Aggregators’ laser focus on digital experience has given them an edge when it comes to online conversion. They leverage data to understand how their users behave and buy online, which enables them to A/B test improvements quickly and efficiently to drive sales.

Identifying purchasing trends allows them to spot up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, react to changing customer expectations, and tailor products to meet user needs. Insurers would do well to imitate. 50% of Online Insurance in Europe is sold via aggregators.

Ecosystems Will Account For 30% Of Global Revenues By 2025

7 of the 10 largest companies by market capitalization are ecosystems – Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tencent. 

Ecosystems’ one main focus is to have customer-centric digital activity. Their expansion puts insurance brands at risk. Products like Amazon Protect, focused on device insurance, are the first examples of a potentially untapped market for these tech giants.

Insuretech

9 In 10 Insurers Fear Losing Part Of Their Business to Fintechs

Pressure on margins, loss of market share and information security are among the top concerns for insurers, but according to PwC, a large proportion also see opportunity. Many think new technologies can offer reduced costs through automation, improved customer retention and a differentiated service.

Insurers

71% Of Consumers Surveyed Used Some Form Of Digital Research Before Buying Insurance

To compete, insurers must adopt the same customer-first mentality as digital leaders like Amazon. Namely: A relentless focus on finding and eliminating friction, particularly for key journeys like account registration, troubleshooting and account management.

Many companies fail to improve customer journeys because discovering what customers value isn’t easy. Translating that understanding into operational performance improvements is even harder, requiring deep customer insight, robust analytics, and a detailed model of key customer journeys, with ownership across functions and end-to-end management. 

Digital channels like web and app offer important opportunities to analyze customer interactions and uncover friction. This data is essential to creating services that don’t just work, but delight customers.

Insurance Trends

Traffic per Device: Traffic shifted from desktop to mobile in 2019 – a 48% increase from 2018.

Number of Pages Seen: Visitors seem to consume more content per page, with an increase in the session time (+35% on desktop) but a decrease in the number of pages viewed on average (-6% on desktop).

Percentage of Content That Is Never Seen: Despite visitors consuming more content per page, the percentage of content that is never seen increased.

Average Page Views For A Lead Generation Visit: Visitors consume lots of content before converting whether this is informational content or the form pages themselves.

The Problem

Insight into customer behavior trends is crucial to building an online experience to rival the Amazons of the world. Yet insurance brands still frequently struggle to understand the “why” behind customer behavior, and many still use tools like Google Analytics to get answers. While these tools effectively answer the “what” – ie. which pages are being viewed and for how long, this information doesn’t help when attempting to understand visitor behavior at scale. 

Many rely on session replay tools to try and uncover user experience issues, but few have the time to gain effective insight. Others rely on analysts to answer their on-site questions. This too requires significant time and manual effort, and puts a strain on analyst resources. 

The “Tag, Wait and Learn” methodology is outdated. It relies on having to guess where issues might be ahead of time, leaving businesses “not knowing what they don’t know.”

A Solution?

UX Analytics helps organizations make faster, smarter decisions by giving each team the means to answer their own optimization questions. With these tools, they can access aggregated data on visitor behavior; robust enough to underpin data-driven decisions, and presented in a way that even non-analysts can understand. Contentsquare’s platform is purpose-built to be easy to use, accessible to a large number of users, and not to sit siloed within Analytics teams.

According to our Digital Experience Report on insurance Bank of America has 30 people trained on the tool to measure the impact of every experience, and piece of content. 

Find out how Contentsquare’s solutions can help insurance brands by accessing “The Digital Experience Report – Insurance” below

You’ve got months of careful planning under your belt, a fail-proof business plan, an enviable communications strategy, and you’re finally ready to launch your product or service.

Your homepage is the gateway to your brand. You’ve carefully crafted the content on your landing pages to showcase your unique offering. 

But let’s be honest — how much thought have you really put into your CTAs?

Calls To Action, or CTAs, have the heavy task of turning your visitors into prospects.

Their design, location and messaging can’t be an afterthought — they must meet the needs and expectations of your visitors at the opportune moment.

In this post we will look at what makes a good CTA, and how to achieve effective affordance when designing one.

We will reveal the secrets behind the perfect CTA to help you drive a higher click rate and ultimately, more conversions. 

What is a Call to Action or CTA?

A Call to Action (CTA), also known as a call-to-action button, is a clickable element designed to encourage users to perform an action.

Oftentimes, this button sends the visitor to a page where they are able to complete a purchase or subscribe to a service.

