Marketing and UX design: Winning conversions through user-centric strategies (with examples)

How would you feel when you see an advertisement with a great deal on software you’ve wanted for a while, but when you click on it, you get a 404 error message? 

Frustrated, right? 

Well, that’s a bad user experience (UX) hampering marketing. 

Poor UX can significantly lead to inconvenience and user distress, adversely impacting user engagement and conversion rates. 

Research suggests that intentional and strategic UX can increase conversion rates by 400%. For every $1 investment in UX, a company can expect a return of $100 in increased business value and profits. When marketing and UX design work hand-in-hand, your brand not only captivates customers but also easily guides them through the sales funnel.

Continue reading if you’d like to learn more about the connection between marketing and UX design in detail. We also give you tried and tested UX design strategies to boost your marketing and examples from big names who do it right for your inspiration.

The Role of UX Design in Marketing

Marketing is the process of promoting and selling products. It involves analyzing the market, attracting new customers, and engaging existing users for improved sales and brand loyalty. 

UX, on the other hand, focuses on how users interact with the product or service. It aims to design smoother interactions by understanding user needs and behavior patterns. 

While marketing uses visuals like color and design to send a message, UX design marketing digs deeper into how and why users respond to those elements. It answers important questions that numbers alone can’t explain.

For example, a pop-up that won’t close or a broken link are some things that increase bad UX. It adds a layer beyond just tracking clicks to understand why users engage — or don’t engage — with ads, emails, or websites.

Key Components of UX in Marketing 

UX consists of many elements that deliver a pleasant experience with a product or service, boosting the results of your marketing efforts. 

• Usability: Usability ensures your product or service is easily used without frustration. Whether landing pages with simple navigation or progressive web app UX design that provides a native app-like experience, smooth UX results in better conversion rates.
• Design: A well-designed website, app, or product enhances UX, making it more enjoyable and easier to interact. This means more engagement, which makes interaction memorable, boosting brand identity and chances of conversions. 
• Content: Content plays a crucial role in the UX. Informative, easy-to-read, and understandable content relevant to users’ needs helps them stay informed and engaged and increases their chances of conversion. 
• Speed: Fast loading times and responsive website elements are vital in maintaining user retention. Speed ensures the user won’t have to wait, which can significantly lower the bounce rates. 
• Interactivity: Interactive elements such as buttons, forms, or animations improve the web user interface design and UX by engaging users in marketing campaigns.  
• Accessibility: Accessibility features, such as alternative text for images or keyboard navigation, help reach a broader audience for an improved brand reach.

What’s the Clash Between Marketing and UX Design

While marketing concentrates on improving sales and brand identity, UX strategies aim to create a smooth and engaging experience when interacting with that campaign. 

However, due to this difference in priorities of marketing goals, marketing, and UX may clash in the following ways:

• Marketing Elements Takeover UX 

You might have found a popup on the landing page of a product or service website asking for your personal information, such as contact details or preferences. These pop ups help the marketing team collect user information to create personalized marketing campaigns for individual needs. 

However, the repeated appearance of these pop ups irritates users by breaking the flow of information and may even hinder content visibility. They’re more likely to leave your website without actually looking at or buying what they visited in the first place.

• Marketing Goals Corrupt Usability Approach

Organizations conduct usability testing studies to assess how effectively users interact with and connect with the product or service. Many companies integrate marketing goals with usability testing studies; however, it reduces the efficacy and accuracy of the responses.

So, say you have an eCommerce shop. Through analytics, you discover users leaving shopping carts before completing the checkout process. You suggest usability testing to determine why, but the marketing team insists on using this opportunity to understand the impact of adding promotions for related goods. 

Now, the usability tests focus on how users feel about promotions rather than the checkout process. Even if they’re talking about the latter, promotion biases will corrupt the responses, making it difficult to create UX design marketing strategies to minimize cart abandonment. 

• Marketing Takes The Priority

UX strategies should focus exclusively on understanding user interaction with the product throughout its development. However, before product development or updates, marketing research lays the foundations for the target market, user requirements, and preferences. 

Marketing teams usually gather user information through focus groups and surveys. They might ask target users how they would interact with a web ui design services element if they purchase a product. This early insight often shapes UX strategies to test interface elements. However, while the data can be useful, it may be corrupted or biased by factors such as social influence or group pressure. Users’ actual behavior might not align with their reported actions.

