience begins with a blazing fast site. A study in 2009 by Akamai and Forrester suggested that 40% of visitors bounce back from sites that take longer than 3 seconds to render completely. No one has the patience to wait for it to unfold slowly.
Akamai in 2017 found that a 100-millisecond delay in load time can cause conversion rates to drop by 7%. All this data directly suggests that you can only boost conversions if you optimize your website/page to load faster. You can also use some great bootstrap 4 templates available in the market as your best UX guide, as those are created by industry expert UI/UX designers and have quicker good loading speed.
To check your current load speed, you can use the following tools:
- Google’s PageSpeed Insights
- Pingdom’s Website Speed Test
- GTmetrix’s Website Speed and Performance Optimization
Along with current load speed, they also suggest how to boost speed and mark areas that require improvement.
Declutter your Page; Remove that which Distracts!
A page with too much irrelevant information will confuse your visitors. Any business’ landing page is mostly about conversion. This page must only hold information that is relevant and guides the visitor to the core purpose of that page. One of the massive UX mistakes is to believe that giving too much information is wise.
Avoid putting irrelevant information or too many navigational links that take away the visitor from the landing page. This will only create competing decisions in the visitor's mind and distract them from the central aim, which is taking the call-to-action.
AmeriFirst decided only to create naked landing pages, which meant decluttering their landing pages from any navigational links. With this simple decision, they have seen an increase of 30% to 40% in conversions.
Your Page Copy Should be Readable
Readability is a critical aspect when it comes to UX. In my personal experience, websites with small text size, hard-to-read typeface, and wacky font colors have been tremendous suffering. Though most people overlook this underappreciated aspect of UX design.
If it gets difficult for visitors to read the page copy, it will become naturally hard to comprehend. Your visitors will be clueless and not know what to do or where to head. A report by UX researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Spain’s Universitat suggested that an 18-point font size and 1.0 line spacing is the best for UX readability and comprehension.
A text with arduous vocabulary, improper grammar, and lousy language, is harder to comprehend and understand. People usually skip the written content and move on to more interactive elements or call-to-action. Thus the little text you have must be easy to read and quick to understand.
Proper CTA Placement
How and where you have placed your call-to-action button can make a lot of difference in your conversion. Usually, people like to put the CTA button at the bottom of the page after giving all the information. This makes ethical sense but factually doesn’t work.
A study found the exact opposite. In relation to user experience design, the fold is the imaginary line that divides the website into two sections, the one that you can see without scrolling and the other, which you will see after you scroll.
Here is a heat map used in the study with 57,453 eye-tracking fixations across a wide range of pages. It shows where the visitors looked more or less, red being the highest point of attention and white being the lowest.
The study by NN Group found that the visitors give 84% more attention to the information that is above the fold than what is below the fold. To illustrate, your blog setup should be in a manner that puts the most important and relevant information above the fold, whether it is a CTA or any navigational link.
Add Videos on Landing Pages
Text is harder to absorb. Graphics and videos have the most retention value. Videos are interactive, indulging, and self-explanatory. Thus a better medium to communicate.
Your landing page is your sale page. Just for aesthetic's sake, you can’t skip providing the necessary information. But putting too much text can be more challenging for visitors to comprehend. Thus, using explainer videos on your landing page can be a better idea. Videos are more interactive, people are more receptive to it, and it communicates the value proposition more effortlessly.
TapInfluence’s landing page is an excellent example of a video landing page. Their video explains the vague concept of influencer marketing effortlessly, which means they have seamlessly delivered their value proposition.
Video landing pages can boost your conversion to 80%. There many examples similar to that of TapInfluence.
Take Away
A better UX means higher conversion rates. There are no two ways about it. You can read as much as you want; every successful business is telling the same secret. We shared a few tips to enhance UX, which, in turn, will lead to more conversions.
There is enough data to suggest that a better UX boosts conversions. Experiment with these methods and do not shy away to make a few changes.