The Call to Action is generally considered the second step of your Inbound Marketing strategy, preceding the moment of purchase.

Its main objective is therefore conversion or transformation: that of your visitors into leads. Implementing efficient CTAs is crucial to the performance of your website.

The CTA can take many forms — it could be a button, a banner with an image, or a simple text link. 

It redirects visitors to a landing page or pop-up window in order to:

• Sign up to a site
• Download a report
• Make a purchase
• Subscribe to a newsletter
• Request a demo
• Etc…

Given this, it’s crucial you send visitors to a relevant landing page to avoid any visitor frustration. But we’ll talk about that in another post.

The Call to Action Button: a Question of Affordance

It’s immediately obvious your CTA button is a button. Or is it? 

An effective CTA is recognizable instantly and its function is immediately understood. 

Affordance is defined as “the property or feature of an object which presents a prompt on what can be done with this object”  — in other words, the possible actions suggested by an object or element’s characteristics. 

In short: visitors should be able to immediately identify CTAs from their design. Not only is a good CTA instantly recognizable; it also stands out from the rest of the page. When in doubt, remember that a button must match the idea a visitor has of what a button looks like!

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your design is, if an element that is meant to be clickable doesn’t look clickable, your visitors will be left scratching their heads (at best) or leaving your platform altogether.

This is even truer on mobile, where affordance is the only indicator of active in-page elements. Remember: you can’t hover on a smartphone! In fact, the only way to measure the performance of a CTA on mobile is to track clicks.

CTAs and Mobile UX

As discussed above, while the appearance of a CTA is a key factor that influences desktop performance, it’s even more important on mobile.

Digital behavior is heavily influenced by context, and visitors browse differently on their office desktop than on their mobile, especially while they’re on the go.

Browsing while waiting for the subway, walking down the street or perusing items in a store comes with its own set of challenges, and the absence of a mouse or touchpad may result in less tap accuracy.

A survey of 1,333 people carried out by researcher and consultant Steven Hoober revealed that 49% of users hold their smartphone in one hand (the right hand in 67% of cases).

This statistic has given rise to the concept of the Thumb Zone, which sheds light on the importance of the size of devices and site elements and of how this impacts usability. 

To get advice on how to design the perfect CTA, we quizzed some of our UX-perts across our offices in Paris, New York, London and Munich. Here are their 5 top tips for creating an irresistible CTA.

1. Make Sure Your CTA is Visible

Because it’s good to start with the basics, a good CTA needs to be visible. This means: 

• It must always be above the fold, particularly if it’s an add-to-cart CTA.
• You must use colors that contrast with the rest of the page. 
• There needs to be enough empty space around the button to suggest interactivity.
• If there is more than one button on the page, increase the size of your main CTA and go for a bolder color so that it can stand out.

Make sure you position your CTAs where users expect to find them (add-to-cart buttons, for example, are often located in the top right corner of the page). If visitors can’t see your CTAs, then you’re bound to miss out on sales. 

Here are some common types of CTA buttons:

• Sharp-cornered button
• Rounded-corner button
• Gradient background button
• Ghost button

Dropbox uses a simple design with a lot of space, in keeping with the minimalist look of their homepage. The simple design means their blue Call To Action really stands out on the page, and since the CTA button is the same color as the Dropbox logo, there’s no misinterpreting the message on the button.

2. Create an Easily Identifiable CTA

While a CTA has to be visible, it also needs to look like a CTA (see the section on affordance). A heatmap tool will help you see if your CTA is doing its job — ie. whether customers are actually clicking on it. 

An identifiable CTA has:

• A shape that suggests its function: heart or thumbs up for a like, a cart icon for add-to-cart… 
• A color and design that reflects the brand’s aesthetic and the colors on the page  
• A hover feature on desktop

Another example of a viable CTA is the “Remember Everything” button on the Evernote website. It clearly communicates the value of signing up, and the green of the main button both reflects the brand’s palette and stands out on the page. 

3. Communicate a Clear Message

The text on your button, if there is any, must be crystal clear. 

The wording should be: 

• Straight-to-the-point: the text should explain the exact function of the button (Order, Confirm, Remove…) 
• Impactful: if possible, the button should point out the value for the user (Download the guide for free, Get one month free…)
• Coherent: it needs to clearly show where users will land next 

It’s also smart to:

• Create a sense of urgency, highlighting time-limited offers, limited stock, etc… 

There’s nothing like a timer to make a user want to sign up. Visitors who spend some time on the Aquaspresso homepage are welcomed by a pop-up CTA, which advertises a limited-time offer and displays a two-minute timer. 

