While Seattle is home to some of the most successful technology companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Tableau, Dropbox, Facebook, Zillow – we also boast a vibrant startup community. For those just starting out, nailing down the basics of Internet marketing is an important step that can lead to success down the road.

It is said, in real estate, that the most important purchase priority is “location, location, location.” While no such idiom exists in the sales and marketing world, it could certainly be “leads, leads, leads.” Marketers are expected to generate and nurture leads, while sales representatives are tasked with converting those leads to customers. As such, a company’s revenue intake and profitability is inextricably linked to its success or failure with their customers through the entire buyer life cycle.

Increasing conversion rates, however, remains a challenge for many organizations. CSO Insights’ 2015 “Sales Management Optimization Study” found that lead generation is the greatest challenge for B2B companies today.

For organizations playing in today’s increasingly digital world, where 81 percent of customers conduct online research before making a purchase, providing customers with a quality user experience (UX) on their websites or mobile apps is imperative. In fact, research from KISSmetrics reveals that bad navigation (a critical piece of the user experience) is one of the main reasons potential customers leave a website. In other words, user experience must be top of mind when it comes to any online strategy (whether it’s run by marketing or sales).

Creating a user-friendly, easy-to-navigate, aesthetically pleasing website or mobile app is a  complicated process. Before you can even begin to think about how your digital properties look and feel to your customers, you must understand consumer behavior. Target markets vary from business to business and industry to industry, they also evolve over time. As a result, making assumptions about what consumers want and expect can be extremely risky. The only way to truly understand consumer behavior is to conduct user research.

Leveraging analytics is an effective first step to understanding your customers’ preferences and increasing conversion rates. For example, analytics can shine a light on which pages are keeping your readers’ attention and those that are not. With this kind of information, companies can begin to reshape their website or mobile app’s user experience based on empirical evidence.

Aside from analytics, there are also several other tools businesses can use to create an optimal user experience and increase their conversion rate:

A/B testing

If you’re playing around with the idea of changing the font size in your website’s navigation, A/B testing may be the best way to see if the change will have a measurable impact on user behavior. Creating two variations of the navigation bar—one with the new larger font and one with the old smaller one—will allow you to determine if users are taking less time to navigate to the correct page or not.

Customer surveys

Going right to the source can also be an effective approach to optimizing the user experience as well. Customer surveys and questionnaires offers insight into areas that may not show up through analytics or A/B testing. Customer surveys can uncover user experiences and sentiments compared to your competitors, as well as solicit suggestions from their customers.

Ongoing monitoring

Analytics and analysis are critical way beyond the initial launch of a new website or application. A revamped or newly launched website or mobile application, for example, may be extremely effective for six months, but consumer preferences and expectations change over time (as does the technology).  Therefore, it is crucial that organizations continue to monitor performance of their applications and websites continuously and never get complacent.      

Consumer preferences, technologies and sales strategies may change frequently, but lead generation and conversion will never lose their importance when it comes to company growth.