All developers, business owners, webmasters, and people who want to create their own first website want to make it popular and useful for every visitor. However, “popularity” just like “usefulness” and “great user experience” are very broad terms. There are dozens of things that you can do to engage customers, make a marketing strategy more personalized, or create a better design based on the opinion of real users.
Based on my digital experience, design, speed, atmosphere, website navigation, and problem resolutions are all of these pillars that can help you create a good customer experience.
Around 38% of customers leave a website if its layout or content seems unappealing. That means a great user experience on your website can help your visitors find everything they are looking for with ease and speed. It’s up to you to build a well-designed and content-rich site that makes your customers engaged and return for getting more information or more products.
To get success, it’s important to go deeper and try out new ways to get maximum engagement and earn more leads and revenue in the future. In this article, you will find six simple ways that can help you start working in this direction efficiently.
Table of Contents:
- Use Chatbots
- Apply A/B Tests
- Use Google Tools
- Add Structured Data To AMP Pages
- Understand Your Web Analytics
- Mark Up Your Live-Streaming Video Content
- Bonus Tip: Improve Your Email Marketing
1. Use Chatbots
Though lots of businesses add more and more chatbots to their sites. It’s still not an as common tool as it should be. According to eMarketer, 63 percent of customers were more likely to visit a website that offers a chatbot. Customers don’t just receive a piece of information but are engaged in dialogue, which, paradoxically, is very humanized and natural, much more natural than impersonal mass emails. It’s like talking to someone friendly and qualified —a perfect combination that can regularly increase sales.
Right now customers want to get quick service. Chatbots don’t need to sleep. They can respond to you, and give answers to questions at all times of the day. An asset to your at 3 am immediately, and that can hardly be overestimated. Online businesses who create chatbots don’t need to wait for 24 hours to get the info they need.
Chatbots increase not only customer loyalty significantly but also generate precise leads and collect statistics that will help you better understand user behavior. Now, that is a game-changer. For example, we’ve recently integrated the chatbot for Stephens Law to help our clients get instant answers about their law problems. Using this approach, it accounted for an impressive 35% of all conversions within the first 45 days.
2. Apply A/B Tests
“The more online services are provided, the more sophisticated customers become. Giving clients what they need is not enough anymore,” says Milosz Krasinski. “Today, the way you do it and the experience you give is equally important”. That’s where A/B tests come into play and are considered one of the most effective marketing tools.
I know that A/B testing is a well-known way but quite tried and true, effective as it helps online businesses make better decisions and increase revenue by testing different versions of your web pages to figure out which one performs best.
You might be thinking that it is quite a complex process to prepare for your campaign and optimize your business. The answer is yes, that’s why it’s crucial to use the right tools to implement a comprehensive A/B testing strategy. For example, Finteza is an effective tool that can help you measure the efficiency of your changes. The best thing about this tool is the ability to build funnels including three stages for each version of the page and find out whether the frequency of clicks depends on the location of the buttons.
3. Use Google Tools
Google works hard to improve the quality of sites that people see in the search results. The company recently announced that all the most useful tools will be turned into one set of functions. All the services webmasters have used before, Lighthouse, Chrome DevTools, PageSpeedInsights, and Search Console’s Speed Report will be updated and integrated into Core Web Vitals. In turn, it is aimed at improving sites for a user and search engine.
It is not easy to measure the level of user satisfaction — there are too many aspects to consider. That’s why Google decided to focus on the quality of their website’s user experience using these basic metrics:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is an important metric that helps measure how long it takes to download a page and shows the essence in the page load timing process when the page’s web content has likely loaded.
- First Input Delay (FID) allows to measure load responsiveness and evaluates the user experience when they first interact with the web page.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) tends to quantify visual stability through the analysis of an event of the user experience.
Currently, these are the core metrics, but the representatives of the company note that Core Web Vitals will be updated, and new metrics will be added. Business owners can use these tools (PageSpeedInsights and Google Search Control) to understand if their sites meet the most essential quality criteria and optimize them, if necessary.
