Why User Experience Optimisation In Digital Marketing Is Everything
Is user experience in digital marketing everything? Absolutely. That’s a pretty big claim, and we’re standing by it. Positive user experience is pivotal to your digital marketing success!
Here is the 2024 User Experience breakdown every digital marketer needs, covering topics such as:
- What is user experience?
- Why Google prioritises user experience
- What are the differences between user experience (UX), digital experience (DX) and customer experience (CX)?
- The benefits of user experience to your digital marketing
- UX best practices
- The secret to creating an exceptional user experience
What is User Experience (UX), and Why Does it Matter?
User experience, shortened to UX, refers to the usability of digital products, services or systems. A positive user experience means users can easily interact with the digital channel and accomplish their purpose.
If someone is able to find what they need on a website and check out quickly, they will be satisfied and have had a positive experience.
UX Design is when you design a product, service or system with the user in mind to ensure an optimal experience.
You want to ensure that it is enjoyable to interact on your digital platform (be it your website, customer portal, or mobile app) because positive UX leads to:
- A positive brand perception. How people are left feeling after digital engagement reflects how they will feel about your brand.
- Loyalty. People will keep coming back because you’ve made it easy.
- Conversions. Good UX makes the path to trusting your brand and buying from you a no-brainer.
- Great SEO! Google’s ranking algorithm weighs User Experience quite heavily.
Why Google Prioritises User Experience
There are a couple of reasons Google prioritises User Experience more and more, all of which essentially boil down to:
- Happy users are repeat users. Google wants to make its users happy just as much as you do. If someone has a frustrating time on the site that Google sent them to, they may not trust Google results or switch to another search engine.
- UX helps Google understand what is relevant. While keywords SEO keywords also known as keywords or keyphrases are terms added to online content to improve search engine rankings for those terms. Most keywords are discovered during the keyword research process and are chosen based on a combination of search volume, competition and commercial intent. are still fundamental for SEO today, the way we approach them has evolved. Google doesn’t rely on keywords to determine a web page’s relevancy as much anymore. Instead, it looks at how users interact with a website to indicate whether the page answers the search query. Fast bounces are a sign that the content may not be relevant.
Overall, UX strives to make users happy—if it’s good for users, it’s good for SEO.
Many experiences, are they all the same? UX vs DX vs CX
It seems that only developers love jargon more than marketers, and the two worlds collide with digital platforms.
This begs the question, is there a distinction between User Experience (UX), Digital Experience (DX), and Customer Experience (CX)?
They are indeed distinct from each other, but they work hand-in-hand.
Customer experience is ubiquitous. It refers to all the interactions a person has with your brand across all touchpoints (on- and offline).
Digital Experience is omni-digital-channel. It refers to the experience across the brand’s digital ecosystem. It encompasses customer experience and employee experience across all digital assets, such as websites, apps, games, and computer interfaces.
User experience refers to the users’ experience on any given digital asset—usability—to achieve a specific goal. UX is an aspect of DX and, therefore, CX!
The Benefits Of UX To Your Digital Marketing
1. Good UX & Customer Journey Optimisation Increases Conversions and ROI
Several studies highlight the significant impact of UX on business performance.
According to a Salesforce report, customers expect connected journeys: “79% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, yet 55% say it generally feels like they’re communicating with separate departments rather than one company.” With that, 88% of customers are more likely to purchase again if they had a positive experience.
Hubspot reveals that “Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t.”
Data from Zendesk suggests that bad experiences account for 73% of customers moving to competitors.
2. UX improves Brand Equity
A positive user experience fosters trust and loyalty, leading to repeat business and positive word-of-mouth marketing.
67% of users say that a poor website experience negatively affects their opinion of a brand (Webalive).
3. User Experience Affects SEO
User experience impacts bounce rate, page dwell time, user retention, and conversions—all of which affect your domain authority and, ultimately, ranking.
