Benefits

6 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Customer Experience

Attracting new customers is important, but keeping them loyal to you is critical to your business’ performance. This can be achieved with a great customer experience. Also referred to as UX (User Experience).

Statistics show that it costs 5% more to attract a new customer than it does to retain a current one.

Still, 60% of businesses claim that their retention rate is less than 20%.

To keep your customers loyal, you need to get to know them. You need to understand their needs, expectations, preferences, and problems and use them to provide them with a highly customized user experience.

Here are a few powerful strategies that will help you improve your customer experience.

Optimize their Payment Options

Too complex payment options may drive your customers off. This is why you need to optimize your checkout page.

  • Make sure your shopping cart is prominent and easily available.
  • Be fully transparent when it comes to fees and prices.
  • Make sure you display recommended and related products on your checkout page.
  • Offer different payment options. You don’t want your customers to ditch your shopping cart just because they cannot find their preferred payment method on the list.
  • Cater to those customers that cannot pay for your products immediately. For example, you could offer free financing. You will give them enough time to pay, while you will get paid up front. Plus, having an online payment portal saves accountants time, making the billing and collection processes much simpler.
  • Make your shipping details transparent and make sure you let your customers choose the preferred shipping option effortlessly. 

Optimize your Navigation

Your website visitors either already know what they’re looking for or they’ve landed on your site to explore it.

No matter in what stage of a sales funnel they are, you need to provide them with a highly intuitive and personalized browsing experience. This includes:

  • Placing your search bar strategically to make it easy-to-spot. To help a customer find the desired product, add an autocomplete option to your search bar.
  • Having parent categories and subcategories, classified in a logical order.
  • Offering different filtering options, based on a product’s characteristics.
  • Simplifying your top-level navigation.
  • Add a “What’s New” section so your users can keep up with your site updates effortlessly.
  • Display “Compatible Products” to helps your users find relevant products.
  • Provide a “Recently Viewed” option so your customers can go back to the items they’ve already viewed.

blogging on social media

Provide Social Proof

Your customers don’t rely on branded content when making buying decisions. They look for other people’s experiences online. This is why you need to invest in social proof.

Reward their Loyalty

Did you know that a typical U.S. family participates in up to 30 loyalty programs? Before they make a purchase, people are looking for those brands that really understand them and appreciate their loyalty. And, this is something you should turn to your advantage. By boosting their awareness and loyalty of your brand, you will manage to retain your customers and give your sales a boost.

This is where loyalty programs come to shine.

Your incentives need to reflect your mission and values and, at the same time, be relevant to your target audience. Don’t limit yourself to discounts and bonuses only.  Get creative. It could be free shipping, VIP tickets to an event or even a thank you note or a gift basket.

Pay attention to how famous brands are rocking their rewards programs. REI, for example, offers a co-op membership, giving you the opportunity to travel for less, get members-only deals, have access to their garage sales, and get 10% back on some of your purchases.

personalized content

Drive Loyalty with Personalization

Sending out the same, generic email to a bunch of people doesn’t work. To resonate with them, your content needs to be highly targeted. Only by personalizing your interactions with your customers can you earn your customers’ trust.

Automate your lead generation to find out who your customers are. Based on their location, language, gender, age, sex, education, and previous buying habits, you need to nudge them towards completing the desired action. And, be it a popup on your site, email, or social networks, offer them content they’re really interested in.

Amazon is a perfect example of this. Namely, they use behavioral targeting to make highly targeted pages for each of their customers.

Offer Impeccable Customer Support

To inspire your customers to stay on your site and perform the desired action, you need to provide them with an exceptional user support before, during, and after the purchase.

Make sure you provide your customers with the omnichannel customer support. Guide them through different website pages towards your content, phone number, email, IM tools, and social networks. Help them reach out to you effortlessly, no matter which device they use or which communicational channel they prefer.

Social networks are the backbone of solid customer support. Most importantly, you can automate them for delivering better customer experience. By integrating AI-powered chatbots into Facebook, you will be able to provide your customers with highly relevant and to-the-point answers to their questions, while social listening tools will help you track your brand mentions and provide instant feedback.

Conclusions

Customer retention starts with improving your customer experience.

Boost their browsing experience by simplifying your navigation and offering different payment methods.

Share testimonials to prove your authority.

Offer real-time customer support.

Most importantly, show them how much you appreciate their loyalty.

Hope this helps!

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