Your customers turn to your website to find products, services, and solutions that make their lives easier. However, any bumps in their buyers’ journey can throw them off the hunt.
Factors like slow loading speeds, confusing page layouts, and unclear directions can cause your visitors to bounce back to the search engine results page (SERPs) in search of a more fluid experience. This means an optimized customer experience can improve your customers’ satisfaction, drive sales, and improve your brand’s reputation.
So, let’s look at six foolproof ways to remove friction from your customer experience and encourage more of your website visitors to convert into loyal customers.
1. Map your customer journey to identify any causes for concern
The first step to removing friction from your customer journey is understanding your existing customer experience. To do this, you’ll need to create a customer journey map, which is a visual representation of the journey a user typically takes, from learning about your products or services to making a purchase with you.
It helps you track and analyze the story of your customers’ experiences with your brand across various platforms, like social media, your website, email, and any other channels they may use to interact with your business.
To map your current customer journey, follow these steps:
• Profile your users by their demographics so you can define your goals based on who you are targeting.
• List all the touchpoints customers typically hit when interacting with your brand. This should include social media channels, paid ads, and review sites.
• Once you have your touchpoints mapped, you can travel through the customer journey yourself to see how the experience is and whether there are any places where improvements could be made.
The most common friction causes tend to be interruptions to the buyers’ journey, which may be caused by slow loading speeds, confusing purchasing pathways, and crowded page layouts that make it difficult for customers to find and purchase what they need.
2. Don’t leave room for customers to wonder what their next step should be
A lot of friction in the customer experience can be caused by prospective customers not entirely understanding what their next step should be. So, you must do everything you can to eliminate any risk of confusion or possibly face losing key sales.
There are many ways you can ensure your customers know how to move forward with your company, such as by:
• Designing an intuitive and engaging website that is easy for visitors to navigate.
• Adding a search feature so customers can find the information they need as quickly as possible.
• Including a contact form that allows users to contact your company with questions or concerns.
If customers can see a clear and frictionless path forward with your brand, they will be much more likely to move further into your sales funnel. Now, to give you some inspiration, let’s look at some businesses that don’t leave any room for confusion when people are browsing their websites.
Intelius is an online people search tool designed to provide customers with background information about the people they meet. It’s crucial to ensure customers understand how they can access their offerings right away, because website visitors are likely to be new to this type of tool and will want to feel engaged right away.
So, their people search page features an easy-to-use search bar where people can enter simple pieces of information to get started. This is placed right at the top of the page, too, so it’s the first thing people see when they land on the website. This leaves no real time or room for prospective clients to get confused about what their next steps should be. This will help to ensure that customers jump right into doing the research required, which will increase the company’s sales.
You can use this approach on your website by placing a form above the fold of your site to ensure customers know exactly how to convert. Just make sure you ask for as little information as possible to begin with, or visitors might be deterred from entering their details. This tactic can reduce confusion among potential customers and help direct them towards making a purchase in as little time as possible.
Another company that ensures prospective customers know exactly how to convert when they land on its website is Trillium Counselling. This counseling service aims to offer clients a safe space and top-notch therapy sessions through online and in-person sessions.
To ensure customers can meet their therapists and book an appointment right away, they have placed two prominent call to action (CTA) buttons at the top of their homepage so people can either book an appointment or learn more about the therapists before visiting. The buttons on the slider at the top of the page can help potential clients learn more about the counselling center and remove confusion about where a user needs to click, depending on what stage they’re at in their journey.
You can use this strategy on your website by placing easy-to-spot CTA buttons within an uncluttered page design. Use precise verbs, and your customers will know exactly what to do as soon as they land on your website.
3. Make your website copy as detailed and helpful as you can
Your bottom line will take a hit if your website copy doesn’t offer readers all the information they will need to feel comfortable buying from you. So, it’s important that you take steps to improve the UX of your business website and ensure customers aren’t left in the dark about anything.
To ensure the copy on your website hits all of the necessary points to guide customers towards making an informed purchase, you should:
• Outline the different uses and applications your products or service have
• Explain what kinds of customers tend to take a lot of value from your offerings
• Talk about the results you typically get for your clients so people know what to expect
• Mention how easy it is to get up and running with your products or services
• Answer any common questions you tend to get about your offerings so people can find all of the information they need to make an informed purchasing decision
As you craft your website copy, you should also emphasize the benefits of what you sell by including testimonials and reviews from clients you’ve previously worked with. Plus, when structuring your content, jump right into outlining the advantages of shopping with you before anything else. What are your USPs? This is what people will be most interested in learning about. This is a great way to remove friction by making customers feel comfortable and informed about what your company offers.
