Based on analysis conducted by Nurture of over 100 website experiences within biotech, pharma, medical devices and medtech we have identified a number of key areas that could transform customer engagement, leading to increased lead generation and better ROI from marketing activities.
Many of the website experiences we analysed are falling short on creating a great customer experience. So we’ve highlighted 7 fundamental elements below that leads to a successful website experience.
For a complete 18 point review of your website, benchmarked against your competition – download and fill out the template – simply list your company name, and two competitors then email it back to us to see how you compare!
1. Mega Menus
Navigation is one of the most important features of your website and mega menus can ensure users access information with ease.
It’s incredibly important when designing and creating a website that the customer journey is clear, and easy to navigate.
Here are some suggestions to consider including in your mega menu:
- Colour – Adding colour to the header titles helps divide the categories to make a clear distinction between sections
- Highlight where the visitor has clicked – Shows a clear path and further options of the selection
- Text – Always use bold text or a large font size to ensure that the user can clearly read and navigate your mega menu
- Tiers – A tiered structure helps new visitors locate pages with ease and can assist in exploring deeper sections of your website experience
- Images – Similar to the use of colour, images in a mega menu can add extra context to help visitors explore options
2. Search – One click results
Search is one of the simplest and most effective ways for your customers and prospects to find what they are looking for. It is important that you have a clearly defined customer journey in place, or a first time visitor may struggle to get to their required destination in a short amount of time – especially if you have a large product focused website.
As seen in the example screenshots below – the Hillrom search when activated stands out, the background content fades and makes the search feature your focus. Advanced features like type ahead search, auto complete and related search criteria add to the experience and we would highly recommend.
When the search renders the results, make sure the information is easy to consume. Clearly define each result, add images, highlight search result in the content returned and add quick links to relevant material.
3. Product Pages
Create the best experience possible, make sure your product pages stand out from the crowd!
Here are some top tips:
- Images – High resolution, good quality crisp images.
- Remove backgrounds – Make sure you frame your product in its best possible light.
- Rich media / video of your product – if a picture can speak a thousand words, what can a video do?
- Support your product with insights, marketing material, specifications, education and benefits.
- Create a product explorer – allow the visitor to navigate between products, or ever compare products to visualise the specs / benefits side by side.
As you can see from the picture above, the items have a clear background, the images are sharp and with the additional information and filters used on the search page they are easy to navigate for the users.
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Lets talk4. Using Rich Media
Video content is the most engaged content online. Take your product experience to the next level with the use of video – in either real world application or 3D rendered images, rich media will give your customers the ability to have a deeper engagement with your product.
Most importantly though it helps to create a truly memorable customer experience – which will have an amazing impact on your conversion rates.
Not only is video an amazing tool to use on your product page but it also transfers effortlessly to social media, again helping to catch the eye of people scrolling and entice them to your page.
Lastly, videos and images can help break down language barriers. Even if someone were to stumble on your post socially, they would still be able to get a full understanding of it, again helping to further enhance the user experience.
5. Engaging Content
Content is king, but there is such a thing as too much content! People are always concerned about too little, but beware of content overflow! Less is more and quality will always prevail over quantity – Ensure that your content marketing is engaging to read and well structured.
Enhance your visitors experience by adding a related content or related products section at the bottom of the page. Related content and product journeys are very simple to achieve by tagging, and is first in the many steps of personalisation – be sure to subscribe to our insights or follow us on LinkedIn as we will go into more detail around personalisation and preference centres later on in the series.
Also a nice touch is to showcase new product lines, however make sure you it relates to their interests and/or browsing behaviour.
6. Connect using Social
Most companies have a corporate page on LinkedIn, but this is considered an entry level social presence. The question is, are you socially active and driving to attract new followers to engage with around your products, insights and thought leadership?
If the answer is no, it’s a missed opportunity to create awareness and take your business to the next level. Social media plays such a huge role in marketing, with 97% of marketers using social it is clear how vital it can be. It is a way of engaging with clients and showing a more human side to your brand.
What can social media help with:
- Brand awareness – Ensuring that clients know your name and are more likely to come to your business.
- Increasing traffic – Linking to your website and pages on social will help to increase footfall on your website and ensure that people are seeing the content that you’re working hard to create.
- Free – It’s an easy way and free, unless you’re using paid promotions, to promote your business, product and services. What more could you ask for!
- Building a community – It’s an easy way to offer extra support for your clients and push further your customer service, building a relationship and ensuring that they will return to your business. And hopefully promote it to others!
In the Hillrom example below, the image is bright and eye catching, and unique to their brand. It can easily be spotted when scrolling through LinkedIn.
Adding call to action buttons like ‘REGISTER NOW’ will prompt users to click through to their site, and register – its a great example for social posts.
7. Accessibility – 101
Disability affects 1 in 5 people, and it’s incredibly important to ensure that your website is accessible so that you are catering to the needs of all your potential prospects and customers.
Most of the areas that are covered by website accessibility may seem like obvious points but it is staggering the number of websites that aren’t compliant… 70% of websites aren’t compliant!
So we’ve put together a check list of the key areas that all web designs should be thinking about.
- Text size – Ensuring that text is legible and large enough to be read by all users.
- Colour contrast – When designing you have to ensure that the colour of the text or background doesn’t stop the user from being able to read the text. For example having white on a light blue background would be very hard to read;
- Alt text – Adding alt text to images is important to ensure that it is readable for screen readers and can still be accessed by users that are visually impaired.
- Easy to navigate – Ensure that it is clear how to navigate and travel through your site, so clients can get to the page and information that they need.
If you want to learn more about accessibility and how important it is then be sure to check out our previous blog ‘Ignore accessibilities at your peril’ to learn more!
It’s important to remember when trying to improve your customer experience that it’s not just ticking one or two boxes, it’s a collection of key feature functions that all work in harmony together.
And although in our research we found many sites excelled in certain areas, we found the Hillrom example to be well rounded on the 7 principles we have outlined in this blog post.
For a complete 18 point review of your website, benchmarked against your competition – download and fill out the template – simply list your company name, and two competitors then email it back to us to see how you compare!