Before you set aside some money for your marketing budget and customer acquisition, you should think about how much you’re spending on new customers and how much on the old ones. A successful business will always put their existing customers first and do everything to boost customer experience.
Nowadays, customers care about their experience more than ever before, so it’s not surprising that 86% of buyers will pay more for better CX. This is why as an owner of an eCommerce store, you should do everything in your power to meet their demands as fast as possible, and we’ve comprised some strategies that might just help you do that.
Enhance website navigation
To start things off, one of the earliest things that will determine whether or not your eCommerce store fails or not is your website’s navigation. People need to move around your website with ease and shouldn’t be confused by the elements on it. Keep in mind that the navigation gives value to your eCommerce website.
While there are a lot of factors that determine what makes a website’s navigation good, one thing that no eCommerce website should be without is product search. Your search tab should be very prominent, have an autocomplete feature, and preferably be at the top of the page.
With a good navigation bar, all of your website visitors will be able to find what they’re looking for in just a few seconds and without any hassle.
No matter if they are on the website because they are looking for just one specific item or are simply browsing, navigation can either lead them to the desired item or help them narrow down their choices.
If you created your website with WordPress, try to install a WordPress search plugin. Not only are these plugins easy to install, but they also come with a great number of useful features such as a self-learning algorithm, synonyms, type tolerance, and managing search results, all of which will improve your website’s navigation and search feature.
Provide great customer service
Customer service is the place where customers interact with your business and try to solve any issues they might have. It’s also another factor that determines if you’ll have loyal consumers, as 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service.
To improve your eCommerce customer service, you should keep the following tips in mind:
- Know your products. Whenever someone contacts your business, your customer support agent needs to be completely prepared for any question they might have about your product or business. If they can’t memorize all of that information, make sure it’s readily available to them.
- Listen. Even though this should be a given, a lot of customer service agents don’t listen properly to the customer and try to rush them through the call. Make sure to always give the person on the other line all of your attention and listen to them carefully.
- Be respectful. No matter if the customer is rude or not, all of your agents need to show them respect at all times. It’s also important to look for any non-verbal signs they might display when they’re annoyed and displeased.
- End the conversation properly. Don’t rush to finish one conversation just to get to the next person on the line. Take the time to thank the customer for their call, see if they need help with anything else, and ask them if they would like to fill out a survey or leave a different kind of feedback.
Optimize for mobile
The number of eCommerce sales that are being completed via desktop is dropping while the popularity of mobile eCommerce keeps rising every year. Nowadays, if your website doesn’t work on mobile devices as well as it does on desktops, you’ll lose a lot of potential customers.
However, it’s also important to emphasize that mobile optimization requires much more than just getting your website to work when someone visits it via mobile. As only 12% of consumers find shopping on the mobile web convenient, you can see why a lot of mobile websites need to be improved.
Here’s what you need to remember when you’re building the mobile version of your website:
- Monitor the speed. Slow-loading websites are one of the biggest causes of increased bounce rates, no matter what device they’re using. As internet connections are even slower on mobile, you need to check your mobile website’s speed on a test tool.
- Store important elements above the fold. As you don’t have the same amount of space to show the most important information on mobile as you do on a desktop, you need to prioritize what will go above the fold. A good practice is to keep your CTA button and a shopping cart icon visible.
- Eliminate unimportant form fields. While some form fields are necessary when you’re requesting information from the user, try to limit the number of fields as much as possible. Ideally, you should condense your form into one cohesive page.
- Consider building an app. While the popularity of eCommerce apps is also on the rise, not every business needs its own app. Check your web analytics to see how many people visit your mobile website and if the number is bigger than 30% of all visitors, you should consider building an app.
Improve your product pages
A good eCommerce website is able to give its visitors the same or at least similar experience online as they would have in a brick-and-mortar shop. While your customers are on your product pages, they need to feel as if they’re interacting with a salesperson in a physical store.
One of the drawbacks of online shopping is that it can be hard for people to visualize themselves using a product. However, if you create a compelling product page with all the necessary information, your customers will be very satisfied with what they see.
Here are a few elements your product pages need to include:
- Descriptive titles that are as specific as possible
- Rich and unique descriptions that also contain keywords
- List of the product’s specifications and attributes
- Prominent CTA buttons
- A gallery full of high-quality product images showing off the product from multiple angles
- Prominently displayed shipping information and the return policy
Final thoughts
Never forget that without your customers, you would never be able to run a successful business and earn a profit. You owe a lot to your customers and website visitors, so it’s important to make sure they have the best experience on your website.
As long as you follow the tips you just read about, you can be sure that you’re going to boost your eCommerce customer experience.