4. Use an Accessible CTA

By now you know that a high-performing CTA is an easy-to-click CTA. 

A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Touch Lab found that the average width of a finger is between 10 and 14mm, and the average fingertip is between 8 and 10mm wide. 

It follows that any clickable element should be at least 10mm by 10mm. Yes, UX is an extremely precise discipline.

Barkbox provides another great example of the ideal CTA, and the two CTAs on their homepage demonstrate how well the brand knows its audience. 

There are many consumers who visit the site are interested in signing up to the service themselves but there are also others looking to give a Barkbox subscription as a gift.

To make their customers’ lives easier, the company has chosen to display two CTAs on the homepage: “Choose Your Barkbox” and “Give a Gift”.

5. A CTA Should be Reassuring

Finally, make sure your CTA is reassuring to your client or prospect. Clicks should trigger a confirmation, which could be visual or audible. The absence of a confirmation could leave the user thinking that their action was not confirmed, causing them to repeat the action needlessly. 

Enabling a confirmation feature limits unnecessary interactions and, as a result, user frustration. 

You can also reassure visitors by clearly communicating that an action can be reversed at any time. Netflix, for example, allows visitors to cancel anytime, once they have signed up — a reassurance feature that had a positive impact on conversions.

You are now equipped will all the knowledge you need to create irresistible CTAs on your web, mobile site or app. Don’t forget that a big part of creating an effective CTA is “>understanding the intent and browsing context of your customers, and fine-tuning the design accordingly.
Remember to use CTAs sparingly — too many CTAs kill the CTA.

And, some parting words of wisdom: test, test, test!

Whether you are making changes to the size, color, shape or location of your CTA, A/B testing and granular analysis of customer behavior will help you make the right decisions.

With the back-to-school shopping season in full swing and our data-driven approach to just about everything, we surveyed the shopping habits of early-bird shoppers getting a head-start on filling their supplies lists.

The back-to-school shopping season represents the second-largest retail event in the year, with 54 million students enrolled in grades K-12. A Deloitte study predicts that there will be a $27.8 billion expenditure during the 2019 back-to-school season, with 29% of this revenue stemming from online sales. 

Our 2019 Back-to-School Report offers a holistic view on how shoppers maneuver through websites for common back-to-school items. This blog post is a condensed version of our mini-report, pointing out keys facts and figures that brands ought to know. With the knowledge of browsing, shopping and other online behaviors of back-to-school shoppers, you’ll be able to optimize your site for a successful back-to-school campaign.

Back-to-School Shopping Campaigns Methodology

The findings in this report stem from an analysis of 69 million user sessions between June 1st and July 1st.

These sessions translated to observing 439 million pages and 567 million clicks. Now that’s a lot of back-to-school shopping. In an effort to extract the most valuable data for brands, we filtered out non-customers, only studying the customer journeys that resulted in a purchase. 

We zoomed in on two types of purchase decisions: low-involvement and high-involvement. 

Low Vs High Involvement Purchases: Elemental Differences & What Sets Them Apart at a High Level 

The back-to-school shopping season is defined by shoppers that fall into two major categories, although they’re not mutually exclusive; high involvement purchasers often make low involvement purchases. 

What sets them apart? For the purpose of this mini-report, we defined a low involvement purchase as one that requires little consideration and low levels of user attachment — think pens, pencils, notepads and other stationery items that make up the bulk of a back-to-school shopping list. Parents are usually at the helm of these purchases, searching for a way to fill up their kids’ shopping list in a budget-friendly way.

A high involvement purchase, on the other hand, is a much more deliberate purchase, one that is personal for school children — in this case, we looked at backpacks. More durable and long-lasting than say, a crayon, a backpack can also be a medium for self-expression, and as such, this type of purchase isn’t made quickly, on a whim, or to satisfy a teacher’s list.

Aside from this core difference, let’s glimpse into the other elemental ways in which book bags (high involvement) differ from stationery (low involvement). Before we delve into the more granular behaviors of these two types of purchases online, you ought to know the more basic ones as you attempt to set up a good user experience (UX) for both.

The Menu VS the Search Bar 

As two of the main page elements visitors use to find the products they’re looking for, the menu and search bar carry a lot of weight for UX and conversions. Backpack and stationery shoppers have their own preferences when it comes to using these site elements.

The product-finding element of choice for book bag shoppers is the homepage menu, as it garners almost 4 times as many interactions from them as it does from stationery shoppers. Stationery shoppers opt for the homepage search bar, which receives a 7% higher click rate from this type of shopper.

