Today customers have many options when shopping whether online or offline. To make it worse, their attention spans are becoming shorter, reducing the time you have to make a lasting impression on them.
As an e-commerce retailer, you have to find ways to attract the attention of shoppers and offer them a satisfying shopping experience that will lead them to come back to your shop. Here are some top tips to help you create a memorable shopping experience for your customers.
Improve navigation on your site
Your website is the storefront where customers browse through your products. Like a storefront, it should be easy to navigate, neat, and appealing to customers. Your pages must load fast enough for customers to view your products.
Once your customers are on your site, you want them to have an easy time understanding what you are dealing with. Simplicity should be the priority here. Let your site have simple product pages, design, and product placement that tells customers at a glance about the value you offer.
For example, Kettle & Fire provides a simple but effective product page for customers to easily get information that’s important to them about each product such as nutritional labels. They also make the different purchasing options easy with one click just like an Amazon product page.
Investing in a good e-commerce copywriter will help you communicate to your customers within a few seconds of them being on your site.
Remember to optimize your site for your mobile users. More shoppers are using their phones to shop for their favorite products. Therefore, you must optimize your site for a seamless shopping experience. Ensure that the images, content, and navigation tools are available for mobile users to make their shopping experience satisfying.
Your site should have a hassle-free checkout process to reduce cart abandonment and increase your sales.
Have a solid content strategy
While your e-commerce website is there for selling, you need to offer more in terms of customer experience by developing a community around your brand. Content marketing will help you achieve this.
You can create content that allows your customers to interact further with your brand. You can provide informational content. Detailed guides are one type of content that helps e-commerce brands educate customers and often lead to conversions.
For example, mattress retailer, Amerisleep, provides shoppers with a detailed mattress buying guide to help them in their purchasing journey by understanding the differences between certain mattress types and sizes.
When your brand is responsible for creating informative content, you build authority, trust, and increase sales.
Here are some issues you must be clear on when developing a content strategy for better customer experience:
- Ensure that every content you put on your website has a clearly defined purpose
- Have a consistent publishing strategy
- Always publish high-quality content across your platforms
- Incorporate different content type, including text, images, and videos
Offer customer support
While you can anticipate customers’ problems beforehand and deal with them, some customers will still need help completing their order and should receive the help they require immediately. You can use different customer support approaches, including:
Self-help options through detailed FAQ pages for customers that prefer solving their problems themselves. These pages should answer the most common questions, offer solutions to common problems, or advice to troubleshoot these problems.
Zalora is a great example of providing an FAQ style knowledge base to customer making it easy for them to find answers to their questions.
Live chat support for real-time customer support. Having live chat customer support on your website reduces the response time and increases sales. Live chat can also offer support to different customers simultaneously.
You should have a customer support team that provides human interaction for even better customer service.
Combining the three forms of customer service provides a rich customer experience as they can have their problems solved as soon as they arise and escalate their problems through different support channels based on their problem.
Customer support should also extend to after-sales services, especially with customers who experienced a problem while shopping. Reaching out to them makes them feel appreciated and they are more likely to shop from you again.
Have an omnichannel strategy
Gone are the days when customers found you where you were. Today, customers expect to find their favorite brands where they hang out. This means that your business should invest in having a website, social media, phone, and other channels where your customers hang out.
For a successful omnichannel strategy, you need to:
- Identify your customers’ preferences
- Understand your customer journey to develop a personalized experience that meets them at every stage of their journey
- Have a consistent customer experience throughout your platforms and for different devices
- Have a cohesive message throughout your channels and platforms
Key takeaways
As competition in the e-commerce space grows, customers are looking beyond product features to make their buying decisions. They are keen on the quality of service they receive from your business and are willing to shop at a competitor who offers better customer service. To improve your customer service, you must begin by designing an easy to navigate and use the site, provide customer support, have an omnichannel strategy, and develop a solid content strategy.
