Why you need to be thinking about user experience as much as your copy

It’s not a huge leap from copywriter/marketing strategist to user experience.

After all, we are all customers. We shop online. We see ads all day, every day.

And we know what makes us frustrated enough to bounce.

The same logic you use to plan an email sequence, plot out a funnel, or outline a sales page can help you find holes where your customers drop off – holes that all the great copy in the world will NEVER fix.

Take a former client –

Beautifully shot merchandise in an exclusive studio dedicated to shooting ONLY their product.

Dedicated creative team with custom design and copy.

And one day I did a search for “wind chimes” and the suggested search term was:

Did you mean “wild chimneys”?

Not only did the suggested term make no sense, all the results pulled back made no sense either.

No yard decorations. No birdhouses or bird feeders. No American flags or porch planters.

A bunch of unrelated merchandise, and me incredibly distracted by the result.

Seriously, I probably spent a good 5 minutes pondering what exactly constitutes a “wild chimney”, if OSHA has to be involved in the care and feeding of them, and if you have to tame them once you get them home.

I brought this up to the web team.

And succeeded in getting “wild chimneys” removed from suggested terms. But the logic wasn’t fixed in the search results.

Even though I was no longer distracted by a nonsensical suggested search, I still wasn’t able to find the product I wanted, or really anything even CLOSE to it.

So remember the bigger picture beyond your copy.

If your funnel has a hole, people are going to drop off no matter how great the strategy and the story are.

Test, test, test.

Move through your own site and your own sales funnel as if you were a customer. Deliberately seek out steps that frustrate you or make no sense.

And if you can’t fix it yourself (I know I’m not exactly a tech superstar), make sure to partner with someone who can. ASAP.