As internal marketing managers working closely with your website's web designers, you want to meet user needs and want them to benefit from the products or services offered. That's why target users are identified, ideas are developed, and website usability is tested. But what's the point of all these efforts if no one uses what has been designed? Even the most user-friendly website can be overlooked by the majority of users.
In this article, we'll look at the three main reasons why users love some products or solutions over others and what you can do to ensure that your users fully utilize your website.
Whether you're selling products or services online or have a corporate website, you'll be interested in knowing how many users interact with your web offerings, purchase your products, or subscribe to your newsletter. Once you know these numbers, you must understand why they hold that specific meaning.
You risk creating confusion if you don't know what could benefit your business. If you understand why your users aren't interacting with your website as you wish, you'll learn how to reverse that trend.
Here are the three reasons why your users aren't fully exploiting the potential of your website:
1. Value Proposition
The value proposition refers to the benefits your users gain from your products or services. The products or services offered are what users engage with, but the value proposition explains why they use them.
Your value proposition guides the direction of your website's entire UX design. It helps answer the question: Do our products or services solve problems or meet user needs? No matter how user-friendly your website's design is, users won't engage with your site if they don't need what you're offering. By analyzing your value proposition, you can identify what benefits you offer your users and which problems you can solve for them.
What you can do:
- Observe your users: Find out how your users engage with your products or services. The best way to do this is to observe users in their environment or track their behaviour on your product, such as how many users open the newsletter, which pages are most frequently visited, and where they linger the longest.
- Know what the competition is doing: Discover who is solving your users' problems and how. Your competitors aren't just those who offer the same products or services but anyone who, though offering something different, shares your same value proposition.
2. Communication
Landing pages, product descriptions, newsletters, and social media posts are all part of your company's communication strategy, just like advertisements or ads. If users don't understand what you can do for them through your communication, they won't use your products or take advantage of your services.
Users are valuable. They have their own lives, and their time is precious. Currently, they interact with your site, and they probably have another 17 tabs open on their browser, half of which are likely your competitors' sites. At that exact moment, users are bombarded with other information competing for their attention, and you only have a few seconds to convince them that your offering is the perfect fit for them.
What you can do:
- Speak to your users: Use language they understand. Users want to hear about the benefits your products and services offer. Focus on your value proposition, not just your product.
- Help them make a decision: The goal of your communication is to motivate users to take action on your site (buy a product, request information, subscribe to a newsletter, etc.). To do this, you can use several techniques:
- Build credibility, such as stating how many users have interacted with you;
- Use reviews and testimonials to show how others have benefited from your products or services;
- Offer targeted promotions for a limited time.
3. Experience
Experience has a broad scope. It refers to how easy it is to learn and use your product or service and whether it offers good value for money. A positive experience will encourage users to continue engaging with your products and services. Additionally, a good experience often depends on what users expect.
When people use your products and services, they invest their time and energy into understanding how to gain the most advantage. If your value proposition is compelling, users may experiment and learn through trial and error, choosing you over your competitors.
What you can do:
- Set the right expectations: If your communication sets a confident expectation, your product or service should live up to it.
- Facilitate onboarding: Everyone who uses your product or service starts as a first-time user. If people feel comfortable, they'll return. A good onboarding process will help your users get up and running with minimal effort.
- Test usability: Observe how your users interact with your website. Ask them to voice their thoughts as they use it to see if they interpret your design as intended.
Several factors determine whether your users will continue to engage with your website and, consequently, with your products or services. Much depends on the value proposition (the benefits your company offers users), how you communicate it, and the user experience.
Qualitative user research will help you assess whether your value proposition meets user needs and identify any gaps that can be filled. You can also use these findings in your communication strategy to better explain your value proposition.
Whatever your web strategy, whether it's a new feature or a new landing page, make sure to test the design with the help of experienced web designers to improve your website's usability.
Once users arrive on your site, they must be courted with a compelling value proposition and a positive product experience.