This type of binary in-site searching behavior reveals that visitors seeking backpacks are more open to a wider scope of product suggestions. This is exactly what a menu offers, especially if it’s comprehensive, or a menu mega. This preference is telling of the nature of backpack purchases, which are much more personal for students and are set to last them at least one school year. 

On the contrary, stationery buyers seek the shortest path to their sought-after products. This is because the item lists for stationery are long and varied, not to mention; they tend to be specific. For example, 8 x 10 ½ loose-leaf paper, washable glue sticks, ringed binders, etc., are precise supply requests. Finding them quickly to make a fast purchase will require a strong search function on a search bar. 

Searching for an item with a close exactness to its name will ensure stationery shoppers that they find the right product at speed.

Site Visits for Backpack and Stationery Shoppers

While you can safely bet that book bag and stationery shoppers will visit your website (especially if you are well-established or have a decent UX) quantitatively, their visits diverge. Backpack shoppers will need more site visits before converting.

This is because backpack shoppers are the online equivalent of window shoppers — they require more time for finding the best product for them. Our data shows that these high involvement purchasers will visit a site three times before converting. After thorough sessions of browsing potential backpacks, these buyers leave as something of a brand expert.

Stationery shoppers usually convert after having visited a site twice. As low involvement purchasers, they do less perusing and require less convincing. To cater to these visitors, pay attention to price points, as these are often the main, if not only, deciding factors for these shoppers.

As the first graph shows, and the one below, the longest user sessions for both stationery and book bag shoppers exist on mobile, followed by desktop and then other devices.

Landing Page Attractiveness for back-to-school shoppers

The landing page might be reached via different entry points (direct, social media campaign, Google Ads, remarketing, retargeting, etc) but it serves the same goal for back-to-school shopping campaigns: getting prospects to convert.

Let’s see how the different types of landing pages fare for stationery and backpack shoppers. Stationery shoppers land 23% more on category pages than their backpack-minded counterparts. They’re looking for quick comparisons for a quick time spent on the site. Thus, they favor a bird’s eye view of all the relevant merchandise.

Book bag shoppers land on product pages 125% more than stationery shoppers. This is because high involvement purchasers seek a comprehensive understanding of what they’re willing to buy. Since product pages go into the full depths of a product, they oblige to this need. Brands should work on calibrating their product ads to perfection, because this is typically the starting point of a product page landing.

Consumption of Pages and Time Spent on Site

Backpack and stationery shoppers have different proclivities for consuming webpages. That means that the amount of pages each category consumes and the time they allot themselves per session differs.

Low involvement (stationery shoppers) view 35% more pages than do book bag shoppers — 46 pages per visit versus 34 per visit. This can easily be attributed to the list of supplies stationery buyers need, while backpack shoppers are just on the hunt for a single item.

The visits of stationery shoppers are also longer on average than those of backpack shoppers, specifically, they are 33% longer. The cause underpinning this is also easy to understand, as viewing more pages will take more time than viewing a few.

However: when it comes to time spent on-page, back shoppers take the lead, consuming a single page — particularly a product page. Book bag shoppers spend 60% more time on a product page than stationery buyers. Brands should therefore pay more attention to optimizing product images and descriptions. Remember, these high involvement purchases are more expensive and carry more sentimental value.

Similarities of High and Low Involvement Online Purchases

Despite the many differences that high and low involvement, i.e., backpack and stationery purchases entail — and even more finely combed ones you’ll learn about from our report, these two back-to-school purchases do cross paths digitally.

This occurs in the homepage slideshow and on the recommended products, as both of these site elements exhibit a high click rate among our two audiences. For backpack shoppers, this underscores a keen interest in the product itself, tying back to its longer use and function as an item of self-expression.

For stationery shoppers, who are especially inclined towards clicking on these in-page elements, this shows that they are on the prowl for the best deals — as noted earlier, this audience will surely compare price points across the all the websites they visit, so make sure your prices are competitive. As for the UX side of price, if you’re offering a sale or discounted prices, spell this out for customers early on in their journey, as not all user paths are equally long.

We hope this post granted you acute insight into the digital habits of backpack and stationery shoppers during the early 2019 back-to-school shopping details. Hungry for more data? Our Back-to-School Shoppers Report won’t disappoint.

