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.
Related Article: What Is User Experience (UX) Design?
The Consideration Stage
The Consideration Stage is where you have to highlight your key differentiators in the market. UX across your site needs to lead the visitor on a journey to get to your core content that educates them on why your product or service uniquely solves their problem. This stage is where people evaluate your offerings compared to other options on the market.
Important Elements of the Consideration Stage:
- Guide next clicks in UX. Highlighting the next click visitors should take from their introduction to your brand. Once they arrive on your landing page or home page, what element (especially based on the path they took to your site) should they explore next? Your menu and on-page CTAs should send them on a thoughtful path that deepens their learning.
- Competitor comparison in UX strategy. Visitors often want to know exactly how your offerings stack up to competitors in your space. Based on their journey from their search intent to your website, consider creating pages that clearly delineate the differences between you and your competitors as well as advantages of your product/service.
- Optimize onsite search experience. Optimize your onsite search to deliver content tailored for the Consideration Stage based on data that shows common search queries; you can glean a lot of user intent from your site search to understand exactly what your visitors are looking for and where you have gaps in your content that you need to fill.
The Decision Stage
The Decision Stage is the bridge between the pre-sale and post-sale phases, when a potential customer is compelled to convert. The interested party is ready to buy, so instead of delivering more informational content to them, you should be looking to move them through the purchase process quickly and easily.
Important elements of the Decision Stage:
- Make the bottomline information clear and accessible. For ecommerce, this means showing pricing and product features clearly on the product page. For SaaS and other service-based industries, your pricing page needs to clearly show what’s included at different pricing tiers. For other non-transactional industries like higher education and healthcare, it’s about onpage education that drives home the value a visitor would get from applying or setting up a consultation, etc.
- Have social proof woven throughout your key pages. Quotes, testimonials and links to case studies/customer stories can make a huge difference in getting people over the line to conversion in the Decision Stage.
- Focus UX on the final action. Bottom of funnel pages that you’re looking to optimize for conversion should focus on making the final action extremely easy for visitors. If the conversion event is to sign up for a free trial, submit an application schedule an online appointment or otherwise, make the CTA button easy to find and prominently featured and keep everything following the CTA click as lean as possible (sign up forms, etc.)
The Retention Stage
The Retention Stage is everything that happens after a person becomes your customer. This involves all the actions and touchpoints they have with your company and content after that initial conversion. For certain industries, this can include the onboarding process, how they’ve adopted your product/service and their willingness to participate in company satisfaction surveys.
Important Elements of the Retention Stage:
- Solve customer pain points efficiently. Retargeting ads and win-back campaigns should lean into solving the customer’s pain points based on all the information you have about them from their journey.
- Enrich post-purchase experience effectively. Blogs, guides and video in post-purchase communications should be designed to enrich the experience with your product or service so that it deepens the customer’s understanding of how you’re solving their problems.
- Tailor follow-up with first-party data. Personalize post-conversion communications; you have first-party data and information about the customer at this point, so your follow-up touchpoints should be tailored to their interests and needs.
The Advocacy/Loyalty Stage
The Advocacy/Loyalty Stage is when you grow the relationship with your customers to the point where they are willing to recommend your product to others and are happy to continue purchasing your product or service.
Important Elements of the Advocacy/Loyalty Stage:
- Create UX that makes it easy for customers to let you know what they think about your product/service. Quotes and testimonials are invaluable social proof, so make it easy for customers to give you that feedback in post-purchase communications.
- Use feedback and reviews on your site. Prospective customers often need the confidence boost of knowing other people or organizations trust your brand and your product/service. If you consider the uphill climb that CAC creates in attracting new customers, then part of “treating each customer like gold” is leveraging their happy moments as inspiration to compel others to convert down the road.
- Start by establishing your baseline for advocacy and loyalty. What percentage of customers are leaving positive reviews? How many new customers are attributing their patronage to word-of-mouth recommendations in surveys? Find those metrics that matter to your organization in this category and create your baseline so you can capture the impact of UX investments over time.
Curating and Course Correcting With AI
Curating your customer journey and optimizing for conversions is an iterative process. It’s all about testing what’s working at each stage of the journey and making tweaks to your website experience to fine tune your visitors’ pathways to conversion.
That’s where the need for marketing agility comes in. Teams need to be able to test, gain insights and move quickly in response to the data that lives within their website. Your website is a treasure trove of data that’s constantly trying to tell you how to improve the visitor journey.
Are You Listening to Intent Signals From Your Website Visitors?
If you are listening to the stories within your website data, your next step should be a plan to fine-tune your website experience and UX with the help of AI. The first layer here would be AI tools that facilitate creative and copy. These are best used to accelerate tasks like landing page creation, messaging for headlines and supporting copy to quickly make changes based on the information you’re getting from your website experience.
The next layer of tools that can help you curate the customer journey are solutions that help you quickly surface insights about your site performance. Many marketers are still relying on GA4 as their only gauge of their website performance; those teams will find themselves behind compared to others who are using AI-enabled tools that can give you customer journey-specific analytics, onsite search analytics, heatmaps, session recordings, and more detailed insights into the way your visitors are interacting with your website.
There’s no shortage of AI tools that can help you fine tune your website UX for higher conversion rates. But that is only half the battle.
Planning Beyond the Curated Path
Don’t forget to plan for the times when visitors deviate from the curated path. No matter how much we plan and prune the perfect customer journey, website visitors will undoubtedly stray from those carefully crafted paths and discover content in click pathways that are unique to them. UX strategy can help you course correct here.
Help your visitors discover content by promoting high-value pages and offering content recommendations when they search for specific resources. Link content-rich pages in high visibility locations and ensure your global header menu is organized with valuable links.
You should always be asking, “How are we connecting visitor intent with content that answers their questions or solves their pain points?” This will help you plan for contingencies, and there are many AI tools that will help support you in surfacing relevant content.
Going Forward With Your Improved User Experience Strategy
Building the optimum user experience at every stage of the customer journey isn’t a perfect process that anyone can prescribe. It takes iteration, careful listening to your data and fine tuning in real time. To achieve this, you need to ensure that your technology stack is capturing the signals your visitors are sharing through their behaviors.
In the face of rising CAC, being agile and adapting to those signals to find the right content and pathways that build trust and confidence is how you’ll make the most of each dollar spent to attract your visitors.
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