The Importance of UI in Modern Marketing

Thanks to the rise of the internet, marketing has changed completely. What was once (metaphorically) screaming your message or offering at customers has evolved into something much more interactive.

These days, customers don’t just value innovative products or prompt service, they value the experience with a brand. Don’t believe me? Consider these stats:

• According to research from PWC, 86% of customers are ready to pay more for the same product or service, if it is coupled with a delightful experience.
• In the same survey, 49% of respondents confessed to making an impulse purchase after receiving a delightful experience.
• Companies that make more upwards of $1 billion stand to make an additional $700 million within three years of investing into customer experience.

While customer experience consists of several customer touchpoints, both online and offline, the user experience of your brand’s online properties makes up for a significant chunk of this experience.

In other words, the user interface (UI) of your online properties can make or break the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts.

In this article, we will be discussing importance of UI and how it is affects the various facets of your marketing endeavours. However, before we get into that, let’s begin by understanding exactly what user interface is:

What is User Interface?

Simply put, a user interface is the way in which a user interacts with a digital application or website or software. Depending on what we are talking about (operating system/web browser/software/website) user interface can have different elements.

Since the focus of this article is on web properties like websites, the elements of a website user interface are dropdown menus, navigation menus, buttons, toggles, text fields, checkboxes, and visual elements, and many others.

User interface is, in most cases, the deciding factor when it comes to measuring the quality of user experience.

An intuitive and “user-friendly” user interface will lead to a positive user experience and the benefits of a positive user experience, especially for marketers, are simply too significant to be ignored.

Now, let us see the importance of UI (User Interface) affects the different aspects of your marketing endeavors:

Improved SEO Performance

Search engines, especially Google, have stressed upon the importance of UI of a positive user experience to boost the chances of ranking higher in their result pages, and their algorithms reflect the same.

For instance, responsive web design, that freely adapts to the size of the screen on different devices (desktops and mobile devices) is considered a great practice to implement to improve the user interface of a website.

Even Google priorities responsive websites in their search results. When almost 60% of web traffic is coming from mobile devices, this move is absolutely sensible.

In a similar way, website creators must also ensure their websites are ready for display on mobile devices. Otherwise, they may be missing out on optimizing their website for almost 60% of web users.

The responsiveness of a website is not the only user interface element that influences search engine performance.

While responsiveness may be one element that directly influences search engine performance, other user interface elements influence it indirectly, by influencing your website’s bounce rate.

For those of you who don’t know, the bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors that “bounce” after visiting just one page of your website.

Now, this can happen for a variety of reasons. Maybe they didn’t find your content up to their standards. Maybe they had trouble navigating your website to find what they were looking for. Maybe what they were looking for isn’t even available on your website.

Whatever the reason may be, every bounced visitor contributes to a higher bounce rate and bounce rate is a known ranking factor.

You may have also noticed that most of the reasons contributing to a higher bounce rate have something to do with the user experience on your website, which, in turn, is decided by the quality of user interface of your website it is also one of the importance of UI.

Be it the quality of content or the quality of the interface that allows users to navigate your website, user interface elements can directly or indirectly affect your website’s search engine performance.

Other user interface elements that may influence your website’s performance in the search engine result pages (SERPs) are website speed, sitemaps, and trust signals present on your website.

To check which elements of your website you can improve to positively influence its search engine performance, you can use any SEO optimizer on the web to get actionable suggestions.

Improved Brand Loyalty

In a survey of 15,000 participants by PWC, it was revealed that 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand that they love after just one bad experience.

Moreover, 92% of respondents said that they would completely abandon a brand after running into two or three negative experiences.

On the other hand, it is not difficult to imagine how a customer will return to a brand website after having a positive experience. This is especially true for ecommerce websites that have the chance of converting every website visitor into a paying customer.

According to a study, 87% of customers that had a positive experience with a brand will return to make another purchase. In comparison, only 18% of customers that get a negative experience will return to make another purchase.

A 2% boost in customer retention contributes the same to your bottom line as a 10% cut in operating costs, retaining customers, and in turn, user experience should be at the top of your priority list.

Here’s another statistic that you may find interesting:

80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when presented with a personalised experience.

This makes it worth your while to find web design services that will help you create an online experience on your website that is tailored to the needs and pain points of your customers.

Improved Conversion Rate

We’ve already established that the user interface of your website can influence the search performance of your website and the customer loyalty of your business.

However, we still haven’t discussed how an intuitive user interface contributes to more conversions when first time visitors or sales are considered. This section of the article will be dedicated to the same.

Like the other sections of this article, I would like to use data points to make my point. In the previous section, we have already discussed how 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when presented with a personalized experience. Here are a few others:

• 47% of users expect a website page to load within 2 seconds or less. 39% of users will stop interacting with a website if the images take too long to load.
• On the other hand, if you improve your website loading speed from 8 seconds to 2 seconds, you can potentially improve your website conversions by a whopping 74%.
• An average user takes just half a second to form an opinion about the business website they are interacting with. When treated with a positive user experience, 90% of users will continue shopping on the website.
• 48% of users cited that a website’s design is the most important factor when it comes to determining the credibility of a website.

These stats, combined with the fact that an entire aspect of digital marketing, conversion rate optimization, is dedicated to improving the customer’s experience on websites and landing pages, prove the importance of UI in determining the conversions on a particular website.

Besides the fancy marking lingo and the numbers, it only makes sense that an intuitive and user-friendly user interface will lead to a positive customer experience, which will in turn, improve the chances of a conversion for a first time visitor.

Think about it, regardless of whether you own a product or service company, your ultimate objective is to help your customers (or prospects) solve a specific problem in their lives.

When every aspect of your brand’s online existence serves to help your prospect, the chances of them becoming a customer and realising that you will be able to help them solve their problem will improve dramatically.

Conclusion

If you have read Importance of UI, you may already have started thinking of ways you can improve the user interface of your website or mobile application.

What ideas have you come up with? Share them with us (and everyone else) in the comment section below.

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