Building any successful business requires special attention to its customers.
For an e-commerce business, where every interaction made with customers is online, positive customer experience is of the utmost importance.
How customers feel about their interactions with your business needs to be a priority. Bad customer experiences can lead to severe consequences for your e-commerce business. Good customer experiences, on the other hand, can result in an increase in site traffic, brand awareness, and, most importantly, sales.
One of the best ways to drive sales for your e-commerce business is by working on improving customer experience. So, here are five ways you can improve customer experience to boost sales:
Train Your Team
The foundation of improving customer experience is by ensuring your team is equipped to deal with customers. Since e-commerce customers don’t interact with you in person, it’s important to ensure online interactions with customers go off without a hitch.
Every business owner should make it a priority to ensure customers have positive experiences. By training your team and teaching them the basic guidelines of how they need to interact with prospective customers, you can ensure every interaction is consistent. If this aspect is something you’re struggling with, you can always get a sales process consultant on board to help you out with many things, such as hiring, coaching and advisory, and culture development.
Offer A Smooth Website Experience
A website that’s full of glitches and lacks speed can be a deal-breaker for your e-commerce business. To ensure your customers have a positive experience, they need to be able to use your website smoothly on all devices and browsers. In 2019, mobile e-commerce accounted for 67.2 percent of total e-commerce. This share is only expected to grow as more people rely on their smartphones to conduct the various activities they traditionally did with a laptop or desktop computer.
Your customers should be able to shop on your website easily. Not only does this mean limiting the number of steps they’re required to complete, but ensuring they’re able to get what they’re looking for easily.
Buyers who visit your site will either know what they want, are looking to browse, or have an idea about what they want to buy, but want to explore further. Incorporating features that your customers are likely to use will improve the ease by which they can navigate your website. Tools such as search bars, filters, and categories allow your customers to search for the products they’re looking for and make the entire shopping experience hassle-free. These tools should be added in places where they’re easy to notice and use.
If web development isn’t something you’re familiar with, you should consider websites for sale and buy a website that’s already up and running.
Create High-quality Content
Your e-commerce customers aren’t just purchasing your products and services; they’re looking for practical solutions to their problems. With access to the internet, customers can now search amongst a multitude of options across the globe. So, which site do customers eventually decide to explore further? The one that offers them valuable, high-quality content.
You should aim to create content that adds value. One of the best ways to do this is by setting up a blog where content is posted regularly. A blog can cater to your target audience and, by establishing yourself as an authoritative source in your niche, your target audience will see your effort to build trust and add value.
Along with articles, you should post visuals, such as infographics and videos with your blog posts, too. Visual content is easy to recall and there’s a 60 percent chancean image will be retained three days later.
Take Advantage Of Social Media
Social media has provided businesses an excellent way to attract their target audiences and communicate with them. You should create profiles on different platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and update these profiles regularly with new product announcements and promotions.
Apart from using it as a quick advertising tool, you should also use social media to resolve any queries and issues your customers might have. It’s essential to devote time every day to ensure you respond quickly and show customers you’re eager to build a relationship with them.
Surprise Customers Whenever You Can
With competition as fierce as ever, it’s essential to make your business stand out. One of the best ways to do that is by personalizing your approach towards customers and surprising them whenever possible. There are multiple ways to do this, including:
- Sending customers goodies or free samples with every order. These add-ons won’t cost too much, and free stuff will always make your customers happy.
- Loyal customers should be rewarded with offers and discounts. These offers should have an expiry, so customers have a deadline set to make a purchase.
- Offer exclusive deals and promo codes to website visitors to motivate them to purchase from you.
- Ask customers to submit user-generated content and pictures of themselves and post these on your website and social media pages.
Improve Customer Service
Every business should aim to offer exceptional customer service. Customers will experience problems occasionally, and you need to be available and accessible to solve these problems. For starters, your contact information, such as your email address and phone number, needs to be visible on every page.
Additionally, your customers should have access to a live chat 24/7. If they reach out to you outside working hours, an auto-respond option should be enabled. While Zendesk is a popular option, there are many Zendesk alternatives that work just as well.
Lastly, your e-commerce site should always include an FAQ section where answers to most common questions should be listed down. It’s essential to only cover what customers need to know, such as shipping times, payment options, returns, and exchanges, etc.
While positive customer experience isn’t easy to build and requires a lot of effort from your end, its benefits are multiplied. A customer who has a good experience will spread the word to their friends and families, who will also want to buy from you. A chain of positive experiences will expand your e-commerce business and boost sales like nothing else.
What other ways can you improve customer experience to drive sales for your e-commerce business? Let us know in the comments below!
