How to Improve User Experience with Customer Journey Optimization

When it comes to growth hacking, entrepreneurs try every strategy they can find to convert visitors to loyal customers. They invest heavily in designing beautiful websites, or spend a fortune on advertising to increase traffic, hoping to direct every new customer to their sales page and push them to buy (or at least try) their product.

What’s Wrong with This?

This works in two scenarios: in case you don’t know what you’re doing or if you are trying to run a ‘touch-and-go’ business.

The truth is, while beautiful websites with great UIs may attract people to your website or your app, it does not really contribute that much to increasing your revenue, or adding value to your customer’s experience.

The problem is that some entrepreneurs try to invest in paid media and advertising to increase their opt-in rate and get more customers, and they overlook the fact that while such digital marketing strategies are great for your business, you must first build a solid foundation, optimizing the user experience and encouraging your visitors to return.

The most essential factor that can positively transform your growth rate is enhancing your user experience through Customer Journey Optimization, also known as CJO strategy. In this article, I’ll walk you through the most vital steps of Customer Journey Optimization strategy and help you increase your conversion rate and optimize your user experience.

Why Does Conversion Optimization Matter?

Running a successful online business means being able to increase your revenue, scale your business, make customers happier, and reduce your costs. As straight forward as this may sound, many entrepreneurs won’t make it too far because the devil is always in the details.

Here’s the truth: When you spend a lot of money on marketing and advertising and use different strategies to increase your traffic, your aim is to encourage every visitor to make a purchase, and buy your service, but it doesn’t happen just like that!

In reality, apart from your loyal customers, not every visitor who lands on your website is willing to try your service or pay for it. Thus you should engineer your website to attract your visitors to stay longer, and encourage them to learn more about you. The secret to success is in understanding your customer’s preference. You must pay attention to their persona, find out what matters to your customers, and try to engage with them while they are on your website.

The main question is, how do you know what your customers would be interested in? That’s exactly where conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategy comes into play. Conversion rate optimization refers to a set of data-driven growth hacking experiments that help you discover the weak spots on your landing pages, and tune them towards your customer’s preferences.

A CRO experiment takes about four to six weeks. Ultimately, you should be able to begin having high quality engagement with your visitors, and convert them to loyal customers.

Source: Conversion Rate Optimization

What Is Customer Journey Optimization?

While conversion rate optimization focuses on optimizing your landing pages through experimenting with different designs, background colors, buttons, forms, text, and so on with different customer segments, customer journey optimization helps you take your customer experience to the next level.

When we talk about customer journey, user experience plays a great role in it. It would be unfair to limit the scope of UX as it spans a wide range of things from understanding customer’s behavior through research all the way to strategizing and copywriting.

The best measurement to know if your website UX is engineered to convert more visitors to leads is your customer behavior. Understanding customer behaviors enables you to design or redesign your landing pages based on proven facts, with customer needs in mind, and remove unnecessary design elements. For instance, you don’t need to ask your customers to give you every detail about themselves just to offer a free trial.

Customer journey optimization refers to a predefined path that your customer segments will walk through, until they make a purchase and become your customer. In plain English, you must design different landing pages, separate lead magnets, and special offers for different customer segments.

One of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs make is underestimating the power of market segmentation. When you drive all of your traffic to one trial offer, sales letter or homepage, you’re highly likely to experience a huge decline in your conversion rate.

Designing different landing pages is just the beginning. In fact, the tone of your copywriting must match your customer’s need and enthuse them to keep going. For instance, if you’re selling apparel for teenage girls and teenage boys, you may want to funnel your traffic based on gender; this way you’ll see a great boost in your conversion rate. On the other hand, if you’re selling a product that is a bit complex to use, you may create two different blog posts, “The Advanced Guide” and “The Beginner’s Guide,” and drive different customer segments to each page. This way, you are engaging both customer segments the way they need to be engaged.

Customer Experience Best Practices

The main reason that many user experience experiments fail is that UX designers and entrepreneurs don’t put enough effort into understanding their customer’s persona. The secret behind successful online businesses is in understanding what your customers want, desire, need, have, love, hate, etc.

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by Ehsan Jahandarpour via SitePoint