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Running an online business is not that easy. There are tons of important factors to consider when selling on the web. However, the ultimate goal of all online entrepreneurs would be the same — to achieve unparalleled business success. And an unmatched customer experience (CX) is the key to success!
Are you an e-commerce business owner? Do you have a solid idea about how customers perceive your business? Would you be able to evaluate their behavior towards you? And most importantly, are you able to make improvements based on these respects? Then you’re on the right track. You’ve all the chances of becoming successful!
If you’re really concerned about your business success, you’d definitely be aware of the major ways to increase customer experience for your online store. However, let’s see if you’ve missed any.
And don’t worry if you’re a novice entrepreneur. I’ll walk you through the important tactics to well shape your customer experience strategy.
But wait! Before moving further, you should have a sound knowledge about what customer experience is and how it adds value to your business.
Customer experience — What and Why?
Customer experience has proven to be an important aspect of any business. If you’re running an online store, you’d measure customer experience as the effectiveness in attracting customers and keeping them engaged across the web.
Did you know that online shoppers have higher expectations than the offline ones? And what happens when you don’t meet customer expectations? It would substantially reduce your chances of business success!
So you need to transform your business strategies in order to develop a well-defined customer experience. This takes your business to the next level quickly and efficiently.
When people complete a purchase and leave your store with extreme satisfaction, then the more likely they are to come back to you. Also, it persuades them to recommend your brand to their friends and relatives as well.
Consequently, a huge number of customers would reach your store and buy from you. This simply indicates that attracting clients and gaining their trust is just like a chain reaction.
Happy and satisfied customers would definitely be loyal to you and stay with you longer. Therefore, amidst all other business activities, spare some time to interact with your customers, identify their pain points, and improve your service quality so as to satisfy them best.
And in return, you’d be able to secure impressive reviews and increased revenues from your clients.
How to improve the customer experience?
“Improving CX can be massively worthwhile. For example, for mass-market auto manufacturers, improving CX by one point can lead to more than $1B in additional revenue!”
Source: Forrester
Here are 9 proven ways to create an outstanding customer experience strategy that helps you enhance customer satisfaction for your e-commerce business.
1. Serve your customers best
Just like traditional businesses, it is important to provide good customer services for e-commerce stores. You should always make sure to stay connected with your customers so that you can instantly help them if they have any issues or queries about the product they have purchased.
Therefore, it is necessary to incorporate all your contact information like telephone numbers and email address on every page of your e-commerce store or website.
When customers approach your help desk, try to respond quickly to their inquiries, so that you could avoid a situation where you lose customers just because of your delayed response.
You could include a live chat function on your website for enabling real-time interaction with your clients. You could also consider using chatbots that generate automated responses to the questions that are frequently asked by the customers.
2. Improve your website navigation
Your website navigation needs to be intuitive and easy-to-use so the customers can easily explore and move through your website. If your website seems to be improper or confusing for the users, they are more likely to withdraw their purchasing decision. In such a way, you could lose a great deal of sales.
So you could consider the following best-practices while designing your e-commerce website.
- Include a search function to help users quickly find what they are looking for.
- Make the clickable elements easily recognizable.
- Reduce the number of menu items.
- Minimize the use of drop-down menus as they are quite annoying to the users.
- Ensure the proper working of navigation on your mobile site.
3. Let your customers checkout seamlessly
When it comes to e-commerce, the checkout page is one of the most important aspects. The checkout page is where your store visitor becomes a customer.
You’d certainly be aware that convenience and ease of use are the main reasons why people choose to buy online. So it is crucial to keep your checkout flow friction-free.
By optimizing your checkout process, you could improve the customer experience thereby boosting revenue. With a streamlined checkout process, you could reduce cart abandonment rate and increase conversions substantially.
To create a seamless checkout on your online store, you could consider the suggestions given below.
- Do not force shoppers to register their details before they can buy.
- Minimize the number of checkout fields as much as possible.
- Remove the navigation and all other distracting elements from your checkout page.
- Offer multiple payment options for the customers.
- Improve your mobile checkout UX.
4. Provide your customers with personalized services
We have entered an age of personalization. You’d be aware that your customers expect personalized shopping experiences throughout their buying journey.
So you shouldn’t be failing to introduce personalization strategies to your business. And you need to maintain a customer-friendly tone across all the pages of your online store.
To implement advanced personalization, you could use recommendation engines that help you make product recommendations to individual users based on their location, previous purchases, shopping interests, and browsing history.
5. Support your clients via social media
Today social media networks like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are used extensively to make product promotions and communications.
Being a cost-effective marketing strategy, you could take advantage of these platforms for engaging your customers more effectively.
With social media platforms, you’d be able to deal with customer issues much faster than you could do with a typical support ticketing system.
6. Amaze your customers with special offers
You can never afford to ignore any strategy that helps you retain customers. No matter traditional or online, customers would always love to receive surprises. This is a great way to delight your clients and thus enhance the customer experience.
When you give unexpected offers and gifts to your customers, they would shop with you repeatedly and also might insist others do business with you.
Here are some ideas to delight your customers.
- Send free gifts to customers making bulk purchases.
- Offer redeemable reward points for the next purchase.
- Send gift cards along with the “thank you” emails to your loyal customers.
- Create referral programs that are a win-win for both your existing customers and new ones.
- Attract the cart abandoned shoppers with some incentives, so they might come back and complete the purchase.
7. Encourage your consumers to leave reviews
When new customers come to your e-commerce store, they’d be interested in knowing what fellow shoppers have to say about their purchases from you.
Potential customers read and analyze reviews posted by others, before making a purchase decision. These reviews would help them identify the best selling products and figure out the quality of items they are interested in buying.
Customer reviews increase your visibility by making your brand more transparent. It also shows that you’re trustworthy. So always ask your customers to leave authentic reviews so that you could boost your sales dramatically.
8. Provide improved mobile experience
The world has gone mobile! In this context, it is highly essential to providing better, high-quality mobile e-commerce shopping experience to your customers.
“In 2021, mobile e-commerce could rake in some $3.5 trillion and then make up almost three quarters (72.9 percent) of e-commerce sales.”
Source: Statista
These days, people strongly prefer mobile devices over desktop and laptop computers. Hence, you should necessarily make your online store easily accessible and highly usable on mobile devices.
9. Engage your customers with powerful content
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Source: Content Marketing Institute
This indicates that content marketing intends to help your customers overcome all the possible issues during their purchase journey. You could assist your customers through blog posts, help documents, expert tips, videos, images, and infographics based on the nature of your business.
When creating content to promote your products and services, ensure you produce truly relevant and useful content that your customers can relate to — so that they could better understand your products and make more informed purchase decisions.
Conclusion
You should never ignore the importance of customer experience, as your clients are the most valuable asset for your business. Your customers have the potential to make or break your business.
Making a sale and retaining consumers is easier said than done. Your customers leave or stay with your business based on their overall buying experience.
The quality of your product offering is not solely what consumers expect from you. They’d always want to have unique shopping experiences and personalized services.
Therefore, you need to reshape your business strategies by taking into account the necessities, priorities, and emotions of your customers. This will certainly help you build best-in-class e-commerce customer experiences, which in turn builds increased revenue and customer loyalty.
