A customer orders your product. It arrives at their door, and they open the box. What happens next?
If you are committed to creating quality products, your customer likely went on with their day, excited about the new toy they just purchased.
But this isn’t what happens 100 percent of the time. Perhaps the product is ugly. Maybe it’s poor quality and hard to use. Worse, maybe it’s all of the above.
How likely is the customer to order from you again? Not very likely.
Whether it’s your website, app, product or service offering, there is an important link between user experience (UX) and brand loyalty.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was famous for saying:
“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”
Take a moment and think about Apple product users. They line up in droves in front of Apple Stores whenever a new iPhone is released. That’s brand loyalty.
Apple products are complex yet simple. They often don’t require an instruction manual to use. Moreover, they look and feel amazing the moment you lay eyes on them and pick them up. They are intuitive to use.
Are Apple products superior in every way? Without getting into an age-old argument on PC vs. Mac (or other competitors), their products may not be state of the art in every regard. But they work and behave intuitively, and typically have few problems—one reason people love them so much.
It’s hard to think of a better illustration than Apple when it comes to the meeting point of UX and brand loyalty. They continue to focus on creating an amazing user experience with their offerings, and fans continue to tout their products’ benefits.
You have an online presence because you want to develop a relationship with your prospects and customers. But when the quality of their experience is not up to par, their confidence in you will begin to erode.
Why do they lose confidence in you? Because if you don’t think like they think and demonstrate your understanding of them (for example, speak their language), you will come across as incompetent.
This can manifest in small ways—a cluttered navigation menu with mislabeled links, misspellings and grammatical errors in blog articles, or broken images.
But you may have bigger issues to deal with as well—products or service offerings that are mismatched or aren’t relevant to your buyer personas, a broken checkout system, links leading to unscrupulous third-party websites, and the like. Problems like these can harm your reputation, especially since many customers today won’t give you more than one or two chances to prove yourself.
No organization is perfect, but it’s not hard to see why these and other problems would not instill a sense of confidence in your target audience.
When designing for your buyer personas, you need to gain a deep understanding of who they are and how UX design works. If you fail in this regard, your leads and customers will find it hard to trust you.
We live in a fast-paced, hectic world. Many people are looking for instant gratification, but customers won’t just buy from anyone. They’re looking for the right company to do business with, and will browse many reviews, blog posts and product pages to gain a better sense of the options available to them at different price points. Customers are discerning.
A positive customer experience doesn’t begin and end with purchase. It starts the moment they first become aware of you, all the way to post-purchase support. So it’s to your advantage to carefully craft this experience, as you can boost the lifetime value of each customer. If they know, like and trust you, they will become repeat customers, which will boost your revenue.
UX design allows you to develop better relationships with your website visitors.
There are many aspects to UX design, and how you go about it depends on who you’re trying to appeal to. But looking forward, it will be critical to think about:
Is your website design supporting your business goals as well as the objectives of your customers? Is it building your credibility?
Loyalty begins with user experience. If your customers love you, they’ll want to do business with you again. If they find your website hard to use, or if the experience isn’t what they expected, they may begin searching for alternatives.
In an age when anyone can create a product or start a business, the one thing that will separate you is your communication. And communication isn’t just about what you say, but how you say it, which comes back to design and experience. If you don’t have a strategy, now is the time to form and implement one.
Does your website illustrate a proper UX to brand loyalty link? If not, it may be time for a website redesign. Learn how to budget for the project appropriately with this free guide.
