UX design is an extremely delicate process. Anything that taps into the psychology of buyer behaviour requires the steady hand of a surgeon.
There’s no secret that buyers are becoming smarter. We’ve often self-diagnosed our problem, identified a solution and explored every option before even speaking with a member of a Sales Team. There’s so much information out there that the buying process is becoming increasingly marketing-heavy.
It’s no surprise that the Internet is the primary and potentially the only information resource for buyers – and your company website should be right in the middle of it.
A carefully considered content strategy can do great things for your search engine rankings around relevant search terms and as we’re sure you’re aware, paid advertising can make this process a whole lot faster and more targeted.
The problem is that customers approaching your business all come in different ways, with different motivations and potentially at different stages of the buyer’s journey.
You might have visitors that aren’t ready and need more education. You might have visitors that aren’t the right fit and you might get visitors that are just complete time wasters.
THE BUYER’S JOURNEY
This is how you can use the power of UX to do a lot of your lead qualifying for you. Using the correct language and leading the potential customer through the right funnels is a simple way of providing a user with more education if they need it, a clear signposted path to purchase if they’re ready and enough obstacles to lose those that just simply aren’t right.
The difficulty of creating these funnels is that it’s hugely dependent on how you’re attracting these potential customers. It’s probably safe to say that you don’t want to be spending your entire pay-per-click (PPC) budget on pushing everyone to your website - and then relying on funnels to drop them back off again because they’re not the right fit. You’ll want to target the right people and drop the wrong ones before they’ve cost you any money.
On the flipside, visitors who have landed on your site through organic means (perhaps a blog article of yours from 6 months ago), are much more likely to be a good fit. They might just need more education to bring them to the point of purchase.
SO HOW IS THIS DONE?
This is where you need to put your surgical gloves on. We’re not talking big changes. We’re talking very small and deliberate improvements to separate the wheat from the chaff and move users in the right direction.
Asking questions is a great way of doing this. Answering questions opens up a huge amount of self-evaluation. The same self-evaluation that buyers go through at the beginning of the buyer’s journey.
But not just any question – it’s about asking the right questions. UX designers must always work collaboratively with savvy copywriters to delve into the brains of your potential customers to identify their challenges and weaknesses.
LIFE ABOVE THE FOLD
We’re always taught to put the most important elements ‘above the fold’ – this being the part of the screen that a user can see without the need for scrolling.
This makes perfect sense in a perfect world, but the world isn’t perfect. A landing page should have one objective – to guide a visitor towards a conversion goal. However, this can be broken down into two parts. The guiding and the conversion. While you would hope that those landing on your landing page (see what we did there) are already targeted and qualified to a degree, they might not all be in a position to convert.
It makes sense to remove all of the clutter and all of the hurdles involved with moving customers through the buyer’s journey. You want to make this process as easy as possible for them, right? Sort of. What you must always consider is leaving enough hurdles in place to vet your visitors before they inadvertently become completely unqualified leads.
FINAL THOUGHTS
When designing your landing page, it’s important to remove all of the unnecessary distractions from reaching your conversion goal. But there’s a fine line between making it easy to convert and making it too easy and misleading to convert.
It’s probably safe to say that you would much rather receive web leads that are ready for sales qualification instead of wasting time sending them back through the nurturing cycle.
Imagine if the UX design of your website could do this for you…
There’s a balance between getting a lot of leads and getting good quality leads. Now that buying behaviour has changed so much and buyers have become smarter, web leads should be almost ready to buy anyway.
Ensure that they are almost ready to buy. If they’re not, send them back round until they are ready. Put the right content in front of them and ask the right questions before converting. Putting a contact form at the top of the page might increase your leads by 7% but what if a contact form at the bottom led to better qualified leads that require less ‘selling’ to?
We’re sure we can guess which you would prefer.
This isn’t just about landing pages. You can go through the process of improvements for every page on your website. After all, your website should always be guiding your visitor to the necessary next step.
When in doubt – A/B split test.