How UX Design Enhances Marketing Efforts

UX and marketing go hand in hand to boost conversions and client retention, and all the best UX design firms know that. Here are a few ways UX can result in better performance of your marketing efforts:

• UX research helps targeted marketing: UX research will help define an ideal customer profile (ICP), revealing customer needs, emotions, and behavior. With an ICP, marketers can get better results with their marketing campaigns by personalizing them for users with user-centric strategies for better conversions and loyal customers.
• UX design creates clear marketing messages: UX logically integrates marketing efforts into designs for a clear and persuasive message. With effective UX and graphic design, marketing messages can be refined for better results based on how users interact with the content. 
• UX and marketing for better conversions: Combining UX and marketing creates memorable interactions, boosts brand identity, and results in better user acquisition and retention. Together, marketing and UX make a web user interface design engaging and functional. 
• UX builds positive brand image: UX is essential in forming marketing strategies as it defines how users might feel about your business. For instance, a well-designed website can build trust and credibility among users. A good UX ensures every user interaction is meaningful and conveys the brand values and mission, enhancing user satisfaction.  
• Marketing without UX can be overwhelming: Marketing without UX navigates to a disorganized space lacking clear directions. The lack of a good UX can make the users feel confused or frustrated and uncertain about what to do with your product. UX creates a welcoming experience, keeping the users hooked on a brand. 
• UX helps achieve customer goals with brand success: UX defines modern marketing by prioritizing customer needs and insights. Integrating UX strategies such as personas and empathy mapping creates effective user-centric marketing strategies that address customer needs. Putting users first allows the organization to achieve business goals with a mutually beneficial outcome. 
• UX drives SEO rankings: In addition to creating a positive experience, UX significantly boosts SEO rankings. A website with good UX and graphic design ensures seamless navigation and a satisfying experience, highlighting the website as valuable to Google.
• UX completes the promise of marketing: Marketing sets the user’s expectations of the product, but UX ensures those expectations are met. Therefore, the combination of UX and marketing ensures the business delivers promises to build trust and customer satisfaction.
• UX builds customer loyalty: With UX, marketers treat users as real people rather than mere conversions and focus on building genuine relationships by creating memorable and engaging interactions. This approach leads to enhanced customer loyalty and advocacy with repeated sales and support for the brand.
• UX helps in testing marketing strategies: Marketing data and user insights act synchronously when marketers know how users interact with and resonate with marketing strategies. Integrating UX testing in marketing efforts eliminates the guesswork, engaging with the actual user needs and preferences.

Best Practices Of Integrating UX and Marketing With Examples

If you want to boost your brand visibility, bring in more leads, and get them to convert, your marketing and UX design should complement each other. Implementing practices that balance elements of marketing and UX design is a must to effectively blend them. 

Integrating marketing and UX design results in more conversions when they take a unified approach toward common goals: 

• Attracting and retaining users
• Ensuring brand consistency
• Driving meaningful engagements

Here are some of the best practices to integrate marketing and UX design:

Conducting User Research 

Understanding your target audience is crucial for effective UX and marketing strategies. User research can help you identify user needs, preferences, and pain points to access valuable insights for the design process. 

Use these techniques to understand your users’ behavior to personalize marketing and UX design:

• Surveys 

A survey is a marketing tactic that follows a “set it and forget it” approach to data collection. It can be easily distributed via emails or popups. 

To get maximum responses, a survey must also offer a good user experience. So, instead of asking the consumers to answer from scratch, specify options based on their satisfaction level. 

Easy and quick to fill = more responses.

Example: To gather user feedback, McDonald’s sends survey links to the consumers after a purchase, asking how satisfied they are with their order. 

• Usability Testing 

Imagine launching a great marketing campaign that lands your potential customers on a website that they can’t use properly. The leads aren’t likely to convert, and all those efforts and money invested in the campaign will go down the drain. 

To overcome this potential problem, businesses conduct usability tests to understand how users interact with the product and whether it offers what they need. 

Example: Airbnb determined that customers faced a major issue with the lack of good pictures of the property as they navigated bookings. So, now, they have a picture guideline for the hosts to ensure professional images of the listings.

• Create user personas 

User personas help marketers define the target audience and create personalized experiences. They can also help build user-centric UX and graphic design strategies based on the audience’s behavior, preferences, needs, and motivation. 

Personas are built through research, data, and insights from real customers and typically include age, gender, education level, job, hobbies, interests, goals, and challenges. 

Example: At the end of the year, Spotify creates a personalized playlist for every listener by understanding user-specific preferences and listening behaviors, creating a custom experience for every user. 

• Empathy Mapping 

Now that you know your customer deeply, it’s time to understand their feelings and emotions as they interact with marketing campaigns and your products. 

