5 Ways To Nail Your eCommerce Store’s Customer Experience

5 Ways To Nail Your eCommerce Store’s Customer Experience

Business owners worldwide know the value of customer service to their companies. Without it, they can’t retain customers and will end up losing out on a significant amount of revenue. As such, focusing on making it high-quality from the start is vital.

As straightforward as that could seem with a brick-and-mortar business, it gets more complicated with an ecommerce store. Since there’s typically no face-to-face interaction, figuring out how to nail your ecommerce store’s customer experience can be trickier.

It’s far from impossible, however, as there are multiple strategies they can use. While it’ll take a decent time investment – and likely a financial one – it’ll be more than worth it. The advantages of nailing it will more than return a profit, both financially and otherwise.

Why Is Customer Experience Optimization Important?

If you’re already generating sales and a certain amount of revenue, you could wonder why customer experience optimization is important. There are more than a few reasons for this, with the most notable being that it helps you remain competitive while improving your branding and sales.

A high-quality customer experience benefits the entire business, making it something to focus on. Alongside this are the various benefits of having high-quality customer service, which includes:

• Driving Retention – When business owners think of retention, they assume it refers to keeping employees satisfied in their roles so they work for you for years. That can also be applied to customers. The happier they are, the more likely they are to buy from you long term, which maximises the profits you get out of them. As advertising to repeat customers is often more affordable than to new ones, you improve your profit margins even further.
• Improving Branding – When customers receive a satisfying experience with a company, they think better of it. By nailing your ecommerce store’s customer experience, you can make sure each of your customers think highly of you. That benefits your branding in more than one way. Satisfied customers are more likely to speak well of you to their friends and family. That generates repeat business and functions as word-of-mouth marketing, which is always recommended.
• Increasing Sales – Poor customer service results in fewer sales, as people who feel dissatisfied with your company aren’t going to buy from it. On the flip side, satisfied customers are more likely to buy from you again. As a result, optimising your customer experience increases your overall sales while decreasing some costs, such as marketing. Your profit margins should be much higher long-term. Since this can be vital to succeeding and growing in ecommerce, it’s something you’ll need to focus on.

The benefits of customer experience optimization are widely-known, so you should be confident that your competitors are engaged in the practice. You shouldn’t let your ecommerce store fall behind in this, as it could end up leading to competitors gaining your customers. That could put your ecommerce store at risk.

Thankfully, figuring out how to nail your ecommerce store’s customer experience doesn’t need to be overwhelming. There are more than a few strategies you can implement that’ll help you achieve this, with several coming highly recommended, such as using magento shipment.

How To Nail Your eCommerce Store’s Customer Experience: 5 Top Strategies

1. Don’t Overlook Testing

Nobody nails their customer experience on the first try. While you might be able to get the broad strokes right, it mightn’t be enough to completely refine it. That’s why most ecommerce stores need to know how to improve the customer experience.

While there are multiple strategies to do so, many people overlook the testing part of this. You’ll need to determine whether specific efforts are having an impact and whether this is positive or negative. Typically referred to as A/B testing, the process involves changing a specific aspect of the customer service and determining the impact.

If it’s positive, then it’s something you can implement long-term. On the other hand, you know to revert this if it turns out to have a negative impact on your customer experience and revenue. Though this is a long-term approach to refining your customer experience, it’s one of the more effective ways of doing so.

You can use the analytics from various pieces of software to track and analyse the impact each of these tests have. Over time, you’ll find out specifically what’ll improve the experience for your particular customers.

2. Understand The Visitor Journey

Understanding the visitor journey, also known as the buyer journey, is vital to improving your ecommerce store’s customer experience. You can use your website analytics to figure out where and when visitors drop off in this journey. Once you do, you can focus your efforts on these areas.

By carefully analysing how visitors get to your website and navigate across it, perhaps with the help of something like these cloud business intelligence services, you can understand where you may be going wrong. Nailing your customer experience isn’t the only way you can benefit from doing this. By optimising for your customer experience, you should improve conversions and sales.

That’s primarily because, the better the customer experience is, the more likely a customer is to complete the buying journey. With that, you should start seeing more sales. Making sure you follow this up with post-purchase customer service should also lead to repeat business.

Simply because they’ve bought from you doesn’t mean you’re done, so make sure a customer feels satisfied post-purchase.

3. Personalise The Experience

Personalising your ecommerce store’s customer experience is a sure-fire way to make sure it brings in satisfied customers. People expect this to happen more and more, with brands like Netflix and Google excelling in this. Even if you’re a startup, this is something you’ll need to focus on.

Thankfully, it’s much easier to do than you might’ve imagined. The easiest way of doing so is by having the right technology in place. The use of data collection and analysis is vital, and you may even want to automate much of this. That means having software across:

• Recommendation emails
• Content personalisation
• Marketing automation
• Data collection

By implementing each of these into your ecommerce store, you can quickly and easily optimise your customer experience. At the same time, you should increase your conversion rates and see more sales coming in.

While this could need a financial investment to get started with. Over time, it’ll pay for itself. Even live chat can be recommended for this, and you can even receive payments in live chat for businesses using smartCast. It’s an effective way of adding a more human touch to your customer experience.

4. Get & Implement Feedback

When you’re figuring out how to nail your ecommerce store’s customer experience often entails determining whether or not your efforts are having any impact. Gathering feedback from customers can be a recommended way to figure this out. It’s worth doing this from the start of your improvement process.

Doing so gives you a baseline for how satisfied customers are with your overall company. At the same time, it lets you determine the main pain points they have with your ecommerce store. You can use this to figure out where you can improve the overall experience, making this an invaluable first step.

If you don’t do this, you could be going in blind. Over time, it’s worth sending out more surveys to determine the impact your efforts are having. If you’re doing things right, you should see customers become increasingly satisfied with your brand. It also lets you figure out where you need to adjust your efforts, if at all.

5. Know What Motivates Customers

You can find out a lot about your customers by observing their on-site behaviour. That’s not going to be enough to properly understand them, however. You’ll need to know what motivates and drives them. What are their passions, needs, and desires? Putting effort into learning this is vital.

Thankfully, doing so doesn’t need to be as complicated as you’d think. Putting together a survey for your customers to fill in is recommended. In doing so, you can ask them about all of the things you want to know, such as how they’d rate their experience with you.

While this can appear similar to getting feedback, you’ll need to focus on different areas. With this, you’re diving deeper into your customers’ personal preferences and desires. Armed with that knowledge, you can more carefully refine your customer experience.

It could also lead you to new revenue and marketing channels that you didn’t even think of.

How To Nail Your eCommerce Store’s Customer Experience: Wrapping Up

Once you know how to nail your ecommerce store’s customer experience, you should see an uptick in repeat business. At the same time, you should see more new customers come in, which you can then turn into repeat business.

While it can take time and effort to achieve this, it’ll be more than worth the effort. The revenue and profit you should see because of this will be more than worth it. There’s no reason not to improve your ecommerce store’s customer experience. With the wealth of competition, it could be vital.

Contributed Article. Contains sponsored links.