Don’t Do User Experience? Actually, You Do.

You have a user experience whether you like it or not, and regardless of whether you’re doing anything to optimize it. From the first exposure a potential customer has to your products or services – whether that’s on a billboard, through direct mail, by word of mouth, or on a search engine – you are providing that customer with an experience around your brand.

In the age of technology, and for most of the people reading this, you ultimately want people to end up on your website – this is where you can really sell yourself, because you’re not constrained to an 8.5×11 brochure or the 70 characters you get in a PPC ad on Google. Here are a few questions to ask yourself about your marketing campaigns and materials, how they relate to your website, and the experience you’re creating for your customers.

Is It Consistent?
What are the consequences of having a value proposition on your brochure that doesn’t match the one on your website? What about the messaging in your PPC ad not matching the messaging of the landing page it links to? Confusion. Potential customers will show up at your site and wonder whether they’re in the right place. The best solution here is to set up campaign-specific landing pages, and use the URLs for those pages in your other marketing materials.

This is the ultimate in consistency. Your brochure says “Visit www.company.com/free-stuff-promo for more information about our free stuff” (notice how the URL of the page matches the campaign), and they end up on a page where the title is “Free Stuff from Company X”, the messaging is all about free stuff they can get from your company, and the call to action is “Get Your Free Stuff Today!”. And not only that, but all of the colours, fonts, and images you use match as well. There’s no question to the customer that they’re in the right place.

Is It Memorable?
What happens when, two years down the road, one of your previous customers is chatting with a friend who mentions that they need some of the stuff your company offers? Chances are that previous customer isn’t going to remember the exact URL of your website, but I’ll bet they still have an invoice. Do you have your business information – website, phone numbers, email addresses, physical locations – all easy to find on that invoice?

What about that billboard you’re paying big bucks for, but directs people to www.company.com/2010promos/promo7341/promo.php? I know that even I don’t have enough dust on my dashboard to copy that down while I drive by.

Is It Simple?
So you’ve got a lead gen campaign running, there’s good consistency between your touchpoints and your website, and it’s easy for people to remember how to get there. But they get there and hit a form with 8 fields when all they want to do is download a whitepaper. There is no hard and fast rule about how long a form should be – it’s typically a balance between minimizing the length as much as possible and satisfying the sales and marketing departments – but you should definitely test it (more on this in a minute).

Maybe your form is short and easy to fill out, but the copy is drowning in fluff. Are the first words on the page “Welcome to the website for Company X!”? Get rid of them. Make your copy concise, and talk about benefits. Point out that you understand their problems, and then tell them how you can fix those problems. Yes, they’ll eventually want to know about the features too, but if they don’t know that you can help them right away, chances are they’ve left. Try out different copy, see what works best for getting visitors to turn into customers.

Are You Testing?
You can test pretty quickly and easily – it’s not hard. Try out things like Google Website Optimizer. Generally, A/B testing is the easiest way to get started. Just two things to keep in mind:

1. Test at the same time – you need something that will let you test multiple versions at the same time (like Google Website Optimizer) so that you don’t have to question whether the data is related to changes in traffic to your site.
2. Innovate, then iterate – try some big changes first. Move your form, rewrite the copy, change the images, things like that. Once you find a big change that works well, then you can try tweaking that on a smaller scale. Don’t spend all of your time changing words one at a time or progressively changing your call to action button from dark blue to light blue.

Remember, you’re creating an experience whether you like it or not. But what’s more important is whether your potential customers like it or not – I’d recommend you do something to make sure they like it.