How to Reduce Churn by Improving User Experience (UX) Design

Brand loyalty — long considered one of the most important marketing and sales metrics — is more difficult than ever for an organization to achieve. The lack of brand loyalty and a customer mindset that values convenience has increased customer churn rates. This new business environment creates significant problems for businesses that are impacted by customer turnover. Reducing customer churn is vital for success: It can save marketing dollars, reduce sales pressures, and provide a more stable revenue stream.

Reducing customer churn can take many forms, such as improving your website user experience. Given the massive amount of internet-based customers most businesses have, improving your UX can be the difference between success and failure.

Here’s a look at five things you can do to improve your UX and how those efforts can integrate with your overall marketing strategy.

Improve Onboarding Flow

Nothing is more frustrating than running into bugs or an unoptimized website while attempting to finalize a purchase or enroll.

Businesses need to do everything they can to make it easy for their customers to convert, whether that conversion is signing up, filling out a contact form, or purchasing a product or service. As such, you should strive to improve the onboarding experience. You can do so by:

• Keeping your forms simple and streamlined by keeping questions down to what is necessary. Don’t make a user fill out too many form fields; you can always get more information later.
• Being transparent and displaying a progress bar to let users see how close they are to completing a process.
• Showing users how they can contact you for help or questions by providing a phone number, email, or chat box.
• Keeping your website and any features or forms mobile-friendly.

Different industries will have different requirements, but these principles should apply generally across industries.

Be Interactive

When done right, interactivity can be a critical component of content marketing. However, interactivity can be extraneous and distracting when it’s done wrong. There are a few basic tenants of creating an interactive website to which you should adhere:

• Consider creating quizzes or surveys that can help a person determine what product or service to use. This content can be interesting, pull users in, and be ideal for advertisements.
• If applicable, create pictures that a user can alter by running a mouse (or user’s finger, if on a mobile device) over them.
• Consider investing in augmented reality overlays if your product or service benefits from them. This could help users see how your product or service would look in the real world or at their homes.Test the various interactive elements to ensure they work on multiple devices.

Streamline User Interface Design

Imagine you go to a website expecting to get a piece of information or complete a purchase. Instead, the website crashes, loads obnoxious pop-ups, or doesn’t work on your phone. This frustrating experience is virtually guaranteed to drive customers off.

Your website should be smooth, simple, and fast. Reduce load time by disabling unnecessary extensions, and make sure you have a responsive design that works on phones. Finally, test the website from a customer perspective on multiple devices to ensure it is optimized.

Identify Recurring Problems

Some issues simply happen over and over again. While user testing should capture at least some of these challenges, you must do what you can to identify recurring problems and manage them by creating a more intuitive user interface. You can do this by soliciting feedback from users on their experience. Feedback forms or focus groups can also help identify recurring issues.

Re-engage Inactive Customers

Inactive customers are usually most likely to end their business relationship with you. As such, you need to identify a process by which your team identifies these inactive customers, then connects with them to see what you can do to get them to re-engage with your business.

From a UX perspective, you can create specific processes and web pages that are personalized and geared toward inactive users. Develop messaging, graphics, and specific business offerings designed to appeal to this customer segment and create the impetus to get them to engage with your organization.

Final Thoughts

Like most businesses, no “one big thing” will make the difference between improving your UX and not. Instead, it’s a series of smaller actions. By taking the five steps above, your business can go a long way toward creating a smoother user experience, thus keeping customers happy, reducing customer churn, and increasing your bottom line.

At Madison Taylor Marketing, we get UX and customer churn and are ready to help you succeed. Contact us today for more information on how our resources and expertise can help your organization build sustainable success.