How To Elevate Customers’ Shopping Experience On Your Online Store

In today’s digital world, how a brand interacts with a customer makes all the difference. Brands understand the importance of value-based offerings, quick and easy support, and a superior customer experience. Customers prefer businesses that showcase their initiatives to provide value for their consumers, and how much emphasis they place on a smooth customer journey. In short, an elevated customer shopping experience is preferred by brands and customers alike.

Digital-first businesses create opportunities to interact with the customer effectively and lead them directly to the product of their choice with minimum to no pain points. As an eCommerce business, you need to focus equally on your products and the journey to them. Anything short on both ends can potentially lead to a struggle for survival. Luckily, there are multiple ways online businesses can elevate the customers’ shopping experience, and here’s how:

Understand Your Target Audience

To improve your customer experience, you need to first understand your audience. Find out what your customers want, and how they want it to be delivered to them. Gather data from various sources such as customer forums, focus groups, customer interviews, surveys, and more. Then, add your most common findings into your customer persona to benchmark what you, as an online business – need to deliver. Discover the following related to your customers:

  • When are your customers online?
  • What demographic do they belong to?
  • What is the purchasing power of your customers?
  • What location are they from?
  • How do they land on your site?

Knowing more about your audience helps you in creating a specific customer experience for them, and increases your conversions.

Use Analytics to Find How Your Customers Find You

As an eCommerce store, knowing your customer journey can help you in creating a better one to encourage future purchases. Research how your customers find your store, the time of their sessions, and the bounce rate. Create practical scenarios as to when customers’ intention played a role in their buying decision, how they perceived your store, and whether or not they made an actual purchase. You will find multiple touchpoints you can modify to elevate the customer experience and pain points that are causing your customers to bounce.

Engage with Customers Beyond Social Media

One key way of elevating customer experience is to engage with them beyond the obvious. It is important to know that customer experience starts when a customer thinks of your brand when they need something, everything from that first thought to the final purchase, and then the use of your product is counted in that customer experience. Let your customers know that the product suits their needs, add details, tutorials, and instructions to ensure their queries are answered. Allow them to try your product as a tester along with the purchase of another item to deliver additional value to them. Offer a realistic return policy, or customer service support to ensure a smooth customer experience even after purchase.

Make Loyalty Mean Something

Customer experience is an incredibly powerful thing, if the experience is according to their liking – you would get repeated purchases. But if you are only focused on elevating the customer experience of new users and not the old customers, you are reducing your profitability as a business. Foster loyal customers by providing them an added incentive to further elevate their experience.

  • Gift vouchers
  • Discount Codes
  • Free shipping
  • Birthday Gifts
  • Sample Rewards

You can add free goodies or discounts after a certain limit, or offer non-monetary benefits. Such as offering a personal greeting when a shopper returns or suggesting products that are according to their preferences. Make sure you craft a customer experience that is according to the needs of your existing customer base and is equally focused on customer acquisition.

Offer an Easy Checkout

Customer experience is time sensitive, your customers don’t have all day to explore your store or make a purchase. This is why you need to enhance your value proposition and reduce loops and jump from one page to the other. Create a simple and easy user journey so your customers can easily check out without having to complete multiple unnecessary steps, or fill out redundant pages. Offer a speedy, and frictionless checkout facility for your customers so they can place the order timely. Gone are the days when cluttering your pages was the norm, now is the time to be quick and simple – especially during checkouts!

Flexible Delivery Options & Smart Packing

Lastly, don’t neglect to offer flexible delivery options and shipment facilities to your customers. Your customers need to enjoy the experience of buying from your store and feel valued when they receive their purchase. An efficient way of doing that is by offering versatile delivery options and packaging your product according to your branding guidelines. Remember, customer experience doesn’t end after checkout.

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.