Summer is officially upon us and — never ones to skip a beat, we’re taking to the road to spread our UX-pertise far and wide. Our team of experts is hitting the road to a city near you to help improve your digital strategy to the max. Our roadshows take a results-oriented approach to digital experience, with a focus on Digital Happiness (which, by the way, you can measure). 

Why? Because we live in an age of experience, and brands today are competing on their ability to deliver experiences that meet (and exceed) the needs and expectations of their customers.

Disjointed experiences, counter-intuitive navigation, in-page frustration, a lack of transparency — a poor site experience is bad news for brands in a world where there are no second “digital” chances. On the other hand, seamless journeys, headache-free paths to conversion and value-adding content are the hallmarks of a successful customer experience. 

So — how exactly do you build standout digital experiences that keep visitors happy (and converting)? How can you make your site or app work harder for you? What tools can digital teams use to gauge customer bliss and encourage engagement? 

We’ll be discussing all this and more. But we don’t just speak on creating amazing experiences — we put our money where our mouth is —  we create them. 

So join us in one of four fabulous locations for insights, happy hour, networking and advice customized for your vertical.

Let’s take a look at what’s in store:

Digital Happiness Roadshow: Dates, Info & Why You Should Attend

Denver 

July 18th, 6:30 – 8:30 pm

The show in Denver (along with the one in Philadelphia) kicks off the Roadshow. We’re starting with a bang, with the show set for Mile High Spirits, a lounge best known for its live music and patio games. If the craft cocktails and light fare don’t fill you up as much as you’d like them to, you won’t even need to walk far, as food trucks line this trendy space. Also, if you love modern distillery and spirits, stay around for some info on how to snag a spot at their distillery tours.

Philadelphia

July 18th, 6:30 – 8:30 pm

In Philadelphia, our roadshow will take place in a historic meeting place — the Philidelphia Distillery, which is the state’s first spirit distillery since the end of prohibition. The meeting place itself was once a factory, a key marker during the state’s industrial revolution. The transformed the 13,00 square foot space was later transformed into a retail store, bar and tasting room. Come for the UX teachings. Stay for the spirit craftsmanship.

Atlanta

July 23rd, 6:30 – 8:30 pm

In Atlanta, our roadshow will leave you shouting from the rooftops — perhaps literally, as it’ll take place in SkyLounge, a world famous rooftop lounge and event space. Here you’ll get to enjoy craft cocktails and gander at incredible views of the ATL. The lounge sits atop the historic Glenn Hotel, situated in the heart of the Centennial Park District, known for being a hub for business and entertainment. There’s no better place to imbibe the sprightliness of the downtown district.

Austin

July 25th, 6:30 – 8:30 pm

We’re hosting our Austin roadshow at Maggie Mae’s, an iconic “bar” that screams Austin. As you can see, we use the word “bar” loosely, as the venue boasts over 15,000 square feet of event space, 7 bars, 3 stages and is steps away from major hotels. It’s anything but boring — the perfect space for a memorable UX lesson. 

In this iteration, we’re partnering with Brooks Bell, a provider of analytics, A/B testing and personalization consulting for enterprise brands. Like yours truly, this company helps with website optimization and has a unique approach to obtaining it.

See you there!

Digital marketers, website developers and ecommerce businesses from far and wide: welcome to a 3-part blog series constructed from our Global UX Map — an in-depth report on digital customer behavior from around the globe.

While we strongly recommend you download our UX map, which offers a wealth of data-backed insights on how worldwide site visitors browse websites and interact with specific pages/ in-page elements, this series will condense some of these topics for a more organized, topic-based read. As such, this series is set to help you increase your ecommerce conversions in a more focused way.

In this round, we’ll illuminate our recent findings on the menu, search bar and slideshow usage through a global lens, and provide tips on how to optimize these elements to cater to your international or US-based audience. 

UX Analysis Methodology

We ran our UX analysis on over 35 million visitor sessions from January and February 2019, on 11 luxury sites in 7 countries. This rendered 150 million page views and 3 billion clicks. 

We observed visitor interactions with the menu, search bar and slideshow starting domestically, in the United States. Our international analysis gathered data from 4 European countries: France, Germany, the UK and Italy. Additionally, we studied the UX in 2 Asian countries: China and Japan.

The aforesaid UX elements we studied all exist on homepages, so this post will discuss the top-priorities for the homepage in particular. These 3 UX elements all point to critical visitor mindsets — determined if they leverage the search bar, seeking inspiration from the slideshow, or methodically browsing the menu. 

The Attractiveness Depends on the Device

The menu, search bar and carousel have varying levels of attractiveness depending on the device, and visitors engage differently with these 3 UX elements on mobile and desktop. 

