Business in Dubai and all around the UAE are rapidly adopting to modern business practices and technologies to improve their performance and progress. In the modern digital era, digital marketing and communication have become a significant factor in any business’s success and the website is considered to be the foundation of digital marketing. However, most of the businesses usually don’t realize the importance of the customer engagement of their website. The customer engagement is a key to satisfactory customer experience and the customer experience is the deciding factor in customer satisfaction and loyalty. The web design plays a crucial role in customer engagement, an attractive and intuitive web design help customers access the content and information they want and it also help building trust and increase your online conversions and sales. The customer engagement is basically the happiness, satisfaction and the value your customer gets from your website experience.
Your corporate website can become a powerful marketing tool and help your business get more online sales, leads or conversions. This depends on how much time people are spending on your corporate website, which pages they are visiting the most, and how many of them are clicking on your CTAs (call to action). Any visitor who landed on your website or its internal page would like to perform certain action, which could be as simple as acquiring information about the product or services you are offering or it can be a lengthy function such as deciding which product or service they want to purchase and making an online purchase or filling lead form. All this is based on the customer engagement, if your website is offering a good customer experience, you will get more click on the CTAs. The customer engagement will help you keep visitors stay on your website for longer, while offering them value which interests them and enabling them to perform certain actions which help you accomplish your business goals. In this blog we will discuss how your web design features can help increasing customer engagements and improve the overall ROI of your corporate website.
How Low Customer Engagement can hurt your Business?
Before we start discussing the factors that help improving the engagement of a web design it is also important to understand why customer engagement is so important for a website. Traditionally any corporate website have multiple traffic sources, one of the most important one is search engine, specifically Google. The Google has almost 96% of the search market share in UAE and almost 92% search market share globally which makes it the most important search engine for any business. The Google or any other search engines rates and ranks a website based on various aspects. Some of the most crucial aspects can be greatly impacted by the customer engagement. For example, the bounce rate, if your website is not engaging enough people will bounce off of your corporate website which means they will spend less time and they will explore less content. If your bounce rate exceeds 70% it will start impacting your website’s ranking in search and will consequently reduce your organic website traffic gradually. The search engine is the most important source of the website traffic, specifically organic traffic as any regular corporate website get almost 70% of its organic traffic from search engine.
High bounce rate led to low website traffic, and low website traffic means less conversions and sales. Furthermore low customer engagement also cause low repeated visits, as the people who failed to find what they need on your website are most likely to never return. The customer engagement also plays an important role in online conversions and leads. Whoever will land on your website would be searching for something that you are offering. The rise of smartphones, social media and digital communication channels have completely changed the customer behavior over the years. Now a day’s if someone needs something they will try to look it up in the internet first before making any decision. People tend to acquire information online and then they compare different vendor and service provider and after that they contact them or provide them lead information. Less engaging websites failed to communicate the right brand message and the value proposition of the product or service you are offering. Furthermore the less engaging sites make customer journey difficult. These all factors contribute to decrease your online leads and conversions. That is why the customer engagement is crucial for a corporate website.
Features of a Web Design which will help you Increase Customer Engagements
The web design plays a crucial role in customer experience, it helps setting up the first impression, which is a key to a good customer experience. Furthermore the web design is entirely responsible for the navigation and help your visitor to navigate to helpful information and features of the web page. Each web page is designed with a purpose in mind, if it is a product page the purpose is to provide product information, convey right brand message, highlight value proposition and provide features to interact or share lead information with the business. The homepage is designed to provide a complete overview of the business, it tells what you do and who you are and what the visitor should expect from the website. The about us page is designed to provide detailed biography of the business and information about the stakeholders and team and so on. Every page has its own unique purpose, hence the web design should be able to achieve that purpose. The homepage web design is always different from internal pages, in fact several different types of internal pages could have entirely different design however the homepage design theme should be dominant to maintain consistency. Here are some key features of a web design that help you increase customer engagement and achieve your business goals of a web page.
Communicate Your Message Clearly with Web Design
The web design can help businesses communicate their message and value proposition clearly which help increasing customer engagements. Each web page has a purpose the products and services pages are very important, because your visitors who are on your product or service page are more likely to convert. The web design of the product or service page is different than other pages, because these pages are designed to highlight the value your product or service can provide to your customers. The title of the page, the headings, the fonts, the paragraphs, lists, design patterns, image and media gallery or such content will help you communicate your message and value proposition. The web design help you to project each and every aspect clearly, it help distinguishing different sections of the page and content which make it more understandable for the customers and visitors. Furthermore the product and service pages are also used to simplify the customer journey, there are always CTAs on these pages which help businesses acquire sales or lead data and take the customers to the next stage of the customer journey. That is why the web design of such pages is very important and by simply organizing the information in visually distinguished sections you can simplify the customer journey which results in high conversion rates.
