Every time you visit your preferred storefront, a helpful salesperson will generally welcome you and offer to assist you in choosing the perfect item for your needs. Your budget is taken into account, and they address any questions you may have along the way. Finally, you make a purchase and happily exit the store, completing a positive offline consumer experience.
Customer experience is the method through which a brand interacts with its clients at each stage of the purchasing process. E-commerce stores require new strategies to get customers to make repeated purchases from them as the market becomes more crowded.
This blog post focuses on 10 strategies to improve customer experience and make your business stand strong to fulfil all your ecommerce customer expectations.
What is an Ecommerce Customer Experience?
This is how your clients view how you treat them in your internet business. Their actions and allegiance are influenced by how they are feeling. If a consumer loves you, they'll come back to you and tell their friends about you. Anyone who receives poor customer service will stop doing business with that firm.
It's essential to deliver a top-notch ecommerce customer experience since it benefits the company. Ecommerce customer expectations for the shopping experience are increasing as more people purchase online. Only 49% of Americans feel businesses deliver a good customer experience, despite the fact that 73 percent of people say it matters when making purchases, according to research from PwC.
Why does customer experience matter so much in e-commerce?
Simply said, if you provide clients with a positive experience, they'll buy from you again, be more devoted to your business, and tell their friends about it.
You'll observe enhancements in:
- Consumer loyalty and retention
- Lifetime worth of the client- customer lifetime value (CLV)
- Brand equity
- Recommendations
- Revenue and expansion
The following are the strategies for how you should be enhancing your ecommerce customer experience.
Establish a communityA community is a collection of ardent supporters or devoted patrons of your goods. It is the outcome of all you do, stand for, and represent as a brand. Your items have supporters in the community. Email and social media are two of the most effective ways to create a community. You may nudge your audience to rate and comment on your product pages.
Boost Your Social Media PresenceeCommerce companies may reflect their distinctive brand voice through social media. If it's not currently possible for you to employ a dedicated social media worker, schedule a certain period of time each day to reply to questions on social media about your shop. Make sure to respond to any comments, whether favourable or unfavourable, on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
For instance, the US-based fast-food restaurant company Wendy's, they are renowned for having an outrageous, edgy sense of humour as well as for being active on social media.
Make Your Clients HappyAccording to HBR, a 5% improvement in customer retention rates results in at least a 25% boost in profitability. Companies that recognise the value of client retention put a lot of effort into giving their current consumers a smooth shopping experience. Here are a few suggestions for e-commerce companies to satisfy their customers:
Customers that buy things receive email rewards or loyalty points that may be used later. After buying, send emails of gratitude. Depending on how many clients you have, a handwritten thank-you gift card can be an even better option.
Implement a recommendation scheme that will benefit both your current clients and potential new consumers. Send your most devoted clients complimentary presents like t-shirts, mugs, or keychains together with their order.
For enhancing your ecommerce customer experience, ask your consumers to offer reviews and product ideas by adding a QR code that leads to a Google form. Through this, you can know where you are lagging and where you can improve.
Adhere to an effective Content StrategyThe main goal of content marketing is to assist your customers in resolving their most pressing issues. You can include blog entries, advice, recommendations, videos, and infographics about the goods you sell. For instance, if you own an eCommerce business that sells clothing, you may provide content that offers advice on dressing well, practical guidance, current trends, etc.
Give customers an omnichannel experienceOn the internet, your consumers are accessible through all means. You ought to be too! The best course of action is to deliver a great omnichannel consumer experience!
Conversion rates may be dramatically increased with omnichannel marketing. Ensure that your website prominently displays all important contact information, including email addresses and phone numbers. Understand what your ecommerce customer expectations are from your business and work accordingly.
Include live chat and widgets on your website to enable real-time consumer communication. With the development of chatbots, it is now simpler for the customer support department to be accessible 24/7 and to automate answers to commonly requested inquiries. Finally, be sure to acquire quality WooCommerce hosting to ensure that visitors can quickly find and access your website.
Reward Your Customers!Surprises appeal to online shoppers. To improve the customer experience, you might include surprises at various points throughout the purchasing process. It is frequently advised to provide free delivery. Implementing this method a little differently will increase your sales. Mention it throughout the checkout process rather than being ostentatious about it. This will motivate the customer to make further purchases from you and urge them to tell their friends about you.
This approach works for the abandoned waggon as well. Send a surprise reward to your customers to finish the transaction instead of the usual "We miss you" emails.
Use the following questions to audit your online business:- Is our website visually appealing?
- How simple is it to locate particular products?
- Does every page and piece of information load correctly?
- Is the website's material informative and simple to read?
- Is it simple to view and edit the items in the shopping cart?
- How effective are the after-sales, support, and customer service?
- Is the client experience pleasant?
Making the checkout process simple might lower the number of abandoned carts you observe. It should be easy to use, have a clear shopping cart on every page, and have secure payment processing. Ensuring your customer sees all of the available checkout alternatives, including Paypal, will prevent them from reaching the checkout stage only to discover you don't accept their preferred payment method. If you discover that your website has a high rate of cart abandonment, you may rapidly install a feedback intercept to determine what the problem is.
One Qualtrics customer discovered that after implementing a new checkout procedure on their e-commerce website, they were losing thousands of dollars per minute. They discovered it was a straightforward form field formatting issue that required dates to be structured in a specific way after deploying a small survey, but the error message didn't explain what users were doing incorrectly.
Be on the lookout for emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and what the future may bring65 percent of people aged 25 to 49 talk to voice-enabled devices at least once daily, and 61 percent anticipate using them more frequently in the future. By keeping an eye on what they can do and learning about this technology today, you may prepare your firm to grow when smart devices become widely used.
Make your return policy transparentThe inability of buyers to try on or test your goods before they buy it is a drawback of internet buying. Offer a reasonable, comprehensible returns policy so that customers feel comfortable returning products.
Final Words
Every organization's product features and pricing have been completely saturated by the fierce rivalry. Customers are no longer content with a great product offering alone. Now you require a distinctive omni channel offering to improve the customer experience that distinguishes you from your rivals.
