customer experience vs user experience

Customer Experience vs User Experience: Understanding the Difference

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When it comes to building your website and providing the best possible customer service, it’s all about creating a positive experience that will help increase conversions, retain customers, and improve your brand reputation. You may refer to this experience as the “customer experience” or the “user experience”. However, these two types of experience are not actually the same thing. Knowing the differences between the two is very important. This is because by knowing the differences between customer experience vs user experience, you will be able to improve both.

What Is User Experience?

The user experience refers to how people interact with your product or service and their experience with it. For example, how a visitor interacts with your website refers to their user experience. If your pages load slowly and they leave without visiting more pages, then they had a bad user experience. However, if they spend a long time exploring your site’s different pages and engage in several ways, such as by filling out a form and signing up to an email list, there’s a good chance that they had a positive user experience.

Improving The User Experience

To improve your user experience, you need to focus on the four user experience elements: value, usability, adoptability, and desirability. Consider these four elements in the context of a website and how they affect the user experience:

  • Value – Does your website provide value to the user? If it’s nothing but advertisements for your products and services, then it probably doesn’t. However, a website full of informative and helpful content that is relevant to your brand and the user’s needs does.
  • Usability – How easy is it to use your website? For example, is your content organized so that visitors can find it easily? Do you have links to the major pages of your site clearly marked on your home page? Is it easy to contact you through your website? If your website isn’t easy to use, visitors will become frustrated, resulting in a poor user experience.
  • Adoptability – How easy is it for visitors to start using your website? Do pages load quickly? Is your website optimized for mobile devices? If they can’t even begin to use your site, their impression of your business will turn negative.
  • Desirability – How engaging is your website? If you have content that’s relevant and informative but has poor presentation, it’s not going to be very engaging. You can improve desirability by creating a variety of different content, using images and using an engaging personality in your writing.

Although these four elements are described in reference to a website, they can be used for any product or service.

Check out these 4 Tips for Leaving Lasting Impressions on Customers

What Is Customer Experience?

Whereas user experience refers to the experience using a product or service, the customer experience refers to the experience interacting with your brand as a whole. For example, this could include exploring your website, signing up to an email newsletter, downloading several eBooks, speaking with a sales associate, making a purchase, then continuing to engage with your brand post-purchase. Basically, the user experience factors into the overall customer experience.

Improving The Customer Experience

The following are some major elements that make up the customer experience:

  • Your customer service – Customer service includes any direct interactions users have with your brand, such as through a live chat feature, email, phone, text or social media. Your customer service reps need to engage in a friendly and helpful way, whatever channel they’re on. Remember that customer service doesn’t stop after you make the sale.
  • The sales process – The sales process should be convenient and painless for the user. Any issues they have, whether it’s with checking out, trying to use a promotional coupon, pricing issues and more, can hurt the customer experience.
  • Your marketing efforts – How you market your products and services to a user affects their customer experience. If they find that your attempts to engage them are overly promotional or not relevant to their needs, they may become annoyed. That’s why it’s important to know who your audience is and only engage in a relevant manner.
  • The user experience – The user experience with your product or service has a big impact on their overall customer experience.

One thing to keep in mind — a customer might have a good user experience with your product, but that doesn’t mean they’ve had a positive customer experience. For example, they can like your product but dislike the quality of your customer service. Because of this, it’s important that you focus on providing both a positive user experience and overall customer experience.

Understanding the difference between the customer experience vs user experience will allow you to improve both. By thinking that they’re the same, one or both are likely to suffer. Although they differ, the two work together to improve the customer’s overall experience.

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internet marketing strategy

5 Ways to Update Your Internet Marketing Strategy in 2020

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The end of the year is quickly approaching. This means that you should take time to review the progress of your marketing efforts this year. You should also think about adjusting your internet marketing strategy and improving upon it. Even if your internet marketing strategy was successful this year, there are always ways you can improve. This is especially true when you consider how quickly internet marketing evolves and changes. With that in mind, the following are five ways that you should consider updating your internet marketing strategy for next year:

1. Update Your Web Design

Your web design has a big impact on whether visitors will stay on your website and continue to explore. The thing is, many businesses don’t update their web design for years. What might have been considered a cutting edge web design three or four years ago may be significantly outdated now. Your website should be easy to read and easy to navigate on both desktop and mobile. As a result, modern web designs tend to go with a cleaner, more minimalistic approach. Take a look at the websites from some of your competitors or from other businesses within your industry to see what they’re doing. If it’s been more than a year or two since you last updated your web design, there’s a good chance that it could do with a few improvements.

2. Personalize Your Email Marketing Efforts

Email marketing might be an old internet marketing strategy, but it’s certainly not an outdated one. Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to not only nurture your leads, but to continue building relationships with existing customers. Be sure to segment your email lists based on the personal data and user behavior data you have access to so that you can personalize your emails more effectively. The more personalized your emails are, the more relevant they’ll be.

Check out our article: Email Opening Lines That Actually Work

3. Make Better Use Of Social Media

A lot of companies have social media pages, but they don’t do anything with them. Use your social pages to your advantage. Link new content to your social pages. Encourage conversations about your brand or your industry by asking your followers questions. Contribute to conversations that are relevant to your brand. By engaging with your followers, you build brand trust.

