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A Step by Step Guide to Use UX & Analytics to Increase Customer Retention

Catalin is the founder of Ecommerce Platforms and Web App Meister. He’s a design enthusiast and loves matcha, and is uber passionate about blockchain technology and travel.

Customer retention is one of the hot topics in sales nurturing right now. It’s frequently talked about, but more often than not, we tend to forget about it at times.

In this brief article, I’ll discuss how you can harness your analytics data and improve the user experience to make sure that your customers are taken care of.

From heat mapping to goal setting, I’ll give you the lowdown on what you can to keep the customers coming in!

The Importance of Customer Retention

Customer retention is one of the tenets of Conversion Rate Optimization.

Why?

To convert a customer, you have to make sure that they are on your web property long enough to make a decision. This goes beyond having the right kind of sales copy but having the whole psychology of retaining the customer and maintaining their interest at the peak levels for a considerable amount of time.

Your color combinations, the look and feel of your CTAs, and how the user behaves when provided with a particular set of parameters matter.

What is a Heat Map and Its Relation to UX?

Heat mapping is one of the best ways to find out how previous visitors have reacted to the elements of your site. It quantitatively measures scroll rates, cursor positions, how a user clicks and interacts with some aspects on your site.

Here’s what it is in a nutshell:

It measures and illustrates visitor behavior.

Heat maps are usually presented in color overlays and shows where the user’s attention is drawn. Bright reds show that most visitors hover over a particular element on a website and there is an entire color spectrum to represent frequency.

Understanding the Usage of Heat Maps for UI and UX

Heat maps can break down the different behaviors of your users depending on their demographics.

What appeals to female visitors does not usually appeal to male visitors, visitors from certain geographical locales might react differently than others from a different place and so on.

Even people from different traffic sources will view your page differently; check out this example of a confetti heat map and how the sources of keyword traffic are placed.

Heat mapping can improve the user interface and experience by:

1. Finding out which form of navigation works

2. Checking if your layout is clear-cut

3. Ensuring that you are using the right CTA buttons. The example below shows that a CTA that was placed above the header was doing a great job!

4. Checking how users interact with the images on your website

How to Use Heat Mapping to Analyze Behavior

Let’s say that you’re trying to analyze which types of pictures on your website draw the most attention; you can use a heat map to measure the reaction of visitors towards a specific element and react accordingly.

Marketers and developers do not just use it. In fact, everyone can benefit from heat mapping.

Content

If you’re a blogger, you can even use heat mapping to find out where in the article your visitors tend to zone out and “bounce off” of a page. One of the prominent ecommerce statistics states that around 40% of online shoppers will talk about a bad ‘web experience’. This will allow you to make sure that you split the post into chunks next time..

In this example, we can see the “blue zones” where visitors do not normally go to and you can see the “red zones” which visitors spend the most time – naturally because it is above the fold.

Improving Internal Linking

Do you want to find out which links customers are hovering over the most and clicking? Then, you can use heat mapping for that too.

Analyzing Click Behavior

In this example, you’ll find that users have tried to click certain areas of this graphic indicating their interest. It could have been because they thought they could interact with it.

Testing becomes so much easier if you are embarking on a website redesign campaign and you have the data available. You can determine which pages matter to your visitors, and the different elements that draw their attention.

How Do I Set Up a Heat Map?

There are plenty of programs that you can use to setup heat mapping, and it is just a matter of signing up, entering your website and hitting analyze.

There are even heat maps available where you can take advantage of using live data to draw conclusions.

Setting Up Analytics to Measure and Test

One of the great ways to integrate heat mapping and analytics is to set up testing parameters and goals.

Say you’re torn and want to split test two different landing page designs, you can use analytics to find out which landing page is doing better and use heat mapping to determine “why” it is doing better.

Here’s how you can use Google Analytics to set up a split test by using different goals and KPIs.

Just go to “Admin” on your Google Analytics dashboard and access your web property.

You’ll want to click on “Goals” and then click on “New Goal”.

You will then be given an option to choose one of the templates that Google Analytics has. The goal will be what you will want it to monitor, it could be new accounts created under your split test or something of the sort.

Now you can set this to a certain landing page. Let’s say you’re conducting a split test between two different landing pages that you have previously heat mapped and you know the success rate is great on both. Analytics will allow you to determine which of the two you can get to pick.

It’s not just that.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool to harness because it provides you with a wealth of information. Being able to properly analyze your traffic acquisition and how people from certain segments behave on your website – alongside your heat maps – will allow you to unlock the secrets to scaling your conversion efforts.

So there you have it, with a little work on analyzing behavior, you can turn your web properties into customer retentive locations that can aid in long-term conversions.


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