With expanding e-commerce, businesses can hardly survive without an online presence. A website can be the starting point. It can help attract all traffic from social media and other channels. As such, it is the best place to engage visitors and nurture them into business opportunities.
That calls for effective customer service for your website visitors. In short, your website must elevate customer engagement to nurture and offer a satisfying customer experience. So, every website element should be geared towards customer engagement.
A thoughtful and creative website design approach can ensure your visuals and any other elements drive excellent customer engagement. However, a poor design like longer website loading time or poor site navigation will push visitors away.
So your website design can build or break your customer engagement on your website. The blog covers how crucial a website is to your customer engagement. It highlights the importance of web design in customer engagement:
- Allow users to find what they’re searching for easily
- It makes your website accessible to any device and everyone, including those with disability.
- Customers have faster access to your website using less data
- Provide ultra-personalized customer experience to each visitor through chatbots
Let’s explore them in detail.
- Persuade Visitors to Explore With a Compelling Home Page
Visitors spend only 8 seconds deciding whether they will stick or bounce off your website. A poorly designed website will lose most visitors within the first 10 seconds. So, you’ll have about 5-20 seconds to convince them to stick with you or lose them to rivals.
But it doesn’t need to be as challenging as letting your crush know you exist. You can afford to lose your crush but not the potential leads.
So, your homepage elements should be compelling enough to persuade visitors to explore your website. There are website design elements that can make your home page more persuasive and reduce the bounce rate:
- A simple site layout with the brand’s value at the center
- Quality and attractive photography and text fonts
- Consider the color, as they have emotional connections on their own
These are just the basics to help improve your visitor’s first impression of your website. Don’t stop at the basics; there are more elements you can elevate to improve your persuasion.
- It Makes It Easy for Users to Find Your Website Resources
Your website, especially your homepage, should look great. But, it is not all about looks – it must also be functional to the visitors. What’s the need for a great-looking car if it can’t take you from point A to B?
So, your site must be functional and easy to use to offer an excellent customer experience. There are two significant ways you can simplify how the users find resources on your website:
- Site Navigation: A site that is easy to navigate will ensure users don’t get lost searching for crucial information or product. The moment the user gets confused navigating your website, they will bounce off. That’s a loss of potential business opportunity.
The best solution is a clear navigation menu that links to all the critical resources on your site. For example, a drop-down menu will come in handy if you sell different electronics like TV sets. You can further break it down to the TV’s size, brand, price, etc., to make it easy for the user to find the information faster.
- Content Organization: Users hardly read everything on the website from top to bottom or cover to cover like a book. They skim through if they have less time. As such, they should get valuable information even if they’re skimming through your content.
So, your headlines, product listings, or announcements must be easy to read. Better still, include illustrative pictures or bullet points to help get key points or nuggets of wisdom.
High-quality content that is easy to read will attract more visitors.
Other factors like your website’s load speed can also influence the ease of users finding what they want on your site. So, you need a careful balance between load speed, site navigation, and others to simplify how users discover resources on your site.
It can be overwhelming for any business to get it right and ensure they satisfy their users. One of the leading website design companies in New York emphasizes hiring professionals with a mix of digital marketing, web design, and development skills.
This will help optimize your site navigation and include elements that can increase conversions. The end goal of any business website is to get convertible leads. Easy navigation is just one step to that goal. So, a team with digital marketing skills will help you design offers, call-to-actions (CTAs), etc., to help you nurture and convert visitors to leads.
So ensure users can easily navigate your website and nurture them into leads.
- Enhance Your Website Accessibility
Mobile internet traffic accounts for about 60% of global traffic in 2022. That means you can not overlook how your website is accessed through a smartphone. So, a responsive website design will suffice.
Users must have a satisfying customer experience whether they access your website through the desktop, tablet, or smartphone. Your product pages, drop menus, reward systems, etc., must adjust according to the screen size of the device accessing them.
That ensures mobile, tablet, and desktop users get a better customer experience.
Plus, your website must adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) provisions. Non-compliance can attract fines because most services are online, and people with disabilities must access them too. Consider the following web design elements to ensure your site is ADA-compliant:
- Use text alternative (“alt text”) for every image, chart, and any other illustrative graphic material. It will help inform blind people about the purpose and details of the pictures and graphs.
- Include video captions for people with hearing disabilities.
- Optimize your online forms for screen readers
- Include more options for your website navigation using a mouse, keyboard, etc.
Your website loading speed can also affect the user experience. Any site that loads slowly will force the user to ditch it and instead check out your rivals. Low loading speeds affect not only user experience. It will affect your search engine ranking and customer engagement.
You can reduce the waiting time by:
- Optimizing your images
- Using white space in your website design
- Disable autoplay for audio or videos on your website
In short, a great web design approach can improve your website loading speed, responsiveness, and ADA compliance. Ensure you engage a professional web design company to ensure your site is ADA compliant and has an exceptional user experience.
- Allow You to Offer Personalized Online Customer Experience
Source: Pxhere
Now you can automate customer service on your site through chatbots. With AI-powered chatbots, you can offer an ultra-personalized customer experience to each visitor.
Chatbots are interactive widgets that pop-ups on the lower left side of your site whenever a user accesses your website. Advanced chatbots like AI-powered ones can engage with users like human agents. They can perform advanced tasks like order tracking, payments, and product suggestions.
As users interact with the chatbot, it will know the users’ needs and preferences. That allows it to recommend relevant product suggestions when the user returns next time. AI chatbots can offer personalized customer experience 24/7 to your users.
Currently, chatbots are handling more than 70% of website chats. So, it is a crucial part of customer engagement that you can not overlook. A great website design must include it to enhance your user experience.
Wrap Up
Quality and effective customer engagement can help you convert website visitors into leads. But first, your website design elements must ensure a great user experience.
A great website design will:
- Be appealing and persuasive to your users to explore your site
- Improve site navigation
- Website accessibility and adherence to ADA guidelines
- Provide ultra-personalized user experience
Some critical web design elements like loading speed or layout can be overwhelming. So, engage professional web designers to help you create a website that elevates customer engagement.
