Do you deliver a fun and unforgettable experience to your users?
If not, you could be unintentionally sowing the seeds of churn.
A rewarding user experience is the foundation for customer trust and loyalty. But creating a good user experience (UX) isn’t easy to do. That’s because the devil’s in the details. To truly deliver a valuable and intuitive UX, you must:
First, think of how the user will experience your service. Are you accounting for every question they may have? Will the user lose their way in the steps between awareness to purchase?
Next, customize the experience for your user. How will you keep the user actively engaged in the experience? What can you do to personalize interactions so that the user has a stake in your service?
Not sure how to do those things? You’re in luck.
In this post, we’ll discuss how to create a UX that generates leads, builds trust, converts, and inspires loyalty. Let’s get started.
The 7 Factors of User Experience
Your success will always be tied to the success of your customers. It’s not enough to create an affordable and competitive service, you must also focus on the user’s experience.
Tweet ThisThis is the secret to converting customers and retaining them.
But what is good UX?
Peter Morville, president of Semantic Studios and one of the founding fathers of UX, suggests that companies focus on the following seven factors when developing a rewarding user experience:
Factor #1: Your Service Must Be Useful
One of the most important factors of any SaaS service is its usefulness. Your target customer should benefit from your service in some way. This is also true for SaaS that deliver entertainment. Your benefit may be a diversion from reality, and it’s still considered useful even if it’s not utilitarian.
What is the purpose of your service?
Are you able to articulate that purpose clearly to your target customer?
Factor #2: Your Service Must Be Usable
Useful and usable sound similar, so what’s the difference? Usable means that the customer is able to accomplish their goal with your service. In other words, your service doesn’t simply offer a benefit, but it also provides a way for the user to obtain that benefit.
There are many services that are useful but in some way prevent easy use. Take for example Adobe Photoshop. It’s an insanely useful product, but it also has an intense learning curve that reduces its usability for many.
Factor #3: Your Service Must Be Easy to Find
Put simply, if people can’t find your service, they won’t buy it.
Can your target customers find your solution? And once they find your solution, can they find reasons to buy?
A lot of SaaS fail at this factor because they overcomplicate the introduction process. A prospective customer who lands on your home page doesn’t need to know every single thing that your service does. They simply need to know the big idea and then be empowered to investigate further.
Factor #4: Your Service Must be Credible
You need to include signals of trust on your website to reassure prospective customers. Trust signals include money-back guarantees, testimonials, reviews, security badges, and other companies that you may have worked with in the past.
Showing that other people trust you will make your service appear more reliable.
Factor #5: Your Service Must Be Desirable
Good UX depends on good design. People will be more or less likely to use your service based on the design of your website and software. If your design looks good and enables the user to respond intuitively, users will want to use your service. Create an experience that your users will actually want to engage in.
Factor #6: Your Service Must Be Accessible
Accessibility is one of the last things that many SaaS think about, but it should be one of the first. It’s always important to design your service for all users, including those with disabilities such as hearing loss, vision loss, motion impairment, or learning disorders. A substantial portion of the population (1 in 5) are disabled. Designing for accessibility will inevitably make your service easier to use for all of your users.
Factor #7: Your Service Must Be Valuable
Finally, your service should offer value to your users.
Earlier, we discussed benefits. Value is a step beyond benefits. Your service can have a list of benefits, but value is how those benefits match the user’s goal(s).
You can have a useful and usable product that provides a ton of benefits. However, if those benefits don’t help the user solve their problem, your service won’t be of value to them.
Show users how your service’s benefits help them reach their goals.
How to Create a Rewarding UX in Your SaaS
Now that you know the 7 factors of good UX, how do you actually put those things into practice? Here’s how to do it:
Focus on Onboarding
Onboarding is the process of introducing new customers to your brand and product. Good onboarding is crucial to delivering a satisfying user experience. It allows you to set a helpful, friendly tone so that your customers feel reassured that they’ve made the right decision in choosing your service.
It’s very easy for customers to get lost immediately after purchase. If they do, they may lose interest and eventually churn.
That’s the last thing you want.
Instead, you want to encourage engagement by getting new customers excited and educated about your service immediately upon purchase. Do this through onboarding.
Check out these resources for successful customer onboarding:
- Strategies for Successful SaaS Customer Onboarding
- 10 Critical Elements of an Effective Onboarding Process
- The Do’s and Don’ts of SaaS Customer Onboarding
Make Your Personality Stand Out
Humans connect with other humans. Your brand’s personality should be relatable and approachable. With your content, speak directly to your target audience using language that reflects the way that they think. Use colors and other visual brand messages to relay your personality to your users. Your visual branding should be consistent, which builds trust and elicits a specific emotion, like trustworthiness or friendliness.
Use Email to Stay in Touch
Email plays a huge role in onboarding, but it also matters for ongoing nurturing. Use email to continue a positive UX beyond your website and software. Here’s how to do it:
- Personalize your emails as much as possible – Add the user’s name and segment your list so that you can customize the content of your emails
- Send from a familiar name – Create a sender name that they can easily identify like “April @ Your Company Name.”
- Include a call to action – At the end of every email, tell the user what to do next, such as visit your website or sign on to the app.
- Keep your email short – No one wants to spend a long time in their inbox. The goal is to get the user to complete the call to action.
- Focus on mobile – Most users open emails on mobile devices. To create a good UX, ensure that your emails look good on smaller screens.
Support Your Customers
Give your customers many ways to remedy their problem. Offer self-help tools, such as an FAQ section and a knowledge base. Also give your customers options for reaching out to your customer service, such as email, phone, and live chat.
If a customer does reach out to you, be sure to respond quickly with a personalized message. The goal is to reassure the customer and let them know that you are proactively looking for a solution.
Another option is to provide in-app guidance for new users (as part of your onboarding service) and ongoing hints that educate and help your customers accomplish their goals.
Final Thoughts
To create a satisfying UX, you must consider how your customer will use your service and what they’re hoping to gain. Good UX is always intentional, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. Use the above tips to develop a UX that generates new leads and retains your customers.