Desktop visitors, for example, are more likely to engage with these features than their mobile counterparts, except in the UK. There, mobile visitors clocked in 7% more interactions with the menu, search bar and slideshow combined than desktop users. 

In all other countries, except China, mobile yields 20% fewer interactions with the menu, search bar and slideshow. In China, this lowered attractiveness is compounded, with mobile driving 70% fewer interactions than desktop. 

Per these findings, you should expect more usage of all 3 UX elements on desktop, and you should be thinking about ways to efficiently and seamlessly guide customer journeys on mobile. 

The Slideshow: Not Getting Much Love from the US and Italy

The click rate on the menu, search bar and slideshow differs from country to country; some regional audiences are much more likely to click on these top homepage navigation elements. 

France has the highest combined click rate on all three of these elements on desktop (see above), while the UK has the highest click rate on these elements on mobile (49%). 

Users in the US, however, are not so click-happy when it comes to these top homepage elements, as they average in the lowest click rate of all the countries surveyed on desktop, roughly 43%. The US also holds the second lowest click rate on mobile, at 33%, only to be outdone by China, which has the lowest click rate on mobile, with only 13%.

As for the slideshow, visitors in the US and Italy show the least interest in this feature. The US has the lowest slideshow desktop click rate, at only 3.7%, followed by Italy, at 3.8%. Across all the countries we studied, the slideshow and the search bar received the least amount of interactions, with the menu coming out on top.

Slideshows drive small engagement in the US and Italy.

Visuals are a Big Engagement Driver in China and Japan 

Visual elements are a crucial ingredient of a good UX in China and Japan, as they produce the most engagement and fastest time to first click. Indeed, visitors in China and Japan are among the first to click on the slideshow. Japan proves that images rule, with the shortest time to first click — 87% faster than the global overage. The time to first click in China is 28% faster than that of the other countries.

While the slideshow is well-received by visitors in Japan and China, the search bar and menu don’t forge a good UX for these audiences, especially on mobile. These 2 site elements garner less interactions within these countries due to their complex writing systems. These elements are ill-adapted to Japanese and Chinese and it shows in the data, particularly in China, where the menu has 74% less engagement and the search bar 60% less than in the other countries. 

While visuals do well in China and Japan, the menu and search bar underperforms in these countries on mobile.

The Search Bar and Menu: Successful in the UK 

Unlike visitors in Japan and China, those in the UK are much engaged with the menu and search bar, as they depend on it more than any of the surveyed countries. Certain in what they want, this audience is eager to find the quickest path to product. 

Opposing the UX in Japan and China, the search bar is crystal clear to UK visitors, who use it roughly 45% more than the users in all of the other countries we surveyed. Mobile visitors in the UK also dominate in menu use, and are 50% more likely to rely on this feature than anywhere else.

Specifically, the UK click rate on the menu comes in at 38.3%, the highest out of all the countries on desktop. Its click rate on the search bar is also the highest, at 6.7%.

The Menu Reels in the Best Usage in France and Germany

The menu is the most preferred navigation element in France and Germany, which reels in over 15% and over 11% higher engagement, respectively. Visitors in the UK and Italy are also highly reliant on the menu, while Chinese and Japanese visitors rarely use this function.

With a much heftier use of the menu in Europe, you ought to capitalize it by making it adhere to a clear, visual hierarchy. But it should also have an air of simplicity to maintain its good results for these countries.

More Formulated UX Tips from our Data on a Country Basis  

Here are a few more tips we extracted from our data assembly: 

Visitors in the US, UK and Italy are determined in their browsing and are looking for the shortest, most direct path to the product. So there’s no need to cram the slideshow. Instead, feature a highly visible, sticky search bar on mobile. This will assure that no matter how far down these global users scroll on the homepage, they’ll have an omnipresent shortcut to the product. Make sure this UX element is fully optimized: enabling an autocomplete function for all search queries will also appeal to this audience.

A general deduction of the European countries we examined is that visitors in these countries are highly engaged with the menu. Optimize it for desktop with a hoverable dropdown feature for ease of use. On mobile, a hamburger icon is a popular, quick menu access solution.

Accentuate the bestselling items on desktop and create a shortlist of recommended products and product categories. Another great UX strategy is to suggest content based on searches such as blog posts, videos, etc. This also presents a solid internal linking opportunity — not all of your content will be stumbled upon by SEO.

