6 Surprisingly Simple Ways to Ensure That Your Website is Customer-Centric
Everything can be designed to look beautiful and appealing. But, can every design hold the user’s attention for longer than a few moments?
Whether it’s an ordinary shopper or a high-profile company, people coming to your website are interested in discovering a solution to their problem. When customers browse multiple options, they don’t think about which brand’s logo looks better or how many features a certain product offers. Their only focus is on the one that makes them think, “This is exactly what I was looking for!”.
That’s why the success of your website depends on customer-centric design. Also called user-centric, this type of design is developed with the customer’s needs and wants in mind.
Customer-centric design can ensure your visitors stay on your website longer and get familiarized with your brand. Studies have shown that visitors will leave your website if its design and navigation are poor and confusing or if there’s no clear message of how your products/services work.
The first step is to get to know your target groups. The customer’s needs always come first, so discover who your typical customers are and determine their behavioral patterns. That will teach you where you need to implement specific measures to save users time and give them what they want.
With that in mind, here are six surprisingly simple ways to ensure that your website is customer-centric.
Focus on Benefits Over Technical Features
When showcasing your product, ensure you present it as a benefit rather than a tool. Instead of making an entire spectacle about your product’s functionality, tell customers what’s in it for them.
Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and think about how your product or service makes your life easier. Then, put your ego aside and tell that story.
We all know that your solutions have some amazing technical features that you can’t wait to tell the world about. But speaking about how your solutions can affect customers’ lives conveys a message that’s way more effective in increasing conversion rates.
When you have to include necessary information about your product’s capabilities, try and make real-world, measurable promises that mean something to the audience. This will improve your customers’ shopping journey and make them follow through with the buying process.
Affinda, a company that automates document processing using AI, provides a great example of this practice on its homepage. They include a “Benefits” section that tells visitors exactly what they’ll get if they sign up for their services.
You can notice that they outline benefits such as less manual work, better insights, faster turnaround, and world class performance in a clear and obvious way, so their prospects know what they’re in for.
Source: Affinda.com
Keep Text to a Minimum
Again, you probably want to include every technical aspect and function of your products on your website because you’ve spent so much time and hard work building them. But that would be a grave mistake.
Keeping things simple is how you ensure you captivate your visitors’ attention and give them an incentive to get interested in your offer so they can dig for more information themselves.
At first, customers are only scouting for options, and they don’t want to climb walls of text to narrow down their search. That’s why keeping text to a minimum may yield better results.
Bottom line: stick to the point and say what you do. Don’t give unnecessary information. Allow your users some breathing space so they can easily navigate through your website and notice important messages and call-to-action buttons.
There are lots of examples of this tactic. One that stood out to us comes from Digitarial. This affiliate marketing agency uses minimal text fields across their entire website except in some sections, which are strategically placed for users who are already engaged and want to learn more.
We can specifically point to the homepage’s main header and the “Why Us” section. They use only one to two sentences to explain who Digitarial are and what they do.
Source: Digitarial.com
Be Available in Person
The importance of customer service is often talked about, and yet, many businesses fail to implement proper communication channels on their websites.
Don’t be one of those companies that hide their support email behind a barrier. There’s nothing worse than frustrating your customers by leaving them hanging when they need assistance.
You need to show your customers that you have their needs at heart by being available in person. Making sure that things go smoothly in the customer service department goes a long way toward building strong relationships with your clients.
So, make your contact details easily accessible and provide as many different support options as you can. You can choose between live chat, email, phone, text, conference call schedulers, etc.
Brakes To You is an example of a site that advertises their phone number on a prominent spot. And not only that – this mobile brake repair service actually uses their phone number as a CTA that automatically launches the user’s phone dial pad or Skype.
Source: Brakestoyou.com
A great example of an effective live chat contact option is SeaRates, a freight shipment tracking and quoting service. They provide a live chat button placed at an intuitive location, which pops up ready to answer customers’ questions.
Source: Searates.com
Answer Common Questions Early
When people come to your website, they’re not really interested in staring at fancy pictures of your logo and products. They’re there looking for information and answers to all kinds of questions about your brand and services.
Make sure to give them that from the start. Provide valuable and actionable information that your usual customer might need.
Given that you’re familiar with who your audience is and what problems they face, you should already know what they want to know about your product or service. Knowing that, don’t make them click around to find answers. Give them the info they need on the home page.
You want your answers to be concise but thorough and complete at the same time. Also, you need to ensure the information provided there is broken down into the following categories:
- Answers that connect you with your customers – details that reassure them in your relationship
- Information that educates customers on how your solutions work
- How-to guides that help customers throughout the buying process
- Surprising details and stats about your solutions that will inspire and excite your customers further down the conversion funnel
GILI Sports, a retailer for paddle boards and accessories, has two sections on their homepage that answer common questions. Look them up under the “Love to SUP but have limited space?” heading and above the footer. That’s where the FAQ section is usually placed.
Source: Gilisports.com
Use UGC to Show Your Product Being Used
People know that professional product pictures are usually touched up and unrealistic. They know this type of media is shown with the purpose of selling, and many shoppers have grown a bit immune to the tactic. It can also be hard to visualize what you’re selling from product photos.
If you want to be more approachable, you can use user-generated content that shows some of your happy customers using your products. This is already answering many of the questions that users would otherwise bombard you with.
It’s totally up to you if you’d like to incorporate this content as a testimonials section on your website or display it through user reviews on your product pages. Just make sure to curate high-quality pictures with your products in the spotlight.
Fire Pit Surplus, a company selling fire pits and related products, does this exceptionally well. They display many user-submitted pictures in their reviews section. They even have a dropdown that lets you see reviews that feature pictures.
Source: Firepitsurplus.com
Optimize Your Site for Speed
In a world where convenience is in abundance, you can do everything right and still fail to satisfy everyone’s needs.
All of your customer-centric strategies can perform exceptionally well and drive customers to purchase your products or services – but if your website is slow, you can still lose them in a heartbeat.
As a matter of fact, website loading speed is one of the most crucial metrics when it comes to retaining prospects.
Google updates its Core Web Vitals every year, and in 2022, your website needs to satisfy the following three metrics if you aim to rank higher in search results:
- LCP – Largest Contentful Paint: Your website’s homepage content needs to load within 2.5 seconds after a visitor tries to access it (loading performance).
- FID – First Input Delay: Visitors should be able to start interacting with your website within 100 milliseconds of loading (interactivity).
- CLS – Cumulative Layout Shift: Your website’s visual content should become stable for viewing and interacting with a score of 0.1. CLS or less (visual stability).
With that said, find a good resource on how to optimize your site for speed and work on building a great website around that. You can also hire a professional to do this for you if you want to focus on other aspects of your business’s online growth. In any case, never forget to address this issue.
Wrapping Up
Improving your online presence should be a continuous process, not a one-time intervention. Analyzing your shortcomings and constantly monitoring your customers’ behavior will provide you with all the data that you’ll need to make regular improvements to give customers a better experience. Remember to always test new elements and apply the versions that communicate with your customers the best.
Hopefully, our six tips for optimizing your website will help you create the kind of website that entices visitors to convert and keep coming back to your business.
About Post Author
