If people can’t properly navigate or find the information they need on your website, you’re unlikely to convert their visit into a sale. Gina Jones explains how to use website design and user experience to influence customers and drive sales.

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As acquiring traffic becomes more expensive, ensuring your website offers an outstanding user experience is essential. Web behemoths like Amazon and Google spend millions each year on user experience testing because they know that it can directly affect their bottom line.

Studies have shown that even just a one second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions; if an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost that company $2.5 million in lost sales every year.

What is user experience?
Quite simply, user experience is what happens to your users when they interact with your business online. It includes everything they see, hear and do, as well as their emotional reactions.

If your website doesn’t offer what they are looking for, customers will simply click elsewhere, usually to a competitor’s site.

“It’s essential that the user journey is as simple as possible. Your website is often the first touchpoint, so it must be appealing in both looks and content,” says Tamara Heber-Percey, co-founder of online hotel experts Mr & Mrs Smith and Winning On The Web Champion.

“Testing your own website is crucial. Every time you make an upgrade, ensure the user journey still works and be honest if something is […]

More and more online marketers and business owners are seeing the light and recognising the tremendous benefits of incorporating multimedia into their online marketing strategy. It’s a proven fact that multimedia more easily and effectively captivates your audience and grab’s the attention of your prospects, visitors, subscribers and customers. Time and time again research has shown that using multimedia in the form of video and/or audio advertisements increases conversation rates, buy rates as well as subscription rates for a product or service.

If studies consistently show the advantage of incorporating multimedia into your online marketing campaign, then those who have not yet added multimedia to their advertising need to seriously rethink and reinvent their marketing strategy.

“As traditional banner ads continue to decline in their effectiveness…leading companies.. to streaming media to juice up their online advertising. These initial trials are just the beginning of what industry experts believe will be a huge market…Streaming media has a 70% response rate for content, a 60% response rate for advertising information, and a 49% “buy” rate for online merchandise. (Source: Hostcentric Streaming Media: Industry Outlook).”

When you look at the above statistics put together by leading authorities, can you really afford not to jump at the chance to use Multimedia as an advertising strategy?

Look at it this way, without Video and/or Audio your site appears static to the visitor and after seeing hundreds of these types of sites, your customer becomes desensitized which is why sales conversion rates have systematically dropped over the last couple of years all over the Internet.

Think about it…you can convince your prospect to buy your product or service or subscribe to your ezine or newsletter much more easily with a 3 minute video as […]