Kick-start the year by spring cleaning your online presence!
LeanTiger
Here are some simple tips on how to kick-start the year by spring cleaning your online presence and not get bogged down with the January blues!
With customers battling the January blues and not wanting to spend, now is a great opportunity to use the downtime wisely so that your company is more than just prepared for the rest of the year.
Your sales may decrease in January, but bringing your spring cleaning forward and optimising your website will mean you’ll have a conversion-targeted mean machine ready to blow the competition away for when sales start to pick up again!
5 usability heuristics to help you embrace January
Hopefully, your December sales have hit or even exceeded targets, but that shouldn’t stop you from looking under the bonnet of your online client processes and systems – especially with leading online retailers reporting a shocking customer website abandonment rate of 70%!* From major improvements to the nuances of fine tuning, your business’s conversion rate can always be optimised further.
#1 – Help your customer feel like they’re in control
Giving feedback to the customer about what part of the website they have reached allows them to feel in control of the system.
A friendly prompt to acknowledge that a form has been filled in correctly, or an image to represent the percentage of a task being completed means the customer knows they are taking the appropriate actions to reach their goal.
Be careful to not overdo it with status updates, though, especially if the user can’t do anything with the information you’re providing – they’re after reassurance not distraction. Ultimately, your business is gaining the consumer’s trust in your brand.
#2 – Speak the customers’ language
Demonstrating empathy and acknowledgment to customers through an online business can be easily gained by using language and terminology used in the real world.
Buzzwords, jargon and business speak should all be replaced with familiar words, phrases and concepts. If you do have to use certain terminology, abbreviations or acronyms, then at least give the user an easily accessible point of reference, such as a Frequently Asked Questions section.
A potential customer having to look up your wording in a search engine is a potential customer about to go elsewhere! Asking someone outside of your business to read through your company’s website or app is a great way to discover if you’re connecting with the real world in a natural and logical way.
#3 – Clearly mark your emergency exits
We’re all human (aren’t we?) and fallible. Giving your customers control over their mistakes is essential to stopping abandonment. Enabling a way for them to back pedal or undo a wrong click is giving them confidence in your system and, therefore, your business.
Even just a simple Cancel button when the wrong delivery address has been submitted can save the day! These ‘emergency exit’ features will need to be clearly labelled and accessible though, otherwise, they may as well not be there. A ‘stuck’ customer is an abandoning customer.
#4 – Your business’s standards are not your customers’ standards
As with usability heuristic #2, people like consistency – real-world language in the above case. The same can be said for visuals. Have you performed a competitor analysis recently?
Even if you haven’t, you know that nearly all websites and apps follow certain standards which convey consistency to the visitor. For example, the shopping cart symbol in the top right-hand corner.
Making your business look individual and innovative through web design could bring you all the web traffic you’ve ever dreamed of, but changing ‘external standards’ that all visitors expect (such as the shopping cart) could give you the bounce rate you’ve always dreaded.
#5 – Be proactive in minimising user errors
User error gives out a completely wrong signal: the user probably isn’t at fault at all, it’s the design of the interface that they are trying to use that’s forcing an error! Error prevention is critical to any business.
Checking for interaction errors and smoothing out the customer journey is the proactive way to minimising problems. Simple wins like button colour/text/location can stop customers becoming annoyed, whereas, a confirmation pop-up could prevent an email going to the wrong recipient or worse still the transferring of funds to the wrong account.
And, of course, not forgetting the ‘emergency exits’ described above in #3, that prevent a customer becoming ‘stuck’.
Summary
So there you have 5 usability heuristics that you can implement during the downtime period that is the January blues.
Your early digital spring clean will have your website or app more than ready for when things pick up again during February.
If you would like to know more about using A/B or split testing and the psychology behind the users experience to help reduce your websites abandonment and improve your business’s conversion rate then get in touch by contacting us for a no-hassle consultation at: info@leantiger.co.uk or alternatively for more information on our products and services please visit: www.leantiger.co.uk
