UX Is Your Key to Conversion Rate Optimization in the Age of AI

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UX Is Your Key to Conversion Rate Optimization in the Age of AI

The Gist

  • User experience and CAC. An exceptional user experience strategy is essential to fighting rising CAC and optimizing for conversions.
  • UX aids customer journeys. Each stage of the customer journey is an opportunity to enhance your user experience strategy and craft an impactful experience.
  • Leveraging AI. Marketers need an agile user experience strategy to curate the user experience and quickly course correct with the help of AI.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) has been one of the toughest challenges for marketers in recent years. As CAC continues to rise, squeezing budgets and mounting pressure on growth marketing teams, the economics of clicks has shifted, showing a decline in click-through rate from paid channels. This creates a scenario where each visitor should be treated as “gold” to improve conversion rates and make marketing dollars stretch further.

In the face of these challenges, marketers need a user experience (UX) strategy that gives them the agility to deliver an exceptional website experience to high intent visitors from the time they hit their site. That first impression and the initial phase of your user experience strategy is a make-or-break moment for converting visitors to customers.

From there, success lies in a user experience strategy that is optimized for each stage of the customer journey. Marketers carefully curate pathways to conversion, but need to be prepared for when visitors deviate from the “perfect path.”

What Is It About the User Experience That Makes People Convert?

Well-crafted UX compels people to action; visitors are curious because of their journey — moving from social/paid/word of mouth to landing on a website, to exploring specific areas of the site that they care about.

When the UX facilitates an experience that makes it easy and enjoyable to discover content that matches the visitor’s intent, it’s a recipe for success. But this isn’t just a “nice to have.” UX that delivers a positive experience is essential to improving conversion rates.

Around 88% of visitors will not return to a website after having a bad experience [Forbes]. We’ve all been there, navigating a website that is full of dead ends, broken links and 404 pages. That type of experience shakes your confidence in a brand’s ability to serve your needs; if they can’t make it easy to find the content you’re looking for, is their product or service going to fall equally short of your expectations? It’s a slippery slope that leads potential customers directly away from your site.

When you consider the high cost of acquisition per visitor, the stakes are even higher. Your site needs to be optimized to deliver UX that engages and delights the user from their first exposure to your content, so they’re compelled to convert or, at the very least, have the confidence to return for subsequent visits.

Related Article: Exploring the Crossroads of User Experience and Customer Experience

Optimizing for Each Stage of the Customer Journey

Your strategy for improving your website conversion rate has to consider UX for each stage of the customer journey. All five stages of the journey serve critically important functions in educating your target audience about your product or service and helping them along to the point where they feel a connection to your messaging and are ready to convert.

The Awareness Stage

The Awareness Stage of the user journey is all about capturing the attention of your target audience across a variety of channels. It starts with a social post on Facebook or LinkedIn, a Google Ad, an organic search engine listing, or any other digital touchpoint that is the first interaction with your audience.

UX starts here. No matter the medium, the UX elements of that first touchpoint in the Awareness Stage should look and feel like your brand and, more importantly, should be optimized to deliver upon the viewer’s intent.

Important Elements of the Awareness Stage:

  • Compelling copy and visuals strategy. Copy and visual design (where applicable) that stand out to demand the viewer’s eye and quickly speak to the value proposition of your product or service.
  • Consistent brand visuals in UX. Visuals and copy of top-of-funnel touchpoints should always match your brand guidelines so that when people click, they land on a page that feels and communicates like the same brand they just experienced in that first touchpoint.
  • Pain-point-focused UX content. Focus on the pain point: viewers are seeing your content because they’ve shown intent, through search or other data capture, that they have an interest in solving a specific problem; from the pre-click touchpoint to the post-click landing page, your content should show how you solve their problem.
  • Effective CTAs in UX strategy. Calls to action (CTAs) that are clear, compel viewers to click and promise value. Where they land should deliver on the exact promise you make in the CTA.

A key mistake that organizations often make with that first touchpoint is not delivering upon the promise or exact CTA. A common example of broken UX in the Awareness Stage would be a display ad that has “Watch the Video” as the CTA but leads to a page that doesn’t automatically play the video in question, or worse, doesn’t have a video on the page. Another common example is a “Learn More” CTA that doesn’t lead to a content-rich experience.

Those UX breakdowns lead to confusion and mistrust. If the user can’t trust you to deliver on your call to action, then they are unlikely to trust your product/service.

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