4. Add Structured Data To AMP Pages
AMP is an online library launched by Google 5 years ago. It is used by devs to create pages that load almost immediately on Google Chrome, Opera, and other mobile browsers. Simply put, AMP is a kind of tool you can use to significantly improve the speed of your website.
Today more than 50% of site visitors prefer to use their mobile devices to surf the web. Of course, all they want to do is increase the quality of their sites and speed. Moreover, you know that users are likely to leave the site if they need to wait 3 seconds and longer.
But what exactly can it do?
- Increase the download speed
- Provide a better user experience
- Make your site get to the top of search engine results
- Be in the top news carousel
Every AMP page needs to be linked to its “main” version, which, in turn, needs to link back to the AMP version. There is another important thing to consider about this library — you still need to include the most important properties to make your page visible. They include the text content, headlines, date, and preview pictures. You can add more, but these things are essential.
After all, make sure to test each page to make sure it is written in valid AMP HTML. Try to use Google Search Console to analyze your AMP report for any mistakes. Integrating AMP, it’s important to follow Google’s structured data policies. If you get it right, your content will more prominently appear in search engine results.
There is no doubt that AMP has got a lot to improve your online business and make your website profitable, attractive, and engaging.
5. Understand Your Web Analytics
To get success, you should track your web analytics regularly to figure out what features, products, or pages work well on the site and which ones make users bounce away. Fortunately, we don’t have to do things manually — there are a lot of effective analytics tools that can provide solid insight into how well your marketing strategies are performing.
It is crucial to check website health, in-page clicks, scroll depth, mouse movement, user navigation patterns, live visitors, recordings, site speed, content performance, conversions, and website accessibility.
We all need user data no matter how we are driving traffic to our websites. Through the use of analytics tools, we can build our own methodologies for getting the maximum return on your investment in marketing and keeping users first.
Here are simple tips how to make the most of your analytics:
- Create a strategic vision. Make sure that it isn’t important how much data you have collected. Instead, try to quantify the value of that information by connecting it to what you want to reach. If you want to create an engaging user experience, you should focus on an individual’s personal interests and tastes of your customers.
- Define your next move. Try to look ahead in the long term. For example, check out where the customer is in the buyer’s journey and what will stimulate him to take action. I mean that all your strategies can be both actionable and incentive. You need to always keep data in mind when taking the next step in the overall process.
- Keep from analyzing data in isolation. It’s a good way to go into detail, but more importantly to receive the bigger picture. Try to collect the most relevant information you need, not just what you want. Let’s say that you tend to find out more about customer preferences. Just give them choose their own offers that could give you the information you need to engage your audience on a deeper level.
- Give yourself permission to fail. It’s a process for overcoming failure and taking risks before you get success. Try to find something in your data that can help your brand better communicate with customers.
Once you do right, you can monitor and scale everything from products to packaging as a way of increasing engagement with your customer base.
6. Mark Up Your Live-Streaming Video Content
Another thing I want to mention is the necessity to use the indexing API to ensure that your video content gets crawled and indexed timely. By doing this, you notify Google about the updates — adding or removing certain pages. Once Google understands that fresh content was added, it will recommend your page to relevant users.
This is especially important for websites that include web pages with many live streams that don’t live long. In other words, marking up such videos allows keeping your content fresh, up-to-date, and relevant in search results. Just make sure that you follow the rules while doing with the indexing API.
Bonus Tip: Improve Your Email Marketing
This is one of the oldest methods, but no one should underestimate its importance. Why? Because it still works well enough. Newsletters can increase sales but only if the quality of content you send is your top priority. Moreover, if you are a small business owner, you can improve conversions and increase sales via email.
Make sure to give your emails a personal touch and make them look like they are written by a human. Hyper-personalized emails allow you to increase customer engagement and make your prospects more connected with your brand.
There’s no need to hire a team of marketers — if you make some effort, you can use the right marketing tools like Moosend for running a successful email marketing campaign.
Bottom Line
As you can see, there are a lot of ways to create a more engaging user experience. Each of these tools and methods I’ve mentioned above can help achieve your goals and build the best user experience. So, consider things that are most important for your business before you choose one or a few options from the list. Just use them properly, and you’ll reach the desired result.
