While most are bombarded constantly with choice, so many of us really crave simplicity. Ease of use is one of the most important elements guiding the success of any purchase. If your website is hard to understand or navigate, forget about getting customers to even consider making a purchase.
You need to design a website which is geared around giving your target market the experience they are looking for. While this may sound tough to achieve, it really shouldn’t be.
Marketers today have access to a wealth of knowledge which takes the guesswork out of conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Unified Purpose, Unbridled Profits
When you are able to place the future of your brand in the hands of the people who derive the most value you from it, you are aligning purpose with profit. This is a powerful choice and one that guides the creation of something truly new and innovative.
Instead of responding by doing what you think or feel is right but instead based on the concrete analytic data you have captured around your user behavior, clarity rules the day. You can see the business landscape clearly and your business model is specifically designed so as to better facilitate your key business aims.
Unify your purpose and watch user engagement and profits soar.
Make Creative a Collaborative Process
The more you understand about the unique ecosystem at the heart of your customer’s behavior making process, the better your ability to design innovative solutions to match the problems they face. In the digital environment, nothing exists in a vacuum.
Instead, you can see a very clear web of influence, interaction, and engagement if you use the modern marketing tools at your disposal. When you make creativity a collaborative process driven by the needs of your customers you are putting purpose-driven design ahead of ego stroking or guesswork.
Build it, They Will Come
Your organization can meet the needs of its target customers better. When you start doing that you will be greeted by record profits and historic levels of user engagement.
Build what they want and they will flock to you.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you just have to listen to what the people are telling you.
Some insights will come from feedback in the form of words others will come from big data. It is up to you to apply what you are learning in the most effective way.
To arrive at the best solutions begin by asking the right questions:
Is your business purpose driven?
Are you applying the correct omnichannel marketing strategy?
How will you continue to attract and convert high-value leads?
Phil is a hard-working digital entrepreneur living in New York City. He is about to jump into a cab when he realizes that his wife had asked him to pick up diapers and some other things on his way home. Normally she would just add the items onto their grocery pickup list herself from her smartphone but a cranky toddler had her hands full.
He quickly grabs his tablet as he is walking out of the entryway of his office and adds the items his wife needs onto a digital shopping list they share which allows the organic grocery store he shops at to add the items to his existing pickup order.
Phil loves how simple and easy it is for him and his wife to work seamlessly from smartphones, tablets or their desktop computers. They are happiest when moving from one device to another is as painless a process as possible. It just makes their busy lives easier.
This is an integrated experience.
This is omnichannel marketing.
Trim the Fat
The purpose-driven design is a key concept at the heart of omnichannel marketing because it guides decision making towards a quality user experience that translates across the full user experience, adding value and increasing loyalty.
Omnichannel marketing allows your customers to enjoy a complete experience whether they are checking out your website on an HD widescreen, miniature mobile screen, walking into your storefront or when viewing your checkout pages on a tablet. The more seamless your branding and user experience is across these many different platforms, the better your business will fare with its target market.
If someone is really interested in your business but their first experience with you is visiting a website which looks amazing on their MacBook Pro and then their second is seeing how really terrible that same site is on their iPhone, chances are they won’t come back. If potential leads are bounced off your site, you are sacrificing gains which could be vital to taking your business to the next level.
Getting omnichannel marketing wrong means failing to convert leads because some aspect of your conversion funnel is not integrated properly with the rest of your overall marketing strategy. This is why you can’t afford to bake purpose-driven design elements into operations at every level of your digital business.
Boost Conversion Rates, or else!
In the modern economy, customer purchasing decisions could not be any more convoluted or challenging. People can impulsively pick up their mobile devices and buy anything they can find. If your product ranks higher or they find your website first, maybe they will buy from you. If a competitor beats you in search engine supremacy then the sale might go to them.
This is where boosting conversion rates become so important. The better you can assure that all high-value leads who reach your website make purchases, the more rugged and fortified your business venture will be. Stop leaving points on the board. You should know where your traffic is coming from as well as how to improve its quality. It is up to you to make your business succeed and this is where employing purpose-driven design is so critical.
There are some key reasons why designing for the mobile web or Web 2.0 is not the as designing for Web 1.0 or the earliest websites you can remember accessing possibly initially through a provider such as America Online or Compuserve.
A whole lot has changed about business since then and yet so many websites were built randomly and with anything but purpose as the central guiding element.
