What does it mean to anticipate customers’ needs? It isn’t as easy as offering a product they might want. You have to really delve into who your target audience is and what pain points they have. Once you understand these things, it is much easier to offer solutions in a way that makes sense to them.
How do you ensure your customers are satisfied? A whopping 91% of consumers don’t complain about a bad experience. They simply leave your site, never to return. They’ll even stop buying a brand they love after one unsatisfactory interaction. Your job is figuring out how to remain relevant to your clients, even without their negative feedback.
Fortunately, many things result in excellent user experience (UX). Here are six ways to anticipate your site visitors’ needs and deliver exceptional results.
1. Solve a Problem
Don’t jump into a sales pitch without fully understanding the issue your buyer faces. There is a pain point that drove them to look for your type of business in the first place. How are you going to fix the problem for them?
Outline why your business has the exact answer they need. Don’t be afraid to dig into the emotional appeal behind the situation.
College Money Matters dips into the pain point many parents and students face of how to pay for higher education. It clearly understands the fear and uncertainty surrounding this time in a person’s life. The rotating headlines in the hero header include topics such as minimizing the amount you’ll owe, how to get the cheapest interest rates on loans and why you should go after as many scholarships as you can.
2. Survey Your Customers
The best way of figuring out the future needs of your current customers is simply asking them. Think about the ways you might serve them as their family or careers grow. What might they need tomorrow they don’t need today? Then, throw out some questions in a survey and ask them for feedback.
There may be services your competitors offer that you don’t. Your customers might even consider leaving you and moving to another company to gain access to those perks. Look for input that helps you grow your business and better meet your site visitors’ needs.
3. Offer Tools to Help Them Navigate
When people come to your website, they’ve already searched for a business such as yours. They may even have visited a few of your competitors’ sites before landing on your page. You want to help them navigate through their options. Have a clear buyer’s journey that takes them from information to lead in mere seconds.
What this looks like depends on the type of company you run. Service businesses may need to include a list of offerings, locations and a free quote, for example. An operation selling a specific product may move the buyer toward the shopping cart or a video showing the item in use.
NMC CAT offers a map showing the locations closest to the customer. Whether a construction company wishes to buy a new machine or a startup wants to rent equipment, they’ll be able to find what they want with the searchable location finder.
4. Add Live Chat
According to a survey by Zendesk, live chat comes with an 85% customer satisfaction rating and is preferred to almost every other type of support. If you want to meet your site visitors’ needs in real time, adding a live chat feature is extremely helpful.
You can use a chatbot for gathering basic information and answering questions that come up repeatedly. However, have a few trained live agents on hand who can close the sale or move an interested user into a lead with little effort.
5. Engage Users
Looks for ways to engage users from the moment they land on your page. There are several methods for achieving engagement. You could add an explainer video that showcases what your product or service does and why it’s superior.
Another option is creating animations as the person scrolls. Their movement on the page is something engaging rather than just another static page with a bunch of information.
Add details your users are most likely to be interested in and make them appealing so they remain on your page.
Boost does a good job of rotating the vitamin bottle in a 360-degree circle as you scroll down the page. Some elements stay static while others move at different speeds. This gives a parallax cinematic effect similar to what you’d see in movie credits. The user keeps scrolling to see what’s revealed next, and while doing so, they learn about the product.
6. Know Your UVP
Your unique value proposition (UVP) is what makes your brand stand out. What is the one thing you offer or do better than any of your competitors? Once you figure out what your UVP is and how it helps solve your customers’ problems, you’ll be a step ahead of others in the industry.
Start by looking at competitors. What are their UVPs? Does your company match what they do, and then perhaps take it a step further? Next, look at what they don’t offer that they should. It will quickly become clear what your UVP is and how to promote it to your site visitors to show them you’re the answer to their problems.
Automate Minor Tasks
When you automate elements of your site, you free up your time for more personalized service. For example, you might collect information for the mailing list via a form, but you could then personalize the emails you send with offers relevant to the recipient.
Chatbots, pop-ups and automated SMS messages are all ways of making your work easier and giving you more opportunities to reach out to individual leads. With a little automation, your site goes to the next level and meets customer needs.