4. Improve your website’s loading speed and ensure it offers a good experience
The UX of your website will have a massive impact on the levels of friction that your customers experience when buying from you. So, you must take steps to finetune the basics, such as ensuring your website is easy to navigate and that it loads quickly.
In fact, according to a recent study, your risk of a customer bouncing increases by 32% between having a 1-second load time and a 3-second load time. Within three seconds, customers grow frustrated and are likely to ditch your site.
To improve your page load speed and ensure customers stick around, you must:
• Choose a web host package that can support the amount of web traffic your site receives.
• Optimize any videos or images on your web pages by using a CDN to ensure your content renders quickly on any device.
• Use a caching page speed plug-in like Cloudflare to help with the technical heavy lifting so your customers get the information they need without waiting for the content to load.
And, to ensure you’ve offering a great UX overall, you can use lots of whitespace in the design of your pages to ensure customers are not overwhelmed by lots of content as they scroll. You can also add appealing CTA buttons to help direct customers through the purchasing process from beginning to end. All of these tactics can improve the user experience on your website and drive more sales.
5. Make it incredibly easy for customers to find what they need
When people shop online, they are looking for convenience, so It’s extremely important that it’s simple for people to find what they need on your website.
To ensure an effortless experience for your potential customers, you can:
• Offer an intuitive navigation menu that makes it easy for them to move around your website. You can categorize your offerings based on the types of customers you serve or the types of products or services that you offer, for instance.
• Offer filtering capabilities on product pages so your customers can find the products or services they need as quickly as possible.
• Position the most popular products or services towards the top of any pages or dropdown menus so your customers can find your post popular solutions in less time.
Let’s look at some businesses that make online shopping incredibly convenient for their users to ensure a frictionless customer experience.
SchoolLockers.com is an eCommerce website that offers lockers and other storage solutions to schools, organizations, and businesses.
And, since different customers will need different types of lockers, SchooLockers.com organizes their products by category and use, with links to pages for gym lockers, school lockers, wood lockers, and more. Organizing everything in this way allows the company to quickly and easily direct customers to the right products without needing to look through the entire website or read lots of content. This is something people are sure to appreciate, as online shoppers are always fans of convenience.
You can use this strategy on your website by organizing your products into clear categories based on the types of products or services you offer to make it easier for customers to find what they need in less time.
Another company that makes online shopping a breeze is JDM Buy & Sell. Since the website offers many makes and models of vehicles, the website features an intuitive filtering system that customers can use to find the perfect vehicle for their needs or budget. This is a great tool to help customers find a vehicle without having to look through each product page, which is sure to encourage more sales.
You can use this approach on your website by offering a search or filtering tool that allows customers to enter different product features to narrow down what will work best for their needs. And, the fewer pages they need to visit to get the information they need the better. This will remove friction from your customer experience and help drive sales.
6. Simplify your checkout process as much as possible
Even if you take the time to improve your online store, a poor checkout experience that confuses your customers will cause shoppers to abandon their carts before they complete their purchases.
In fact, nearly 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned when customers face any friction in the checkout process. So, you must offer a smooth purchasing experience for all your customers.
The fewer clicks it takes to make a purchase, the more likely people will be to convert on your. So, simplify the checkout process by ensuring people need to visit as few pages and enter the most simple details possible to reduce friction at this vital stage.
Summary
Securing online sales depends on the experience your customers have when viewing your products or services. An experience full of friction will cause customers to bounce and look for other companies that make online shopping easier.
So, take the time to map out your customers’ journey and remove any points of friction you find. This will ensure that you attract more traffic to your website and make extra sales as more people see how easy it is to find solutions with your brand.
Looking for more articles on how to grow your eCommerce business? Check out the business blog on AZ Big Media for more ways to take your business to the next level.
Author: Aaron Haynes is an entrepreneur, digital marketing enthusiast, and occasional SEO writer. With more than a decade of experience in business development, Aaron helps businesses and agencies develop and grow a data-driven yet nimble approach to search engine control. You can find more from Aaron on Twitter and LinkedIn.
