Customers today are more finicky than ever. They expect world class presentation at every stage of their relationship with your company. While this may sound difficult, maybe even impossible, there are some basic steps you can take to let your customers feel more appreciated and at ease.
- Your website should be a part of your brand, with a synergistic design and aesthetic.
- Websites which are easy to navigate and without clutter convert more customers
- Improve the speed of your site by limiting picture sizes and other excessive elements
Your website’s design is one of the first things your customers will see and should be optimized to convert the maximum number of potential customers into concrete, paying users. Here are six tips and tricks you can use to optimize your website for your customer base.
Deploy Consistent Branding
Branding is highly prevalent in the modern age, and for good reason. Great branding leads to massively increased exposure for your business and attracts new customers daily to your company who may have never thought about your products or service.
Always make sure to have your logo present on every page of your website and tailor your content to forward your brand’s message and mission. Your company should have brand style guidelines, and every piece of content and webpage design should follow them to the letter. Keep a watchful eye on tone, style, and layout to ensure a consistent, quality aesthetic.
Stay Simple
Both the aesthetic and navigation of your site should be simple to use for all customers. Users who can easily and quickly use your website to find the resources they need turn into paying customers much more readily than those who struggle to navigate around your site.
To make navigation simpler, you should avoid cramming each page of your site with information and graphics. Those websites which convert the most customers aren’t those which give users the most information but allow them to find exactly what they need in a simple manner. Details should be concise and, hopefully, improve your SEO while educating your users.
Leave Room for White Space
Most business owners incorrectly think that they should minimize the white space of their pages, also called negative space, but this is generally untrue. While your webpage shouldn’t be soaked in white, empty space, you should leave an adequate amount of it to guide the users’ eyes and reduce overall clutter.
When elements of a page are too close together, the user becomes confused and cannot find the function they’re looking for. Be sure to include a sufficient number of margins and padding to expand the space of your website and more carefully guide your users’ eyes.
Limit Choices
Another counter intuitive measure, you should always limit the number of choices your customer has to make when visiting your website. This technique is born out of “Hick’s Law” which states that time to make decisions increases as the number of available options also increases.
Once the human brain has to make a decision with more than eight choices at hand, the brain partly shuts down, leading to “analysis paralysis.” To increase your conversion rates and keep people making timely, concrete decisions, you’ll want to reduce the chances of analysis paralysis occurring and limiting the number of options and choices on your website is one of the best ways to do this.
Increase Speed
People have little patience for websites which don’t load instantly. Every webpage on your site should load in less than two seconds if you want visitors to stay on your site and keep reading or buying. Many websites adhere to this metric and those who don’t stick out like a sore thumb, so be sure your website is loading in an adequate amount of time.
There are many tools online designed to test and report the speed of your website, any of these will get the job done. To increase the speed of your website, you should optimize all of the elements on your website’s pages. For example, images should be condensed, and long lines of code should be made more concise to decrease loading times. There are also plugins you can install to decrease load times.
Use The Right Pictures
While images should be condensed and site optimized, they should also be of high quality and add to your brand’s message, tone, and synergy. JPEGs are great choices because of their size but retention of high resolution. The pictures you choose should be related to the topic of the webpage and engage your customer, encouraging them to continue scrolling down the webpage.
In addition, nearly every page of your website should have an image of some kind, as sites without images are more likely to be seen as amateur or unprofessional. If you want to boost engagement and conversion rates, it’s best to place one or more pictures on every page of your website.
Final Thoughts
There are many methods you can use to convert customers and retain loyalty, but one of the most prominent and obvious is to upgrade your website. You should be absolutely sure that your website is fast enough, easy to navigate, adheres to brand synergy, and is engaging and interactive. Adding and ensuring these elements will keep customers coming back for more for years to come.