Contributed by Glassbox
Every session on your website or app is combustible. Friction from any number of factors – from page load performance to poor navigation, bugs and irrelevant messages – can derail a user’s session and erode brand loyalty. Standard conversion and abandonment metrics are all useful for establishing a baseline, but they only tell you what your visitors did – not why.
The secret to optimizing your website to give visitors the experiences they expect is buried inside that ‘why.’
With the global pandemic spurring changes in customer expectations at an unprecedented pace, user experience (UX) expectations have never been higher. In a short period of time, people significantly altered the way they evaluate brands, make online purchasing decisions and select the brands worthy of their long-term loyalty. In addition to the always-important factors of price and quality, these new customers are looking for brands that understand them as an individual and will tailor an experience just for them.
UX professionals are finding the tools they used to understand online behavior a few years ago aren’t cutting it anymore. Today’s landscape requires real-time digital insights to help you learn what customers expect when they visit your site so you can deliver it every time.
Good enough isn’t good enough with UX design:
- The bounce rate increases by 123% if the page loading time becomes more than 1 second. (Source: Think with Google)
- 52% of users say that a bad mobile experience will make them lose faith in the company. (Source: Think with Google)
- More than 80% of users expect a flawless experience on all devices. (Source: Resource Techniques)
More traffic, more “whys”
UX statistics like those can seem daunting. “Flawless” is a high bar without endless resources at your disposal.
Here’s the great news: Understanding the behavior of just five users might be enough to find 85% of your site’s issues, according to a study from the NNGroup. But this takes really understanding them: seeing every action users take to identify where your site isn’t meeting expectations.
Attempting to understand experience through exit pages and bounce rates tells only part of the story. If you want to provide an e-commerce experience that works for your visitors, you must have all the data points that contribute to each customer’s ultimate behavior.
Often, it’s a simple, fixable UX mistake that causes frustration (such as these 10 UX mistakes). Maybe your stylish navigation is confusing site visitors, keeping them from the information they expected to find and causing them to leave your site without it. Maybe users click on your main call to action, but always hit the back button when it goes to nothing but your contact form.
The future of e-commerce is about more than testing elements to find the path of least resistance for the greatest number of visitors. It’s being able to create an experience that provides value to each visitor.
Our data at Glassbox shows that there are more than 1,000 elements that contribute to a single customer session, and every single one is an opportunity to win or lose the conversion.
Incorporating session replays and journey mapping into your UX process
Digital journey mapping is an essential tool in your arsenal, telling you which paths lead to conversion and where you lose potential customers. Journey mapping becomes even more actionable when paired with data that helps you understand ‘why,’ such as session replays, voice of customer (VoC) sentiment and technical performance data (as with Glassbox’s Augmented Journey Map™, pictured below). With real-time journey insights, you can:
Prioritize the most valuable visitor journeys. Session data is constantly updated to identify journeys that hold the greatest value, those that have the greatest untapped potential or the struggles that inhibit them. Combining it with historical data lets you focus on and monetize the journeys that drive digital performance.
Identify frustration. Sentiment and behavioral data connect the dots so you can see exactly where you lost a visitor, what they tried before they left, how much it cost you and where you can reduce friction in each session.
Personalize better. Visitor behavior will tell you almost everything you need to know about what they want. Journey mapping shows you more opportunities to offer a personalized experience and content recommendations – which consumers expect more than ever.
Leverage data you already have to provide new value
Growing scrutiny on how brands use consumer data – both from regulators and consumers themselves – means behavioral information collected on your site is one of your most valuable resources in a first-party future.
The more you know about your visitors, the better you can serve them. The bad news is that brands are in a bit of a blind spot when it comes to web visitors’ expectations of personalization: Surveys show brands think they’re much better at providing personalized experiences than consumers do.
You can learn about their habits through actions taken on your site, of course, but really chasing your biggest opportunities means understanding those actions not just as large trends, but as a series of decisions made by real people. You need deeper insights to gauge each individual’s tolerances, preferences, frustrations and expectations.
Use UX insights across your business – and reap the (literal) profits
Smart use of data can help you increase conversions and decrease abandonment, but digital experience insights can help you evolve your digital operations even further. For example, session replay enables your sales and support teams to review a customer’s exact experience and pinpoint what went wrong, reducing time spent resolving web and app issues. Similarly, anomaly detection and automated alerts eliminate the need to test and hunt for issues by quickly notifying IT and engineering about critical errors and bugs, drastically reducing troubleshooting and QA.
Data is the key to fixing problems faster across your digital operations, from technical support to customer relations. Optimizing your revenue starts with collecting the greatest amount of data about each visitor – then using it to drive frictionless, personalized digital journeys. When you truly understand why website visitors behave as they do, you have the power to deliver an optimized experience that leads to maximum revenues, generates greater profit, and nurtures happier customers.
Learn more about how digital experience analytics from Glassbox power differentiated web experiences.
About Glassbox
Glassbox empowers organizations to create frictionless digital journeys for their customers. Glassbox’s digital experience analytics platform works in real time, across mobile apps and websites, to accelerate customer loyalty and business growth.
For more information, visit: https://www.glassbox.com/
