Improving UX in Your Community: What You Need to Know
• 4 mins read
UX at the Center of Your Community Marketing Project
User experience (UX) can be the key to success or the Achilles’ heel of your Brand Community.
In a constantly evolving digital world, providing an excellent user experience can make the difference between a thriving project and one that struggles to take off or, worse, fails miserably. In this article, we’ll examine the factors behind the importance of user experience in Community marketing and present some effective strategies to improve it and stimulate the growth of your Brand.
Read also: How to Leverage a Brand Community to Acquire Users and Boost Your Business
Community Marketing: The Importance of User Experience
In Community marketing, user experience represents how a user interacts with your company, with other users, and with all the elements that make up the platform they navigate. Essentially, any factor impacting the experience within the Community contributes to building the UX.
And if you’re wondering, “Okay, but why should I care about this?” know that user experience has a direct impact on the fate of your project. A good UX helps you to:
reduce the churn rate in your Community;
attract new users to the platform.
The first point is quite simple to understand: a user who has a good experience is a happy user. And if they are happy, they are unlikely to leave the Community.
Regarding the second point, the cause-effect relationship between UX and acquiring new users might not be so intuitive. After all, why should paying attention to the experience of those already in the Community convince others to join?
The answer is: because people primarily trust the opinions and judgments of others like themselves. In other words, those who really influence the decision to join or not your Community are mainly the users who are already part of it.
It’s the power of word of mouth: user recommendations are a decisive factor for acquiring new ones. This is especially true for younger people: according to a 2014 market analysis, over half of Millennials say word of mouth is the most important factor in choosing a Brand. And this percentage increases even more as age decreases.
Consequently, it’s easy to conclude that this is a growing trend, certainly even stronger today, seven years after the cited analysis, and most likely destined to continue in the future. That’s why a good user experience directly impacts the acquisition of new users.
In the following paragraph, we will illustrate some useful strategies to improve UX in your Community.
4 Strategies to Enhance User Experience in Your Community
Offer simple and intuitive navigation. To facilitate access and participation in your Brand Community, make sure the platform you choose to host it is easy to use on any device and at any time;
Ensure your business is always transparent. Customers want to know who you are, what you do, how you do it, and why. Therefore, it’s important to communicate your mission, vision, values, goals, and policies clearly and honestly. This will build trust and credibility toward your Brand and Community;
Offer a personalized browsing experience aligned with users’ interests and actions within the platform. Our Community Platform SelfCommunity has many features designed exactly for this: starting from the 'Home' tab, focused on tailored content based on user profiles, interests, and behavior, to the sidebar with widgets suggesting members to connect with and relevant thematic categories. You can learn more about these and many other features by requesting a free Demo of our product;
Encourage interaction and collaboration. To grow your Brand Community, encourage users to interact with each other and your company by creating opportunities for dialogue and exchange. A powerful strategy is to build a points-based gamification system to reward the most active and loyal members with benefits aligned to their interests. This is also a feature available in SelfCommunity, where you can freely decide which actions to reward, what scores to assign, and which benefits to offer your audience.
Read also: The Power of a Well-Structured Advocacy Program: A Guide to Community Marketing
In Conclusion
As we have seen in this article, user experience is vital for the success and growth of your Brand Community. A good UX reduces churn and attracts new users thanks to the power of word of mouth, a fundamental element in Brand choice.
Now all that’s left is to put into practice the suggestions we offered and maximize the impact of user experience on your project by using the features of SelfCommunity, our innovative tool for data-driven scientific management of online Communities.
The key to success is in your hands: leverage the potential of SelfCommunity, take care of UX, and push your project to the maximum.
