Create a better customer experience on your website

How do you eat an elephant?

Do you open your mouth as wide as possible and hope you can eat it all at once?

No, of course not. That’s crazy! You eat it one bite at a time.

The same principle applies to improving customer experience on your website so you can increase your conversion rate. You don’t do a major makeover and hope your conversion rate jumps from an average of 2% to a whopping 20% overnight. That’s impossible.

Instead, you tweak your website’s elements bit by bit and aim for a realistic improvement from 2% to 2.2% conversion rate. Sure, the figures may seem small when you look at it superficially. But have you considered the extra revenue you can earn just by doing small changes in your website?

You can start improving your website – and your customer’s experience – by doing these small tricks I talk about in today’s video.

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Imagine walking into a brick-and-mortar store and just being bombarded by 20 different employees asking you what you want to buy, how they can help you, why you should sign up to their exclusive list, or what your target budget is.

It’s irritating. It’s overwhelming. It’s confusing. Right?

So if your prospect visits your website and sees a lot of things happening: a pop-up appearing, multiple widgets loading, and several things flashing on the screen at the same time, it’s the same thing. They feel targeted. They feel attacked. They feel overwhelmed.

And you bet they’re going to want to leave your website as quickly as possible.

Unless you do these three things to improve your customer experience, of course:

1. Log out of your admin dashboard and browse through your website in the eyes of a prospect.

Here’s where a change in perspective comes in handy. Instead of checking your website as an administrator, think of yourself as a guest.

Another advantage of doing this tip is it gives you the opportunity to view your website with all its features.

Sometimes, the website development team tends to add a lot of widgets and pop-ups because they’re logged in as admin so they can’t view everything, so logging out and viewing in a private browser window helps you fix this by seeing all the website elements first-hand.

Think of pop-ups, for example. If you’ve set your pop-up to appear every 3 days only, and you’ve already seen it, whenever you test it while you’re logged in, you may not see it any more so you tend to add another pop-up to really capture your market.

Before you know it, you already have 3 pop-ups and 2 widgets. The only way you can know about this is if you view the site in a private browsing window and see for yourself – kind of like putting yourself in your prospects’ shoes, isn’t it?

2. Create contextual and relevant pop-ups with trigger, instead of showing it all the time.

You and I both know that pop-up works.

Sure, Sumo even discovered that top performing 10% of pop-up forms convert at a whopping 9.3%.

But you also need to consider the fact that intrusive pop-ups are overwhelming and sometimes, irritating enough to negatively affect your customer experience.

After all, 70% of Americans say they get annoyed by irrelevant pop-up ads.

So how do you go about it?

You make your pop-ups relevant by providing:

• Context

Instead of randomly showing your pop-up on every page of your website, consider displaying it in a highly relevant blog post.

For example, you can write an in-depth guide on investing and then display your pop-up offering a free ebook about personal finance.

This way, you’re sure that people who want to download your book are interested in finance as they’ve seen it appear on your post about investing – exclusively.

• Trigger

Using the concept of “less is more”, show a pop-up only when it’s triggered by an action.

For example, the exit pop-up is triggered  only once a prospect approaches the close button to exit your website.

Another example is taken from the CM Commerce website: whenever a visitor who’s reading our long-form content stays a certain time on the page or scrolls beyond a specific part of the page, a pop-up is also triggered to appear.

Of course, if you also want your offer to be available anytime but you don’t want it to appear as intrusive as a pop-up form, you can also use a bar that’s fixed on the top or bottom part and persistently appears on the page. It’s still a nice visual call-to-action that doesn’t detract from your customer experience.

3. Consider how your website elements interact with each other.

Perhaps you have several pop-ups appearing: a persistent bar, a widget for chat, a widget for a loyalty program like Smile.io, and even CM Commerce’s Review Tab.

Sure, I understand the reason for wanting to include all these elements. They may all be helpful in helping you achieve your respective goals.

Again, think of choosing your website elements as you personally talking to your visitor. If you talk about different things all at the same time, your message will be lost, your customers will be confused, and your goal will be left unfulfilled altogether.

That’s why you really need to consider and prioritize which element you actually need and how this element will be displayed on your website.

Perhaps you don’t really need to have a persistent bar that’s available all the time?

Or maybe just showing a simple “contact us” link is better instead of showing a chat widget all the time?

Maybe instead of displaying everything on your homepage, you can consider displaying a certain element on certain pages only. Prioritize and consider alternatives to pop-ups. You owe this to your website readers and customers.

I hope this video inspired you to assess and modify your website as needed. After all, improving your customer experience can boost your conversion rate and increase your Customer Lifetime Value over time – killing two birds with one stone, right?

Interested in learning more about this? Let’s chat about it in the comments section below. See you next week! Ciao.

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(Photo by Igor Miske from Unsplash.)