3 UX Tips to Improve Digital Marketing Results

According to a Forrester report, we are entering the age of the customer. What does this mean for your company's marketing plan?

It means that your customers, as they become more empowered, are going to shape your marketing strategy, as they have an expectation of consistent and highly interactive digital experiences. This includes user experience.

1. UX Requires Understanding the Users

Understanding your users leads to more refined, targeted marketing. After all, UX is really about enhancing customer satisfaction by improving how they interact with your website.

The more you understand your users, the more you can understand how they feel when interacting with the systems your company provides. You are then able to tweak your UX to provide them with the most pleasant, valuable experience.

Forrester also reported that focusing on the user experience increases users' willingness to pay by 14.4 percent, decreases their reluctance to switch brands by 15.8 percent, and improves their likelihood to recommend your products or services by 16.6 percent. Understanding the user through increased UX ultimately allows you to improve your marketing results.

2. Optimizing Content Reduces Bounce Rates

On a very basic level, user experience leads to greater SEO results. The algorithms in place nowadays rank fast, optimized sites higher, and the visuals of a website can attract more leads. Optimizing content can also lead to a decrease in bounce rates as well.

Forty-seven percent of users expect a Web page to load in two seconds or less, making optimization of response time and functionality crucial for a reduced bounce rate. Furthermore, if the page your users are interacting with isn't optimized for relevance to their search and needs, you can expect them to bounce off the page. For this reason, optimization in the form of increased user experience is vital, not only attracting the eyes of your users, but in retaining their attention as well.

If you're still not convinced of the importance of optimizing user experience, take a look at these statistics:

• Given 15 minutes to consume content, two-thirds of people would rather read something beautifully designed than something plain.
• Thirty-nine percent of people will stop engaging with a website if images won't load or take too long to load.
• Forty-seven percent of website visitors check out a company's products or services page before looking at any other sections of the site.

3. Customers Crave Fast, Highly Interactive Experiences

CIO reports that "customers want to engage in fast, highly interactive, visually pleasing virtual environments." This means that to optimize user experience, you need to reduce the amount of friction between the website and user in the form of unnecessary clicks, false starts, excess or blank pages, and most importantly, slow loading pages.

By enhancing your UX, you are enhancing the usability of your website, which increases user-to-customer conversion rates as well as customer retention. You will begin to see an increase in ROI, as customers that have fast, highly interactive experiences are more likely to share their experience with others. The more interactive your website is, the more you can grow your network across various marketing platforms.

What It All Means

As user experience moves to the forefront of content marketing strategies focused on digital media, creative agencies and marketing agencies will have to begin to change the way they interact with their customers.

By focusing on user experience, you will begin to see an increase in
marketing through the deeper understanding of the way your customers interact with your content, a decrease in bounce rates and an overall increase in shareability.