Would you believe that ESPN.com’s revenues jumped 35% after they listened to their community and incorporated suggestions into their homepage redesign? (Source: Inside Design)
4. UX Empowers More Effective Content Marketing
The logic is clear: when users can easily find and understand your content, they’re more likely to engage with it and remember your brand.
Analysing how people interact with your content and website will also give you cues on what people want, so you can continue to deliver relevant, helpful content!
5. UX Helps To Reduce Marketing Costs
We already know that good UX can improve conversion rates and return on investment, but that’s not all. A positive digital experience on self-help platforms or apps means that you can:
- Reduce customer churn, and therefore spend less on acquisition.
- Upsell and cross-sell, reducing advertising expenses.
- Use your analytics to inform data-based decisions so your future campaigns hit the mark the first time!
There are countless more benefits to optimising user experience across your digital assets. We simply don’t have enough time to run through them all.
Getting It Right: UX Best Practice
At its heart, user experience entails:
- Optimising the journey: Good UX considers the entire user journey including how users find the product, learn to use it, and achieve their goals.
- User centricity: UX design prioritises the users’ needs and expectations. It should be intuitive and easy to learn (not requiring many instructions or guesswork)
- Emotional impact: UX considers the users’ emotional response, seeking to remove obscurity, obstacles or too many steps.
Here are the best practices that make for good UX in digital marketing.
1. Keep It Simple and Concise
Clean, uncluttered design helps the user quickly identify if the content on the page matches their expectations.
For this reason, you should have a clear hierarchy of information.
Use consistent layouts, navigation styles, and visual elements throughout the website. This creates a sense of comfort for users, enabling them to learn their way around and find what they’re looking for.
2. User-Friendly Navigation
Have a clear, concise, easily visible and understandable menu. Stick to the tested, common navigation patterns that the public is used to.
Unless your brand’s communication objectives say otherwise, a website about an art exhibition centred on asymmetry might deliberately employ off-centre design. But for the most part, familiar navigation is best!
Ensure all links are clear and descriptive so users know where they’re clicking.
3. High-Quality Content
Provide valuable, informative, and well-written content that is relevant to your target audience. Consider search intent when crafting your content. For example, if someone wants to understand “how to”, include clear steps.
Use visuals like images, videos, and infographics to break up text and enhance engagement.
4. Clear Calls to Action (CTAs)
Tell users what you want them to do next, whether signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or contacting you. Use strong CTAs that are visually distinct and easy to find.
5. Search Functionality
If your website has a lot of content, provide a search function that is easy to use.
6. Accessibility
Make sure your website is accessible to users with disabilities. You’ll be surprised how much of this is already in the bag when you follow SEO best practices (read about online audits).
The Secret to Creating an Exceptional User Experience
You can’t get user experience wrong if you put your users at the start of everything you do. That is, always create with your users in mind.
Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and ask: why am I here? What am I looking for? Where would I go if…?
Imagine it’s your first time landing on the page, or you’ve just downloaded an app. Can you tell where you are and what you should do next?
Can you easily accomplish the goal of the content: sign up, download, share?
The trouble is that most design thinks about what the company wants to accomplish. They create a bot to alleviate the support team, but the bot is terrible at answering FAQs, so the helpdesk becomes even more swamped!
Thinking of real-world scenarios when you build is a good way to avoid this. Imagine the user’s journey from first experiencing a problem to trying to troubleshoot it through your bot. Then test.
Testing is paramount.
This is your silver bullet. Test your product. Test your app. Test the web page.
Give it to someone entirely green, without context and test what they do. Can someone who’s totally left-field get it? Good!
Try to break it. Don’t just test to see if it works. Do your best to break it. Find the weak spots and fix them!
And when all of that is done, think of the user experience with this digital asset in the broader context of your digital ecosystem. Does it all fit? Is everything cohesive? Have you created an exceptional digital experience? Do all these things contribute to an overall positive customer experience?
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