User feedback software has been our preferred method for collecting customer feedback to bring our A/B testing to the next level. A/B Testing is a fundamental necessity to figure out how your customer responds to different sets of web pages and user interfaces. While the precise data and conversion information of an A/B test are incredibly valuable, we have found that combining them with direct user feedback can give even more insight for future tests you may have been unable to recognize without the user feedback. Determining and tweaking your design based on the user feedback data you receive is a fundamental step in any conversion rate optimization campaign.
This is a guest post by Caveni Digital Solutions, best known for Philadelphia web design.
The marketing community has a long established concept that user annoyance leads to a reduction in sales. So, one way to increase your sales is to make your user experience as seamless as possible. User feedback software helps you figure out where your user experience is lacking and how you can improve it. Google Analytics is another important tool, it will give you technical data about who is visiting your website and where they are coming from. You can track which pages they go to and where they leave your website from. We’ve found that combining this with user feedback gives you an amazing blueprint of how your customers interact with your website.
Let’s take a look at some of the issues user feedback has helped our customers tackle.
Difficulty Navigating
Difficulty navigating around a website is an issue we see all the time with a lot of older or denser websites. Luckily there is a great metric to judge whether your website is confusing for customers called Customer Effort Score (CES). CES is going to be the metric you look at to see if your users aren’t able to navigate well and how difficult it is for them to achieve their goal. Poor website structure is a huge problem, so once you’ve diagnosed the issues with user feedback you can go about structuring everything in a more clean manner. How do you do that?
Our advice for site structure is a format called silo structure or its close cousin, cluster structure. These formats are great for larger websites and they both boil down to creating categories within your website that are linked with other pages in the same category and linking those pages, menus, and elements in a way that allows for easy movement between those clusters or silos. Silo structure is the easiest way to give your users a more enjoyable experience. Go test your user feedback after you’ve implemented these changes and make sure that those complaints are gone!
Source: HubSpot
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Users Unsure About What Services You Offer
You would be surprised how often we see this as feedback on a website. A lot of the time your customers are finding you for a very specific service and may get confused when your front page is a little too artsy or just doesn’t have the right information. This can often boil down to a failure in using proper calls to action (CTAs) as well as easily recognizable elements like images related to the field or product the page is focused on.
In our opinion, a good user feedback tool always needs a feature that lets you ask for feedback on specific sections. If you are getting, “not sure what you do” feedback we encourage you to use that feature on the first few sections of your landing page to see what people are saying. A lot of the time these elements will get feedback about those sections being too vague or lacking the information your customers were looking for.
A great example was a chiropractic client we had; their website included a few pictures of people doing something far closer to yoga with absolutely no text until the user reached the bottom of the page. While an all image website is an extreme example, it displays the primary issue you have when you fail to make information readily available; it will confuse your customers. Use your user feedback tool to make sure that everything makes sense for your potential customers.
You’re in luck though! The hardest part about fixing a problem with vague sections is figuring out where the issue is. Once we realized our chiropractor friends were only using semi-related images and lacked enough on-page text, the necessary changes became obvious very fast!
Your problem may be as simple as a button not going to the place people think it should or your images are not relevant to the product to the point of confusing your users. Luckily we’ve already found a way to identify issues with user feedback, so the rest of the process is just reading that content and making it more clear what the next steps are for your users.
For example, if you want them to “read more” make sure that button says “read more.” You will often read your own website as someone who has extensive subject knowledge, just remember that your users will not know as much as you will. Focus on that individual user and you will see a lot more conversions. Mopinion has a great article on user focused marketing, check it out!
“How Do I Buy?”
Making it easier for your customers to buy is a piece of advice that a lot of older websites really need. Halted conversions can be a very easy issue to spot because you will see that your sales often stop before getting to completion. This can be caused by a number of problems, that user feedback can unveil. Your user may feel confused or overwhelmed at certain parts of the purchasing process or there may not be enough information during checkout. For example, the loss of a customer during the purchasing process, which is generally referred to as shopping cart abandonment (on eCommerce focused websites).
In service based industries the line is a bit less distinct so it can be much harder to track why your customers are leaving before they schedule a time for a quote or make a request for service.
A great example of this is actually our own website at Caveni. There was a very clear trend of people submitting quotes and never responding when we called/emailed to follow up. Our solution was to add in a scheduling system, it increased our retention rate by over 64% for our quote submissions and led to an increased conversion rate of nearly 3.5%.
A lot of the time, a drop in sales at a certain section is due to a difficult to find button, a broken link, or an incomplete sales funnel.
For example:
One of our clients operated an eCommerce store and they had decided to use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to improve their Google ranking. However they failed to realize that when they created those AMP pages they were breaking the “checkout” button on mobile devices. They weren’t able to figure out why all these people were coming to the product page without buying, they would have been stuck if they hadn’t come to us!
We used our feedback and analytics tools to find the problem and once it was corrected, those pages began performing much better! So normally when this happens it is an easy fix for you. Just make sure that you make it clear how your user moves onto the next section of the purchase/funnel and whether you are providing enough information to instill user confidence. As long as you know what the exact issue is then you can take the appropriate steps towards fixing it and getting those sales rolling in!
Establishing That You’re a Company Worth Trusting
Trust is the ultimate metric when judging whether customers will buy or return to your business. Gauging user trust can be incredibly difficult to do on your own using only a web analytics platform. But, if we collect some user feedback this concern will pop up very quickly if it is a pressing issue for a lot of your customers.
The worst offender for harming trust comes in the form of an unprofessional website. Your users will not want to interact with a website that looks like it is roughly cobbled together. Normally the way to fix this is with a redesign or a quick cleaning of the pages causing the most trouble.
Another common way to increase user trust is by using a customer feedback tool! By showing your interest you are actually building trust with your user base. Responding to your user feedback and implementing suggested changes/edits shows your users that you are committed to a quality experience.
Our User Experience Conclusions
User experience is an overarching necessity for any digital strategy. The experience of your users is the driving force behind your bottom line. In addition, search engines aim to provide the websites which provide the best user experience and your sales will reflect the boost from the optimization for search engines. One of the best steps you can take for your business is to get out there, start collecting feedback and implementing changes when you discover the problem points on your own website. If you are going to invest in anything, invest in helping your users have the best experience possible!
About the Author
Alexander M Kehoe is Operations Director, Co-founder of Caveni Digital Solutions, and author of Navigate the Digital Realm. He is a speaker, writer and consultant in the fields of digital marketing, web design, search engine marketing, branding, influencer outreach, and social media marketing. Want to learn more about Mopinion’s all-in-1 user feedback platform? Don’t be shy and take our software for a spin! Do you prefer it a bit more personal? Just book a demo. One of our feedback pro’s will guide you through the software and answer any questions you may have.
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