It’s time to step into the future and ensure that you are designing your web presence to comply with the new landscape of Web 2.0:
| Web 1.0 | Web 2.0 |
| Double-Click
Britannica Online Random Tech Dude Personal Websites World Domination Domain Name Speculation Page Views Web Hits Publishing Websites Stickiness (Cut & Paste) Website Works |
–> Google Adsense
–> Wikipedia –> Web Design Professionals –> Blogging –> Realistic Demographic Targets –> Search Engine Optimization –> Cost Per Click –> Web Analytics –> Content Management Systems –> RSS Syndication –> Website Produces |
Not All Channels Are Created Equal
It is essential to realize that your customers may seek out different experiences depending on the channels they are using to interact and access a brand. You should emphasize seamlessness of engagement experience but not if that means sacrificing simplicity and uniformity.
What I mean by this is that if you expect your mobile website will feature every single element that you’re very complex normal website does, that might be asking too much. While you could seek to simplify your normal website another route is to design a mobile experience which guides users towards your more robust desktop experience. Instead of trying to get your mobile identity to match up seamlessly instead opt for a purpose-built design that emphasizes utility and promotes engagement.
Take a look at the mobile app landscape and you will get a clearer picture of what purpose-built design is looking like in 2017 and the years to come. Instead of focusing on making mobile applications which mirror main website’s functions entirely, many of the most popular firms are opting to offer highly niche specific, single-use applications. Think Facebook Mobile to Facebook Messenger.
While the decision to create a breakaway service was initially met with distrust, it has been a tremendous success and has helped Facebook to compete more directly with other competitors such as Whatsapp for the highly coveted messaging service market.
The more you can declutter and streamline your offerings, to give your customers what they need in a way that best meets your business goals, the better and more profitable your business will be.
It is essential that you understand key statistics around user behavior such as what decisions your customers make to successfully transition from being active leads to satisfied customers. The purchase consideration pathway can give you a lot of insight around how and where to focus your digital marketing efforts.
When you know where people are coming from, why they opt-in, what causes them to buy, you are much better positioned to deliver a comprehensive and successful omnichannel marketing strategy. The better you understand your target market and it’s decision making steps, the easier it will be for you to boost conversions and enhance profitability.
Get On-Boarding Right
If you are like me, chances are you’ve heard about a popular website, application or service, tried it out and instantly signed out, never to open it or consider its creators ever again. It happens all the time but why?
One of the most important elements of purpose-driven design is getting the user experience right the first time. If your website has a popup banner that starts playing music and it is turning away potential customers this could be a huge problem.
The same goes for people who download your mobile website or app for the first time. You can’t risk getting an initial interaction wrong. You want people to love your product from the first time they start using it.
It is essential that people understand how to use your website to navigate to the decisions you want them to take. Don’t let onboarding be an afterthought. Spend the time and money to ensure that the people using your website are doing it in the smoothest and most seamless way possible.
Data is Key to Shaping the Future
To ensure you are reaching as many high value leads as possible, it is essential that you execute a purpose-driven omnichannel marketing strategy. At the heart of this is using analytical data and insights about user behavior and demographics.
The better you can understand your target customers through the lens of data in creative ways, the better you can anticipate and better yet guide their decision making.
The more you understand they how and why about where your customers make decisions whether they are to sign up for your email list, make a purchase or navigate away from your website, the better you are prepared to counter or enhance these decisions as they align with your marketing goals and business strategy.
When you understand your conversion funnel dynamically, you are best situated to influence the key demographics of your target markets. You might even learn new and untapped potential sources of traffic from analyzing key statistics related to the performance of your designs and marketing efforts.
Conquer Your Market
If you want to succeed at implementing purpose driven design you need to understand why customers might seek out different kinds of experiences if they are viewing your website on a mobile device or HD widescreen. They could have different end results in mind depending on how, when and where they view your page.
When your omni channel marketing succeeds however, customers can seamlessly move through your platforms gaining value in changing devices and realizing more potential for your products and services in the unique ways you arrange and describe them.
Use the data you are collecting today influence your success tomorrow. The future is bright when you build a user experience that defines your brand and unique value proposition.
Success comes when your conversation rates increase and your business enjoys new and record breaking profits. These things don’t happen by accident. They are purposefully created by masterful magician like marketers who know how to make the best of the the resources at their disposal.
Stop guessing and start employing marketing magic to make your website a market leader!
