Most people have a pretty good understanding of what certain types of websites should contain. A restaurant’s website should have the menu, contact info for making reservations, online takeout ordering, and great photography of the delicious food. A car dealership’s site should have the current inventory, information on the service department’s offerings, contact info for salespeople, and a place to submit questions about the cars on the lot.
What should a bank’s website have? What are potential and existing customers looking for? How do they want to navigate the site? What questions do they need answers to?
Or, to put it another way, how can a bank’s website provide users with an exceptional user experience (UX)?
In this article, we’ll explore five things your bank’s website should be doing for your potential and existing customers. If you ensure that your site is checking these boxes, you’ll be improving overall user experience, and that’s an improvement that’s worth its weight in gold
Why Is UX Important for a Bank Website?
Well, actually, a good UX is important for every website, not just bank sites. And its importance can’t be overstated. When you provide your audience with the information they want in an easily accessible and attractively packaged way, they will repay you with:
- More and warmer leads
- Better brand recognition and reputation
- Higher conversion rates
But the benefits don’t stop there. A quality UX is crucial for search engine optimization and becomes more important with each update to Google’s and Bing’s search algorithms. If you fail to provide a good UX, you’ll struggle to rank highly in users’ searches, which reduces your visibility and your site’s effectiveness.
So the tips below aren’t just to help your customers – they help your business, as well.
Bank Websites Should Be Easy to Navigate
While banking is something almost everyone needs, most people never get any kind of formal education on it. The terminology and jargon can be confusing, and it’s always a little nerve-racking to put as much trust into anything as we do in our banks or credit unions.
When users land on your site, the last thing they want to do is end up more confused than they were when they first arrived. Your site’s navigation should be simple, and pages and links should reflect the language your customers actually use. While “deposit accounts” may be the correct industry term for things like checking and savings accounts, most of your audience members probably won’t know that – use the common names that people are used to.
Don’t hide important information like current interest rates and service declarations deep within your site’s structure; make sure that people can get to any information they might need in three clicks or less.
By giving your audience an easy-to-navigate site, they’ll be left with the impression that your bank is genuinely ready to help them with the products and services they need.
Bank Websites Should Have Helpful Information
An excellent navigation structure is only helpful if there’s something to navigate to. As mentioned above, banking generates a lot of questions in most audiences. When your bank is right out front with helpful, actionable answers to those questions, you’ll see more and more people turning to your site as a trusted source of information.
Some of those questions are going to be general questions that will be asked regularly by just about any bank customer in the world. Just visit any national bank’s FAQ page, and you’ll see dozens of ideas. But it’s not enough to just answer the questions – you need to do so helpfully.
There’s an old joke about a helicopter pilot who gets lost in the fog. Flying next to a skyscraper, he holds a sign to the chopper window: “Where am I?” A startled employee in the building holds up an answering sign: “You’re in a helicopter.”
Don’t let your site be like the employee in the office building: accurate but not helpful.
As with your navigation, provide useful and understandable answers to your audiences. Focus on what they need to know. Your site isn’t the place for an in-depth discussion of the process for obtaining FDIC insurance, but it’s a great place to explain what FDIC insurance does for your bank’s account holders.
Bank Websites Should Be Current
If you polled a number of bank website users, a significant number will tell you that they’re there to find out one of four things:
- Current interest rates for mortgages
- Current interest rates for auto loans
- Current yield rates for certificates of deposit
- Current yield rates for money markets or other deposit accounts
What do all of those answers have in common? The word “current.” Your users want to know how much borrowing money from your bank will cost them and how much money they can earn by letting your bank use your money as capital. They want to know what the fees are for your checking account products. They want to know where your branches are located and what their hours of operation are.
All that information changes regularly, so it has to be updated periodically. Leaving inaccurate information on your bank website sends a signal that your institution doesn’t pay attention to detail, isn’t concerned with providing accurate information, and can’t be bothered to make basic updates. (It may also run afoul of banking regulations!)
Let M&R Build Your Bank a Site That Your Customers Can (ac)Count On!
M&R offers full-service web design and development solutions for banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions. Our talented team knows how to build an attractive and functional site that serves your customers the information they need when they need it. Give us a call, and let a member of our Sales team show you how we can make your bank or credit union’s website a genuine growth driver.
Call Today: 478-818-6319
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