Remember, audiences in China and Japan interact heavily with visuals. Go bold with the slideshow: meld in dynamic content such as standout colors, videos and inspiring images. Use product links on the slideshow to lessen the path to purchases. Each image does not have to be bound by one product link. 

Since the use of the menu and search bar is low in these countries, add a sticky navigation bar, so it stays in your users’ site even as they scroll down the page.

Optimizing Navigation UX

That does it for our findings on the usage of the menu, search bar and slideshow across 7 countries. It’s time to start tailoring the UX of these site elements in line with the expectations of your local audience. 

Localizing the user experience is not simply limited to applying the language of the country your website is tailored for. Brands that can localize the experience in accordance with user expectations and habits will be well poised to improve retention and conversion rates, allowing them to conquer international markets.

The third week of June marked the annual Salesforce Connections, a 3-day event centered on building potent customer experiences using the Salesforce platform. It was the perfect timing since one week before, we announced our integration with Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud — a partnership that allows Salesforce Cloud clients to access Contentsquare insights in an enriched eCommerce management experience.

Besides running our own booth and sharing our customer experience tips with digital leaders from every vertical, we soaked up a wealth of insights from trailblazers in retail and walked away with some learnings of our own.

Here is what we learned at Connections 2019.

Strategizing the Lifetime Value of Customers

Our first takeaway from the customer experience event is one of the most important things any e-tail player should know, and any business owner for that matter: the maintenance of the lifetime value of customers. Ecommerce platforms can particularly capitalize on this, having the digital space at the core of their communication and access to a wealth of data about the preferences and shopping habits of their audience. 

The lifetime value of customers, as its name suggests, refers to the continuous value that a select customer base can bring you. These customers are more than one-time buyers; rather they are those that have established something of a loyalty-based relationship with your brand, and as such are the best candidates for cross and upsells.

The idea behind lifetime customers involves positing a strong grip on customer retention — and beyond. The latter point of “beyond” refers to creating unique customer experiences set to distinguish you from other e-tailers, and by providing friction-free customer journeys across all channels. 

With personalization now one of the standards of a good customer experience, being able to deliver highly customized, intent-based experiences to your audience will go a long way in securing their loyalty. And we’re not simply talking of personalized emails or product recommendations — understanding the nuances of customer behavior and navigation patterns is key to creating journeys that speak to what your customers are trying to achieve and how they wish to go about it. 

Taking the 360° Approach to Customer Experience

There was also much talk about how marketing tactics can best benefit from a 360-degree approach, i.e., one that adds value for customers in every channel and at every touchpoint. 

Consumers today expect to integrate multiple digital — and offline — touchpoints into their shopping routine. This omnichannel approach gives brands access to more consumer behavior data than ever before, and digital leaders have already been leveraging this wealth of data to fine-tune the experience for their most profitable segments.

Brands today cannot be successful unless they understand what is engaging your customers and where they’re struggling. You can begin this on digital, since some aspects of digital experience (DX) can be transitioned into other marketing channels — even the nondigital variety. For example, some images perform better than others; some copy engages better than others. You can measure it on digital first before going forward.

We set up shop at Salesforce Connections 2019.

Automating the Digital Experience

Customer expectations of a streamlined experience have pushed brands to experiment with automated solutions across channels. Implementing automation in transmission strategies (think MailChimp and other mass email platforms, social media and text messages) has been the dominating  automation technique and has helped brands deliver individualized messaging to consumers. 

But aside from automation that facilitates content transmissions brands are also investing in tools to automate processes, such as conversational bots that guide navigation and replicate a level of customer service and guidance more often found in-store.

And the impact of automation is not just client-facing. As the volume of customer behavioral data increases, so does a brand’s capacity to predict behavioral patterns and UX performance trends.

This ties into the idea of artificial intelligence (AI), where machines can take automatic actions based on their own programming, rather than that of human command. AI can extend to the analytics space, granting you crucial alerts on customer behavior deviations or unusual happenings on your site. 

Creating an Optimal Customer Experience

Marketers and ecommerce professionals should always be on the lookout for methods to deliver an exceptional customer experience. While you can’t read your customers’ minds, you can always theorize their intentions with concentrated behavioral data. Customers are communicating with your brand with every digital interaction — analyzing their journeys and in-page behavior is the best way to learn what they are trying to achieve and what is preventing them from completing an experience or transaction. 

Aside from our learnings from Connections, we want to point out that we don’t only boast about building fantastic customer experiences; experience runs deep in our blood. During Connections, we brought out our friends from GoPro, whose bold, unique approach to digital content creation is a true inspiration. If you didn’t get a chance to pick up one of our “Golden Tickets” and chat with our team of UX-perts, don’t forget we’re always on hand to answer your customer experience questions!

