All About the User "Landing Pages & UI/UX"
Several things can come to mind when focusing on creating the perfect experience for an acquired lead to convert them into an invested customer. In history, the experience of a consumer was largely focused on what they see, hear, smell, and overall observe when it came to a store visit. The introduction of the internet over a few decades has brought many consumers to a new digital consumer experience. Digital marketers focus on enhancing and perfecting the online experience of people who want to shop on the internet, and one of the biggest challenges with this new front is limitation to a digital screen. While the limitation exists, there is argument that digital marketers focus more on emotional aspect than focusing on all senses.
The Landing Page
The journey for consumer's interaction with an online business begins after they show interest in an advertisement or first visits the website. The main reason why landing pages are different from homepages, is that there is a clear objective for when consumers land on the page. The landing page includes a lead form where the business can ask visitors for their information and capture them as a lead. The conversion and capture of that lead is probably the most challenging part digital marketers struggle with. Hubspot Blog provides several best practices to ensure a high rate of conversion from leads and success of the landing page. Crafting a benefit focused headline is crucial to keep the bounce rate from the page very low. Keeping in mind the low attention span of a majority of people online it is vital to catch the interest of the lead right away within seconds, done so with a strong and concise headline. Writing compelling copy is another important part of selling what you offer to the interested consumer. Compelling copy has to be clear and be a guide for the lead to complete the action you are trying to achieve. Probably the most controversial and ultimately revolutionary aspect of the success of landing pages is giving away a relevant offer. Consumers love free stuff, for the same reason contests for free giveaways get so much attention, relevant offers get businesses very high conversions in digital marketing. Keeping in mind that the ultimate destination for the consumer is to buy your product, giving the lead a sneak peak or a relevant offer for free spikes the interest and grasps the attention of leads for longer. Often times the relevant offer comes in a form of an ebook or digital content that is related the product you sell.
Statistics & Landing Pages
There are a few metrics that need to be tracked to understand and get an opportunity to analyze the performance of a landing page. Knowing specific data can lead to understanding consumer behavior on the website and improving appropriate parts of the landing page to increase conversions and success. Metrics like page visits is a simple way of tracking the conversion of advertisements online and if consumers click on the ad and show interest. A way to improve the ads could be adjusting the paid strategy of ads or redefining the keywords that drive traffic to your page. Submission rate is a great way of seeing the number of people that complete the lead form to get their offer. A step further from page visits but very crucial to the user experience, this can tell us many things. Perhaps the value of the related offer is not as powerful as the ad copy or landing page headline advertises. A further step towards final conversion is tracking the contacts, the information of that makes a consumer a lead comes in the form of an email address or another way to reach them. This is different from the submission rates because it narrows down the count to weed out duplicate contacts. A consumer often only leaves their personal information once to get the relevant offer, while consumers can visit the page multiple times and get tracked for submissions rates. Most importantly for digital marketers is the bounce rate statistics; when a visitor decides to leave the page, that is classified as a bounce. This is more of a universal metric and helps us understand which step visitors were on that they decided to leave and which sections of a landing page to improve, maybe it was the headline, maybe it was the copy; bounce rate statistics tell all when tracking the time of the bounce.
User Experience & User Interface
Landing pages aside, there are entire categories developed for the detailed experience of a visitor that are known to be studied in depth to understand what exactly the visitor should and should not see and experience. User experience and user interface are categories that share a relationship but are quite different; while user experience focuses on the technical and analytical aspects, user interface is more of the graphics design aspects and visuals the visitor experiences. "User experience design is the process of enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty by improving the usability, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the customer and the product," writes Emil from Career Foundry. It is really more of a universal term because user experience is pretty much the interaction of a potential customer and the company that operates the product. It is important for digital marketers to focus on user experience because it is considered the process of improvement of the interaction with the company's product and can easily be analyzed.
User interface on the other hand revolves around the graphics of the user interaction with the company's product or rather the space that the user interacts with. Parts of user interface include graphic design, navigation, forms, and all of the visual elements that a user needs to make a decision. Graphic design is a huge part of user interface and experts have to deal with customer analysis, design research, branding and graphic development, and the user guide and storyline. There is also much involvement of interactivity and responsiveness. UI prototyping, interactivity and animation, adaptation to all device screen sizes, implementation with developer are all parts of UI interface.
It is important for digital marketers to understand a wide spectrum of tools and practices in digital marketing. But in order to be a very good marketer, a professional should seek to become an expert in one specific practice to become a T-shaped marketer. UX/UI is an important practice to understand because it is the interaction between the user and company which has great potential for analyzing customer behavior and how to improve conversion.