The type of experience your customers have with your company will have a massive effect. A good customer experience will result in more sales, recommendations both online and in-person and help bring a lot of great attention to your store. Because the customer’s experience is such a key element to your business, you must be doing everything you can to ensure that every customer is happy when dealing with your company.
Nowadays, customer happiness goes way beyond their satisfaction with the product or service they received. Before, if a customer liked what they bought, that was the end of it. But with online sales now taking over such a large part of the market, customer happiness is no longer encompassed just by the product. Rather, you now need to think about other factors such as how easy is your site to navigate? Do you have low shipping rates? Can you quickly resolve customer complaints? And so on. The customer experience no longer ends the moment they have paid for or received their items. Your customer experience can make or break your business, so it’s an area that you can never drop the ball or get complacent over. Let’s take a look at some of the best ways that you can optimize your customer experience in ECommerce and keep your customer coming back to you.
Improve Your Listing
If your product listings on your website are vague or sloppy the customer is going to be put off immediately. After all, who wants to spend all their time trying to work out what you’re selling? If your product listings aren’t clear or detailed then people will walk away. You need to check over your listings. Add clear information, high-resolution images, sizes, features, and anything else the customer needs to know.
Make Your Brand Clear
Your customers need to know your brand. They need to know what your company stands for and what your brand is about. You need to make your brand loud and clear so customers are always able to clearly identify who you are. Keep your branding consistent and unique. For extra points, focus on one aspect of business that will help you stand out from your competitors. For example, maybe you can stock a particular product that your competitors don’t or maybe you can focus on super-fast delivery times.
Don’t Go Out-Of-Stock
Without stock, you cannot sell products and make money. Even just running out of a couple of items here and there will have an impact on your bottom line. Additionally, if you have a habit of your products going out of stock, your customers will notice this trend and start shopping at a different company. Use reliable suppliers, order more stock than you need, and ensure that you have a plan B in place if something goes wrong and you run out of particular items.
Have Free and Fast Shipping
With so many stores online to choose from, you have to work hard to make sure that customers buy from you. One wrong move and your potential customers will be ordering their products elsewhere. It’s hard enough sometimes to get people to visit your store but it’s even harder to get them to then buy from you. Shipping is a make or break factor for the majority of shoppers. If your shipping isn’t free, people will leave. If your delivery times are slow, again, people will leave. Have free shipping and use the fastest delivery service possible to stop anyone from visiting your competitors.
Make It Personal
People love to feel like they are valued as a customer. Therefore, the more personal you can make the customer’s experience, the more likely they will be to come back to you in the future. After you have received an order, send a personalized email to that customer thanking them for their purchase. You can even make a note of what they bought and send them a personal discount code in the future for the same or similar items. Showing that you care will go a long way.
Have a Returns Policy
Does a returns policy really matter? Yes, it really does. It’s estimated that more than 60% of people won’t buy from an online store that doesn’t have a clear returns policy in place. 60% is a huge number of people that you most certainly don’t want to miss out on. Not only is it important that you have a returns policy in the first place, but it’s also important to make sure it’s a simple one. Putting too many conditions or stipulations in place will only confuse people and lead them to go elsewhere. You will make far more sales by having a simple, clear, and fair returns policy, and your customers will be far happier with our company.
Communicate
Don’t leave your customers feeling like they are by themselves at any point during their experience. This means that you need to ensure you have order confirmation emails in place. You also need to send an email when the item is shipped. And if the products are tracked, sending an email when the order has been received is helpful as well. On top of this, you should have an easy way for customers to be able to contact you with any questions or concerns. A contact form is fine, but it’s not a fast process and often people feel like their questions will be ignored. Set up live chat on your site and help your customers feel like they can get help whenever they need it.
If you want to be successful with your eCommerce store then you need to take a lot of factors into consideration. Working on optimizing your customer experience will be well worth your time when you start to see results. As always, you should think about what is best for the customer. Think about what kind of experience you expect when you shop online and this will help you make the necessary changes.
