The primary purpose of encoding is to make data safely and adequately consumable by different users using various systems. The idea is to make the data readable and available to all possible end-users. Encoding can be likened to effectively translating text from Hebrew, for instance, to English, making the information digestible for more users.
Without character encoding, a website will display text a lot differently than intended. Improper encoding spoils text readability, which may also result in search engines failing to display data correctly or machines to process inputs incorrectly.