Great customer experience (CX) is important as it increases performance, leading to more conversions, and new and returning customers. Creating a good eCommerce customer experience is about making your website (and associated channels) the go-to place for your ideal customers. It’s also about utilizing your resources and insights, whilst being agile and customer-centric.
Head of CX at Space 48, Holli Barrett, leads you through the steps towards creating great eCommerce customer experiences to increase revenue for your business.
Top strategies for creating a great customer experience
Remove distractions
Businesses that provide consumers with a frictionless route to purchase are winning when it comes to conversions. Consumers want fewer clicks and quicker ways to pay, especially on mobile, so remove distractions and opportunities to click away from the route to purchase. Don’t get caught out by poorly considered checkout experiences. 34% of shoppers have abandoned a purchase because of the requirement to make an account before purchasing. It’s an instant loss of sales. But something that can be fixed. Consider the following:
- Implement a guest checkout option for speedy checkout
- Let shoppers pay with different payment methods
- Make sure your checkout works on different devices
- Allow customers the option to save their details for later purchases, once they’ve completed guest checkout
Be agile and deliver relevancy
Be data-driven and utilize insights to create relevant customer journeys, considering:
- What’s currently popular and trending (products and brand content)
- Customer data to deliver onsite recommendations using third party tools such as Fresh Relevance
- Automation and personalization
Here’s a great example of an agile approach, focusing on search queries:
Utilize onsite search queries through Google Analytics or your onsite search Saas. Let’s say your current top search term is “summer dresses” and in your top 5 terms was “beach dresses”. Leverage these insights to inform other content channels:
- Create blog posts about “summer dresses”
- Post relevant content via your social channels and set up shopping ads
- Use these keywords to increase relevant CTAs
- Increase email open rates by using these ‘trending’ keywords in subject lines or preheader text
- Include these products in email marketing and promotions
- Look at merchandising similar products
Being agile and leveraging relevant keywords helps to optimize your content across channels.
Offer consistency and continuity
Deliver consistency and continuity on your ecommerce website, across your acquisition and retention channels, and other customer communications. If your copy, tone or creative varies too much, it may cloud your brand message. Optimize your content for different channels, but be consistent.
Implement personalization and recommendations
Use trusted personalization partners, like Fresh Relevance, and maximize user insights to deliver personalization throughout customer journeys, across channels.
When visiting any of Rip Curl’s international websites every customer is greeted on the home page with a range of products ‘recommended for you’. These can include products that were bought by similar customers, frequently purchased items and exciting new Rip Curl lines.
Key factors for delighting customers
Research and testing
Do the right research to understand your customers. Utilize user surveys and testing, whilst drilling into your own insights from your platform, plus your marketing, sales and customer service teams. Carry out qualitative and quantitative research to ensure you get the big picture and implement A/B testing, taking an iterative approach to changes.
Value proposition
Continue to use your research and user insights to provide value throughout the customer journey experience, improve customer service and deliver post-purchase emails and interactions at key touchpoints. Good customer experience leads to customer retention and increased customer lifetime (CLV), crucial for lasting success.
Meeting consumer expectations with search
Consumers expect easy product search. They’re used to the Google search experience, where a few chosen words allow them to reach (or get close to) their desired result. Try to replicate this on your eCommerce website, as users often skip navigation in favour of search. Bad search capabilities result in frustrated consumers, but accurate search increases customer conversion, retention and average order value (AOV).
Brand strength and consumer confidence
Consumer confidence is key to keeping customers returning to your website. Leverage your brand’s presence on social channels and review platforms to excite customers and build their trust, whilst enticing new customers.
Common customer experience mistakes
Poor performance across channels and devices
Don’t let your brand reputation suffer by delivering bad CX on mobile devices and social platforms. Make sure your content is optimized, responsive and delivers fast page loading whatever the device or platform!
Feature stuffing
Give customers options that suit their needs, but don’t over complicate your features. For example, pick-a-day delivery features are appropriate for some businesses, but not for others. Feature stuffing can slow down the checkout, cause distractions and result in cart abandonment. Talking of distractions…
Creating distractions
Many retailers try to wow customers with bells and whistles. You can create impact without creating distractions. Be strategic with your navigation and route to purchase, giving users visuals, personalization and calls to action at the right times.
Setting incorrect expectations
Live chat is a good example. Live chat promotes good customer service but doesn’t equate to good customer experience unless you manage expectations. Are email autoresponders in place? How long is your response time? Do you have adequate resources and the right live times? Be realistic and set the right customer expectations.
Top tips for encouraging customer loyalty
We’ve compiled some top tips for boosting customer loyalty and customer lifetime value (CLV):
Email marketing
Email remains highly effective for nurturing customer relationships. Here are some key tactics:
- Create welcome emails to kick-start your customer engagement
- Use segmentation to target different portions of your email list
- Deliver emails at relevant touch points in the customer lifecycle
- Setup automated basket abandonment email workflows
- Reactivate lapsed customers using re-engagement tactics and incentives
- Deliver dynamic product recommendations & personalization with third-party solutions like Fresh Relevance
- Reward loyal customers with offers and exclusive content
Social, PPC and AdWords
Use static and dynamic remarketing activities to reacquire and retarget site visitors and previous customers:
- Set up remarketing ads to retarget previous site visitors and customers
- Implement remarketing lists for search and shopping ads (RLSAs) to maximise exposure in search engine results pages (SERPs)
- Create loyalty schemes and incentivise customers to sign up
Summary
We hope this has helped you learn more about how to increase revenue by creating great customer experiences. It relies on fine-tuning each element of your customer journeys. Customer satisfaction is essentially about offering value, relevancy and consistency throughout the customer lifecycle, whilst being agile and leveraging all your channels and insights to nurture and retarget customers.
Space 48 is an award-winning eCommerce agency that works with global, forward-thinking retailers. It blends customer experience focused solutions with unbeatable ecommerce technology to amplify the revenue companies can generate online. Space 48 is trusted by various platforms including BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, Shopware and more, to deliver exceptional eCommerce experiences for consumers.
Visit: www.space48.com
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