Empathy mapping with user persona can help understand your users’ mindsets. It helps you understand what users think, feel, see, and experience to develop more refined UX design marketing for your product. 

Delivering the best experiences is all about keeping your UX and graphic design approach “empathetic” and human-centric. 

Example: Google Maps claims to “Explore and navigate your world. ” How does it deliver on this promise? It takes an empathetic approach to the frustration caused by traffic and missed turns. Therefore, it offers an intuitive navigation experience that allows you to find the route with the lowest traffic or reroute when you miss a turn. When users feel understood by a product like Google Maps, they are more likely to return to it, fostering brand loyalty, which is a key goal of effective marketing.

Simplify Navigation 

Complex navigation often frustrates users and leads to higher bounce rates. If users find it difficult to access the information, they’ll leave the website from the homepage. 

A survey showed that 94% of consumers prioritize quick navigation. 38% of shoppers initially notice website layout and navigation, and 37% of users say websites difficult to use would cause them to bounce.

With UI UX design services, strategies for navigation, such as clear and intuitive menus, logical information architecture, and easy-to-access search functions, can significantly reduce bounce rates. Use eye-tracking to understand how users engage visually. 

Understanding what calls for user attention helps the best UI design company design website elements such as navigation menus, calls to action, and forms for an improved UX. 

Aim to offer a smooth customer journey from discovery to purchase. Avoid design elements that confuse and make it difficult for customers to engage with your website, its content, and its products.

Example: Apple’s website uses a minimalistic design, but it’s still eye-pleasing and offers users exactly what they want from Apple. The menu at the top highlights every product Apple provides, allowing quick and easy access.

Optimize Page Load Speeds 

Imagine there’s a great marketing campaign that takes you to a website, but it takes too long to load. 

What are you going to do? 

Leave the page and probably never return, right? 

Time is money, especially here. You’re losing all that money that you put into marketing if your landing can’t load in less than 3 seconds because 40% of consumers abandon your website. 

Page speed optimization is critical to enhancing the web app UX design. Slow-loading pages can increase a website’s bounce rates and adversely affect its search rankings. 

Example: Have you ever noticed how quickly Amazon loads on any device? In 2021, it topped the list of 50 e-commerce websites by loading in less than 0.86 seconds with 286 requests.

Clear CTAs

Effective calls to action (CTAs) are essential in increasing conversions, as they lead users to the desired actions. Consistent and strategic placement of CTAs ensures users are well guided through the user journey – this can be the “contact us” on your marketing campaigns or the “check out” button as a customer gets to purchase the product.

Your UX strategies should implement clear, concise, and visually striking CTAs with action-oriented language that creates urgency. 

Example: Google Drive uses a clear CTA with a sense of urgency through action-oriented language. Users don’t want to lose their backup, so the CTA prompts them to purchase storage plans to keep their data intact. 

Quality Content 

Content can positively impact UX design, given it leads users to relevant, informative, and engaging information. See how we’re engaging you throughout this blog with:

• a conversational tone
• multimedia elements such as images 
• examples to understand each concept and its relevance
• an easy-to-follow structure with headings 

Our focus is to give you valuable content (unique, relevant, and actionable), while making it easy to read and digest. 

Designing for Mobile 

60.67% of the website traffic comes from mobile devices. Given the widespread use of mobile phones to access web resources, UX strategies must accommodate different screen sizes, providing the best mobile UI design experience with consistent information across all devices. 

But if you don’t think you should remember – 52% of the users are less likely to engage with a company if they have a bad mobile experience.

By prioritizing mobile responsiveness in your UX strategies, you can not only improve usability but also boost your search engine position as most search engines favor mobile-friendly websites in their results. 

Example: Walmart has a dedicated website designed for mobile responsiveness that is user-friendly and intuitive. The layout can adapt to all screen sizes with an optimized user experience.

Conclusion

While marketing attracts and captivates users, UX ensures a smooth and engaging user journey. Although your marketing goals may convince you to compromise the UX, you must remember that driving traffic to a disappointing experience is marketing money down the drain.

By now, you know how marketing and UX design can work together to build user-centric digital experiences and improve conversion rates. Use the strategies outlined in this article to stand out from the crowd and build a memorable brand out of your business.

At Anglara, we’re dedicated to turning your vision into reality with our comprehensive end-to-end UI UX design services. Whether you’re at the initial concept stage or ready to build on an existing platform, our team guides you through each phase with expertise and precision. Fill out our consultation form below to discuss how our services can help your business deliver a memorable experience to its customers.