Helping brands forge an exceptional user experience (UX) for their customers is at the heart of our mission and product, and it’s impossible to discuss UX without also mentioning user interface (UI).

The main arm behind the production of memorable digital customer experiences, save for web development and programming, UX/UI is a sector in its own right, and deserves a hefty amount of credit.  

This is not to undermine the other disciplines that contribute to experience development, such as marketing, merchandising, analytics, etc.

Nonetheless, we’d like to spotlight the UX/UI discipline — and what better way is there to delve into this topic than with the first-hand insights of a UX/UI designer? So I sat down with Fanny Pourcenoux, our very own head of UI design.

And Fanny did not disappoint. I was able to derive heaps of insight into the practice of UX/UI. Aspiring designers ought to take note.

What are some of your go-to UX/UI elements/tricks?

It’s very important to keep in mind that every website is unique, and has a dedicated audience, experience, product range, brand story… Here at Contentsquare we work with international brands in many verticals: retail, luxury, banking, automotive… The goals and challenges are always different and you can’t apply the same UX/UI best practices for all your customers. Based on the global client knowledge we’ve acquired over the past 7 years and our daily handling of our data, my team is able to quickly find and suggest unique & personalized recommendations from Contentsquare insights.

Fanny gives a presentation to the team in Paris.

What are some of the biggest changes you’ve noticed in website design in the past 5 to10 years?

Mobile first is the biggest, of course, from a global perspective, but there are also two other big must-haves.

The first one concerns fast & easy navigation. Visitors are more and more demanding when it comes to having a fluid and intuitive navigation. Today this is perhaps the most important goal for an e-commerce website: to facilitate access to menu/search and cross-category/products navigation.

The second is about immersive experiences. In the same way that brick-and-mortar shops are doing their best to make you live/feel an in-store experience, e-commerce websites are striving to offer an immersive & secure digital experience. Since you are only 1 click away from their competitors, brands have to show you quickly their most popular products, and leverage images and video to show to wear/use them. All this in an environment where your personal & payment data is completely safe (think visible and meaningful reassurance elements). Customer reviews are also a very important decision factor in the buyer journey.

What are the main trends you’re noticing now?

There are you classic trends such as visual signifiers that encourage scrolling, sticky nav or CTAs on mobile, cross-navigation links and blocks…

There are more and more bots, too: to guide you, to assist you with purchases, to answer to your questions… Shorter checkout and forms are also popular. Everyone knows it’s often the most painful part of the purchase journey, and we’ve seen a lot of improvement in form length, social and guest login options, interactive and playful checkout experiences…

What are some of your biggest pet peeves in UX?

Filters! A lot of choices, but a small area to display them. How do you make the best choices to ensure they are easy to use. Cross-selling too —what content to showcase, how does it fit in with the overall goal of the page, where to position it, etc… Each case is different and represents a unique challenge.

How has data transformed the job of a UX/UI designer?

Before using data, UX/UI jobs were only based on UX laws, UI trends and user feedback.

Now it’s so much more powerful!! You can directly access the behavior of thousands of visitors on your website and analyze their behavior patterns in seconds. You can stop relying on intuition to optimize, and instead identify actual pain points to improve and solve. We also have benchmark data for every vertical to be able to compare behavioral data with averages before prioritizing actions.

What advice do you have for aspiring UX/UI designers?  

To be passionate about digital. Spend a lot of time every day browsing international sites and apps to prospect/ buy items and services (from a dress to a plane ticket, to booking an appointment with your doctor or hairdresser). Read articles about the latest tech innovations and trends, cultural preferences when it comes to digital, take part in events with other UX and UI designers so you can share knowledge and learn from your peers.

And don’t be afraid to be wrong. You can have good intuition but “without data, it’s just another opinion.” Identifying the best optimization opportunities based on data has to be your daily motivation.

Mastering the UX/UI to Deliver Desirable Digital Experiences

Ease of use, an intuitive navigation and indicators of safe payments are key UX/UI tricks that will elevate your user experience. While some UX/UI best practices are everlasting, or at least seem to be, many emerging and existing ones should be taken with a grain of salt. This is to say that trends change, along with user expectations. But most importantly, the way your own site visitors navigate and interact with your site can change — sometimes suddenly and abnormally. Luckily, you can make timely UX/UI changes with a secure AI-based alerts system in place.