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They are called widgets. And since they’re simple to use and set up they’ve become a significant part of any website design. What is more, they take up little space, but the benefits they bring can be enormous. This is why they are nowadays an important part of any marketing and/or UX strategy.

🚀 Read Customer Experience Guide: How to Put your Customers First? 🚀

In this article, we’ll go through the definition of widgets, its benefits and the ways you can use them to improve customer experience.

What are Widgets?

Widgets are simple, easy-to-use software applications intended for one or more platforms. Serving as independent applications, widgets can easily be embedded into the body of websites. Widgets work with the real-time website data and can be personalized to respond to website identity. Some of the most popular examples of widgets are event countdowns, website visitors counter, clocks, daily weather report, etc.

Many people assume that these kinds of bells and whistles require a web developer to install them. However, these days it’s usually as simple as copying and pasting some text/code.

Taking advantage of widgets can engage your visitors, offer valuable insights, and make a simple site much more functional and fun.

What Are Widgets Used For?

Does your website function as an online business card? If it’s been a while since you’ve updated your website, you may be missing out on some simple ways to make it more engaging. Website widgets boost customer service efforts to the next level!

Focus on improving the way people interact with your website and you’ll be able to deliver a better user experience. In a similar manner, you’ll also increase website traffic and grow your business. User interaction on your website provides you with the opportunity to collect data about your customers and potential new customers.

You can use this data to make strategic business decisions, as well as improve any part of your website or business that affects your buyer’s journey.

Picture 1. Widget examples

More reasons to use widgets

In addition to making your website more engaging, widgets can help lead visitors to new sections of your site. If you have content you want people to see, you need to present multiple ways to them to discover it.

Say, for instance, someone follows a link from your newsletter to an article about management strategies. He immediately notices a link to your upcoming seminar in the sidebar – that’s a well-utilized opportunity.

If that same visitor clicks to read your article on management strategies and sees nothing else on the page for them to continue exploring, they will likely click away from your site.

The longer you can keep someone engaged, the more likely you are to transform that individual from a visitor to a client.

That’s not all – ideally, your site should keep in keeping visitors engaged enough to click around for a while. The time-on-site activity can actually increase your rankings on search engine sites like Google.

Always aspire towards attracting new customers, increasing user interactions on your website or improving your business.

Related: Help Desk Software Guide

How to Improve Customer Experience Using Widgets?

Today’s customers value the quality of customer service as much as the price and the quality of products. They are spreading the word willingly and widely when they experience good service.

According to SuperOffice, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

However, in a challenging economy where growth is harder to achieve, many businesses are missing out on this opportunity. It’s important to see customer service as an investment, not a cost.

Developing relationships with customers is crucial. This involves listening to them, anticipating their needs, and resolving any issues quickly and courteously. If so, they’re far more likely to return after a good service experience.

When asked how many poor experiences they allow, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience, while 92% would completely abandon a company after two or three negative interactions.

Don’t let your costumers search for a better alternative to your product or service. Use our tips and tricks to attract new customers and increase user interactions on your website. Improve your business easily by reading up on why live chat is important for small businesses.

Customer Review Widget

Customer testimonials and reviews will attract business so make sure you are putting effort into sharing and collecting as many reviews as possible. The advantages are twofold. First, the reviews and testimonials provide enough information for customers to make an informed decision before they choose to engage with your business. Secondly, they boost your business’ overall credibility, trust factor and SEO rank.

Research shows that 67% of mobile shoppers are more likely to buy a an item if a website or app offers product reviews. And 30% of survey respondents between ages 18 and 44 look at reviews before every purchase.

Without customers, your business won’t operate. Many of your site’s visitors may never land on your pages again. You have one chance to convert them into a lead or capture them as part of your regular audience. Focus on how you can continuously improve your user interaction on your site. This is done by testing new opportunities and learning from the data collected through various tools and widgets you have deployed on your site.

2. Spread the word with social buttons

3. Use Call To Action

4. Improve your business with surveys

5. Use Pop-ups

6. Include subscription option

1. Acquire new customers with live chat

If you own a small business, hiring call center representatives can be quite expensive, so taking advantage of live chat is a great way to provide support. With live chat, you can engage with your website visitors in real time, turn them into customers, ultimately gaining new loyal fans.

Your website visitors’ experience increases exponentially when they can quickly get their questions answered via chat instead of having to call in and wait on hold to speak to a customer service rep.

Using chat is cost-effective, helps increase sales, and provides you with an abundance of data about demographics of your website visitors, geographic location, and behavior. The data can help you improve your website visitors’ user experience so you can make better business decisions.

2. Increase word of mouth with social share buttons

With a simple copy and paste, you can have floating social media buttons or sidebars on every page of your website. Make it easy for your website visitors to spread the word around by liking, sharing, retweeting, and pinning your website content.

Encourage your users to share your products on social media to increase traffic and brand awareness.

Those visitors who choose to interact with your social sharing buttons are one step closer to becoming loyal fans of your brand and product. Find out why social media has become the number one tool for advertising your business and communicating with your customers and users.

3. Grab your visitor’s attention with a call to action (CTA)

You never want your audience to be unsure of what to do and leave your site. Add a call-to-action at every endpoint to keep them on the page and heading toward your conversion point.

Creating conversions is the goal of your website, so you have to make sure you have clear CTAs that lead visitors through your site and into your sales funnel. List two or three things that you would like visitors to do while on your website, then sprinkle those call-to-actions throughout your site.

There should be at least one clear call-to-action on each page of your website. However, you need to think strategically and creatively to ensure your CTAs is achieving its objective.

Here are some tips&tricks on creating CTAs to increase user interaction:

• Use language that describes why your visitor should click the button

• If you’re writing a headline above the CTA button, optimize them and make sure they work together

• Keep in mind the size of your CTAs because of size matters. With mobile usage increasing, it can be quite challenging to click on a CTA that is too small for your thumb

4.Understand your website visitors with surveys

Conducting an online investigation is a great way to learn what you are doing right and where you can improve. Use reliable survey data to understand your customers’ needs better and make informed business decisions.

Provide your visitors with an easy way to give feedback, which can help you acquire more customers through your website, and decrease bounce rates because they are taking the time to fill out your survey.

5.Pop-ups (but, not too many)

Pop-ups or attention-grabbing alerts are a controversial topic in the website conversion optimization world. It’s good to have it, but not too many. If you have a website goal(s) of increasing user interaction or acquiring new customers, then pop-ups can help achieve those goals.

This widget is a customizable website notification that tells your website visitors what page they should visit next. They come in handy whenever you need to show notice or alert, promote a new campaign or product, draw your visitors’ attention to the most important content, share company events or news or drive users directly to the purchase page.

Here are a few ways pop-ups can be beneficial for your business :

• E-book download pop up

• Webinar registration

• Exit pop-ups that can be geared towards an offer or a free demo

• Blog subscription

6.Provide a subscription option

Are you thinking about building a mailing list, but not sure why it is so important? It’s all about communication and loyalty. Build a mailing list and stay in touch with your customers and prospects. Collect more leads through your website with a prominent e-mail sign-up form and a clear call to action.

Picture 2. Review widget

Wrap Up

One of the biggest benefits of widgets is their ease of use. With basic knowledge, you can upgrade your website’s functionality and improve user experience without going much into design. So if you are looking for a way to upgrade your customer experience and for a new source of user behavior data – widgets are the way to go.

Maybe our Paldesk widget is exactly what you’ve been looking for.