Highlight Trust Markers and Gain Visitor’s Trust
Another great way to increase customer engagement is to gain their trust. The web design can significantly help gaining visitor’s trust by highlighting the trust markers at the web page. The trust markers are key element that highlight your reputation, quality, and security that you are offering to your customers. Such as social media endorsements, likes, share, positive feedbacks, customer reviews, testimonials, etc. The customer generated content can significantly increase visitor’s trust. These days’ the social media and online reviews have become very important as they can greatly influence customer’s decisions. Especially if you are selling something online the customer reviews and feedback becomes significantly important. Several surveys and studies have revealed that the customers seriously consider social media endorsements and online reviews when judging a business or a product/service. Furthermore there are other trust markers that can help you gain visitor’s trust such as putting customer’s and business partner’s logos or name can be very helpful it will give customer more confidence when they will see well-known names on your web page. There are other data protection and privacy badges, antivirus badges, secure payment icons, etc. can also help you gain customers trust and improving brand perception. These trust markers should be strategically placed in the web design to maximize the visibility without disrupting customer journey or flow of information.
Improve Call to Action (CTA) to Increase Conversions
The call to action or CTA is crucial to increase online conversions and customer engagement. Attractive CTA will always increase customer engagement and improve online conversion rate. The CTA is a button or link, which you placed on the web page to achieve your business goal. For example, if you are selling online products your CTA could be a purchase button. The placement of the button, the text or message on it, and even the color scheme can have huge influence over customer’s decision. Studies have revealed that several e-Commerce websites have witnessed up to 30% to 40% increase by simply changing the color of their CTA button. That is why the CTA is very important to increase customer engagement. It is not only about color or placement the message or text you put on your CTA also matters a lot. A good web design use CTA at strategic places and highlight it in a ways that any user can instantly notice it. That is why the CTA size, color, text on it, and even the background where it is placed all help highlighting it on the web page. A good CTA always attracts visitor’s attention and increase customer engagements. Apart from the design another great method to improve your CTA is to add value proposition message and words that attract customers. The CTA can greatly impact your online leads and conversions.
Make your Web Design Responsive
The last decade was truly revolutionary, it have completely changed our personal and work lives by integrating smartphone and mobile devices in our day to day routines. According to stats almost 99% of population of the UAE owns a mobile phone and almost same amount of population have access to the internet as well. The mobile and internet penetration in UAE is amongst the highest in the world. Furthermore the smartphone website traffic accounts for almost 60% of the total web traffic in the world. That is huge, and it means that the smartphone traffic have already surpassed the traditional internet traffic. According to several studies in UAE on an average people tend to spend 7 to 8 hours on the internet. This means that by targeting mobile audience you have a chance to reach out to most of your audience. The users who used to access a site from the desktop or laptop are also more likely to try it via a smartphone or mobile device. This increase the importance of mobile compatibility of a website which is also known as responsiveness. A responsive web design is programmed in a way that it can easily detect the screen size and platform from where it is being accessed, and before even user notice it can rearrange its design elements and content to fit the screen size. Having a responsive web design can significantly increase your chance to get more traffic and it also help increasing customer engagement.
Customer Experience Centric Web Design
A web design which offers a good customer experience can increase customer engagement which results in higher conversion rate and online sales/leads. The consistency and simplicity of a web design is a key to build good customer journey and customer experience. A good web design simplify customer journey with consistent and predictable customer experience. The website navigation, the information structure, the readability and accessibility of a web design plays crucial role in developing a satisfactory customer experience. In order to enhance customer experience a good web design offers multiple features which can help customer throughout the customer journey. The navigation of a web page is a crucial component of customer experience, the visitors who reached to your web page must be needing something that you are offering or something that is relevant to it. A good web design help businesses highlight they important information and guide customers through different steps of the customer journey. A good web design guide users at each step of the customer journey and make it simple for them which increase customer engagements and also help boosting the leads and conversions.
Conclusion
The customer engagement is one of the most important aspect on customer experience and sales generation. The digital experience, customer happiness and satisfaction is crucial for businesses. The digital marketing and communication have already surpassed the traditional communication methods. Furthermore the rise of smartphones and internet encourages businesses and customers to go online. Your corporate website is the center point of all your digital efforts. The web design of a website plays an important role in its success. The first impression is set by the web design the customer experience and customer engagement heavily depends on the effectiveness of the web design and the customer journey and online sales or leads have direct relationship with the efficacy of the web design. The engaging web designs can be up to 85% more successful than the non-engaging or less-engaging websites. In this blog we have discussed a few common but most effective features of a web design which can help businesses increase customer engagements. The customer engagement will help you gain maximum out of your corporate website and help you gaining higher customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want our help to improve your web design please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get back to you soon.
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