While using social media to engage with your followers should be a priority, there are other ways that you can take advantage of social media as well. For example, find influencers within your industry and connect with them. Building relationships with influencers can expose you to even bigger audiences and can help to boost your reputation.

4. Create New Content

New forms of content catch on quickly. Because of this, don’t limit yourself to just writing blog articles. While you should certainly continue with your existing content marketing tactics if they’re working for you, you should also look to vary your content. For example, if you haven’t started creating video content yet, then there’s a good chance you’re already falling behind the competition. If you don’t have the resources to create high-quality video content, consider recording podcasts.

Creating new content in a variety of formats will help to extend your reach and will go a long way towards building your brand authority. You may even want to source some of your content from your users. Consumers often connect more with user-generated content, after all. You can do this by holding contests on social media and awarding prizes to the best user-generated content (such as the best picture submitted on Instagram or the best video on YouTube).

5. Continue Finding Ways To Improve SEO

One of the most common online marketing mistakes people make is to assume that once they optimize their content for SEO, that they no longer have to worry about it. However, SEO optimization should be continuous. You should continue doing keyword research in order to optimize new content that you publish. You should monitor your page speed and improve it when it slows down. Also, work on off-page SEO, such as earning backlinks from respectable sources (such as by getting influencers to share links to your content). Remember that SEO isn’t just about optimizing your website. Your SEO strategy will only improve if you compliment it with your content marketing and social media strategies.

When it comes to your internet marketing strategy, it’s important to take note of what worked and what didn’t at the end of every year. Focus on improving marketing efforts that you feel fell short of expectations or of the goals you set. Even if you’re happy with how your marketing strategy performed, look for possibilities for improvement. As such, keep these five ways to improve your internet marketing strategy in mind for 2020.

The Rising Importance of Voice Search Marketing

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Search marketing has long been a primary focus in the marketing strategies of many businesses. A good search engine optimization (SEO) strategy can help increase your website’s exposure and bring in more organic traffic from search engines. However, as technology has advanced, search engines have as well. Keywords are not the only way that users perform search queries anymore. Voice search is quickly becoming a priority for search engines, especially with the rising popularity of virtual assistants, such as Alexa and Siri. As such, you will need to adapt your search marketing strategy to include a voice search strategy.

Why is Voice Search Marketing So Important?

Voice search makes searching the web much more convenient for customers. It takes far less time to ask a question vocally than it does to type it into a search bar. Voice search isn’t perfect, but it has improved significantly year by year and will only continue improving. It’s estimated that 65 percent of consumers between the ages of 25 and 49 use voice search-activated devices at least once a day. It’s also estimated that roughly half of all searches will be voice searches by next year.

On top of this, mobile optimization has become a must as a result of Google’s decision to rank pages based on the mobile version of a site instead of the desktop version. While typing in search queries on a computer is relatively easy, it’s more challenging on a smartphone, which is why consumers generally use their phones for voice search more often. By optimizing for voice search, you’ll be optimizing for your mobile audience as a direct result.

Tips On Optimizing Your Strategy For Voice Search

The following are a few essential tips on how to optimize your search marketing strategy for voice search:

  • Use language that sounds natural

    Voice search allows users to speak like they do in their daily lives. This means that the language being used to perform search queries is going to be more natural. When writing content, write using natural language and avoid sounding overly formal, if possible. This greatly improves your chances of being matched to their voice search query.

  • Use questions throughout your content

    Try to incorporate questions that users might have as part of your content. Many businesses are formatting their content’s headers as questions. This will help improve the chances of your content being matched with user voice search queries. For example, if they ask, “How do I get a wine stain out of my carpet?” and you have the header, “How do you get wine stains out of your carpet?” in a blog post on stain removal methods, your post is more likely to come up.

  • Consider user intent

    You can’t solely focus on keywords and hope that they will match. You have to consider the intent of the user in order to write high-quality content that’s relevant to their needs. Doing so will allow your content to be inherently optimized for voice search.

  • Use long-tail keywords

    When a user types in a query on Google, they tend to type in as little as possible. For example, if they are looking for a local plumbing service, they will likely type in “plumber” or “plumber” + their location. However, when performing a voice search, they will say something like, “I need a plumber near me in Detroit.” It’s more convenient to speak longer sentences than to type them. However, this means that you should focus on long-tail keywords more than single-word or small phrase keywords.

Learn more about keywords and SEO: Are Keywords Still Required To Increase SEO Rankings?

  • Make sure your site is mobile-friendly

    Because voice search is primarily used on mobile devices, you need to make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. There’s no point in attracting leads through voice search if they’re going to leave your site immediately because of a lack of responsiveness. Use responsive design to ensure that your site displays properly on small screens. Make sure your website loads quickly as well.

  • Optimize local SEO

    A large number of voice searches are going to be local. Customers who are out and about will perform voice searches while they are doing other tasks as they search for a specific business in their area. By optimizing for local search, you’ll not only have a better chance at attracting such customers, but you’ll be able to provide instant results so that they don’t necessarily need to visit your site. Submit your NAP (name, address, phone number) to local listings and set up a Google My Business listing to optimize for local SEO.

It’s no secret that voice search is the future. Begin optimizing your website for voice search marketing today or you’ll find yourself falling behind the times — and your competition — as a result.

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