For years, big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have been desperately streamlining their platform for enhanced usability and stellar user experience. Their logic? If their users are happy, they use their platform more. If they use their platform more, they have more opportunity to gather advertisers on their platform, and more advertisers equate more revenue. Enhancing user experience, however, goes beyond just increasing revenue for big tech companies—it can also increase revenue for small business owners. Here are a few ways that you can enhance your users' experience to increase revenue for your business.

Keep social media marketing native to each platform

The goal of many small business owners is to leverage their social media following onto their website in efforts to convert them into leads. We get it. After all, according to the “State of Inbound Marketing” report, 77% of B2B companies acquired customers from Facebook, while B2C acquired 43%. So, it works. The immediate problem with leveraging users off of social media is the tension it creates in user experience. To illustrate, let’s say a user just finished their workout, or just got done walking their dog. They are perusing Facebook and see one of your posts promoting your article, a product or a service. They do not really have the time or patience to click that content just to leave Facebook to visit your website. They went to Facebook for Facebook. What if you had a post that promoted a current event, something entertaining or even a quick tip that they can easily understand and apply to their life or business? What if you had a post that added immediate value to their life without them ever having to leave the platform? This technique of keeping your social marketing native to each platform is being adopted everywhere. Each social platform has its own audiences, purposes, strengths and weaknesses. You should choose which social platforms work for you and then use that social platform on that social platform.  Here are a few applicable examples:

• If you are on LinkedIn: publish a Pulse article or a Slideshare to share with your professional audience. Of course if you’d like to add links to your site, you can, but what you are really doing is providing value to your user without them ever having to leave the platform.
• If you are on Instagram: run a contest native to Instagram. Have your users share their pictures, or repost a picture. Then announce the winner on Instagram. Not only will this keep the value native to the platform, but you will inevitably gain followers, awareness, and yes…some people will click your bio and visit your website.
• If you are on Facebook: upload a video directly to Facebook, or use some of Facebook’s built-in features to generate leads directly from Facebook. Facebook just released an advertising feature called Lead Ads where a user can click the call to action on your ad and then a form or product will pop up with their information already pre filled via their Facebook profile. This does wonders for user experience and will make many of you business owners happy!

Use landing pages to your advantage If you are launching a product, in many cases you don’t need a full blown website in order to start generating leads and selling that product. You can use any of the following DIY landing page solutions:

• Optimizely
• Instapage
• Lead Pages
• Unbounce

With these programs, you can set up a landing page, drive traffic to that landing page and sell your product. While having a website is nice, you can start simple with great user experience.

Sell directly from your emails instead of your site

Maybe you do not have enough time or the extra cash flow to create landing pages for your business’ product or service. Luckily, you can now sell directly from email. We know what you are thinking, what does that even mean? Can’t I already do that? Well, until now it didn’t mean anything. Every single email service provider has its perks, benefits, pros and cons. A common con among all email service providers is the fact that users can not purchase directly from an email. Sure, you can link to a product on your website but as stated earlier, this weakens the user experience. At Xingley, we knew that this was a barrier to enhanced user experience. So we set out to solve it. Now with our platform, your user can purchase directly from their email, without you having to build out an entire email. (You can read more about how the Xingley platform works here.) Less steps, less friction, better user experience, more revenue.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you need a platform that allows you to create enhanced user experience in as little steps as possible. You don’t need a 55-page website that you spent thousands on to design, and another chunk of money on optimization. You simply need email. User experience is all about creating a smooth, valuable and enjoyable path to purchase. Whatever your tactic is, relentlessly pursue better user experience to increase your revenue.