Allison Leeds Bucchere , Forbes Councils
"User experience" was once a term that primarily applied to product design teams on the verge of creating the next hot app. But today, UX is beginning to influence all aspects of business development, marketing included.
The complex digital marketing conversion funnel — with its email campaigns, social media ads and landing pages — means your brand appears in front of numerous consumers in a variety of contexts. Maximizing your conversion rates requires a consistent, holistic user experience across an array of marketing communications.
This is where UX takes the stage.
Just as UX teams methodically plot how their target audiences will engage with and experience a product, today’s marketing teams must design experiences with the same degree of precision and empathy to maximize results. By taking a leaf out of the product design playbook, marketers will supercharge their campaigns with the following trio of tools.
Even if you sell a single product or service, it’s unlikely that it will appeal to a single demographic of consumers. Rather, different audiences will find it compelling for different reasons. By leveraging both internal data and customer insights to create customer personas, you are better informed to craft campaigns that tap into the desires of your target audience.
Personas also help you reel in former customers with remarketing campaigns that address their specific concerns. Further, they help you find entirely new groups of potential customers. Google Analytics offers a great platform for dividing customers into groups based on factors including gender, age or geographic location.
Another method uses power-user interviews. Our team finds it helpful to spend time with power users over video sessions to uncover their motivations, tasks, dislikes, likes, personalities and more.
To make the personas more human, give each one a name and a photograph. We hang personas up in our workspaces to design and write our messages for these customers — neither for ourselves nor our clients — so it helps the personas stay top of mind as we craft future experiences.
User Testing
The next step is bringing personas to life. Find actual users, preferably your customers with the highest lifetime value, and watch them interact with different levels of your conversion funnel. Additionally, observe how non-customers who match the attributes of your high-LTV customers experience each layer. Then, allow them to identify not only what they love but also what’s getting in the way of their experience.
Pointing out what they dislike is the most valuable information users can give, and usually after testing with five to seven people, patterns begin to emerge. Remember that revising your campaign until the biggest barriers are eliminated is a quick way to improve conversion rates.
If you’re struggling to get information or you don’t have any users yet, gathering valuable feedback might be as easy as standing on a busy street corner with a stack of gift cards and a tablet. Ask people who represent your target users to interact with your campaign, and then take note of their impressions. This approach helps you quickly gather insights, making it easier to craft a meaningful, impactful experience as soon as possible.
No matter which route you take, user testing is one of the most efficient ways to validate your creative strategies before scaling them up. Even the most basic tests may save a tremendous amount of time and energy to improve the odds of success when your campaign launches.
As conversion funnels become increasingly complex, entire departments are often devoted to crafting a single area of the user experience. By creating a map of the customer’s entire journey — from initial touchpoint to eventual purchase — you help ensure every step along the path feels cohesive and holistic.
Journey maps are large, collaborative documents that provide marketing teams with a birds-eye view of the entire conversion funnel. They allow each team to identify how their contributions fit into the big picture. More importantly, they make it easy for marketers to put themselves in users' shoes and ensure every asset they create fits together seamlessly and results in a delightful experience that will drive customer action and lift results.
Journey maps also help teams identify the pain points that trigger customers to abandon purchase funnels, stop engaging or cancel their memberships. From there, marketers can forge productive collaborations with other units — such as the product team or the analytics department — to prioritize and remedy the most pressing issues.
With their distinct skills sets, marketing and UX teams have often been siloed off in separate groups within a company. It's time to break down the metaphorical — and perhaps physical — walls and encourage an overarching UX focus across both teams.
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