Online businesses have been booming in recent years due to the conveniences they offer. If you’re planning to enter this industry, you should bear in mind that an online shop is significantly different from a physical store – in the brick-and-mortar concept the location and the establishment plays a role in building its customer base, whereas, in an online business, owners rely mostly on the products and customer service.
To build a successful, profitable, and sustainable ecommerce business, you have to invest in your customers before they enter the buying cycle, while they are in it, and long after they’ve made a purchase from your store.
Now, one can call it marketing, one can call it CRO, but at the end of the day, what you’re really talking about is customer experience (CX). Customer experience relates to interactions between you and your customers. It’s how your customers feel about you based on the interactions they ultimately have with you.
Now the question is why customer experience is a big factor in ecommerce business. It is because bad experiences felt by customers or would-be customers can wreak havoc on an ecommerce business. Good experiences, on the other hand, can lead to boosts in brand awareness, website traffic, social mentions, and sales.
Certain ways ecommerce businesses can improve customer experience can be as follows:
1.Training the Team:
The first step worth taking when you want to improve customer experience is to train the people who interact with your customers the most: Employees. Your prospective customers don’t get to see you in person. They can’t walk through your door and interact with you or your employees face-to-face. As a result, you really must become obsessed about working with your team to ensure that anyone who interacts with your brand, on the website or off the website, walks away feeling like it was an amazing experience. Everyone on the team should engage in this training – from the person running your social media pages to the person managing your website. Consistency is key to success to success.
2.Send Handwritten Thank You Notes:
Fulfilling customers’ expectations is the ultimate goal of the business. Customers don’t expect the same amount of attention from you that they would get if they were to walk into a brick and mortar retail store. Your job is to constantly surprise them and give them the special treatment they don’t expect from ecommerce stores. One really simple way to do this is by sending handwritten thank you notes with the packages you send to customers.
Sending handwritten thank you notes may seem time-consuming, but it has the potential to make a big impact on you and your business.
3. Create a Content Hub Full of Value:
Online consumers aren’t buying products, they’re buying solutions to their problems. They go online and search for ways to become stronger, better, healthier, happier, more productive people. While working with an ecommerce business, you can improve customer experience by leveraging your brand as a trusted resource in the minds of your customers. The easiest way to do this is by creating a content hub full of value that relates to your products and your ideal customers.
4. Engage Authentically on Social Channels:
The most manageable way to manage social media page for your ecommerce business is to carve out 15-30 minutes every day to spend communicating with your followers and customers on your social media site. Your goal should always be to respond to negative comments first. These are the comments that new visitors will see first when they land on your social media pages, and you only have one opportunity to make the right first impression. It’s up to you to show people that you are willing to listen to customers and help them when they need it. It’s just another easy way to go beyond and start building trust with people from the minute they become exposed to your brand. Social Media Networking can Boost your Ecommerce Sales and so it should not be ignored!
5. Delight Customers Whenever Possible:
To differentiate from competitors, go out of your way to delight your website visitors and customers whenever possible. Some ideas can be like:
- Surprise customers by sending them extra goodies in packages that you ship to them. The goodies don’t need to be expensive, just something extra that they can find when they unbox your products.
- Send customers special customer loyalty offers and rewards via email. Set an expiration date and drive your best or most recent customers to buy from you again.
- Be more playful and creative with your order confirmation copy and your receipts. These are dull documents and emails that everyone expects to get. Go out of your way to surprise them or make them smile when they open them.
- Set a FAQ page which will save both you and your customers’ time and effort in the sales process
- Send free swag to select customers if you have the budget for it. Everyone loves a free t-shirt or travel mug, and it acts as free advertising for your business.
Create a brand that people are excited to support and tell others about!
6.Make Your Website Experience Seamless:
Slow, clunky websites kill ecommerce sales. To improve customer experience and drive more people to convert, you need to create a seamless website experience across all browsers and devices. More people are using their smartphones to shop online than ever before, so having an optimized mobile ecommerce store is a must.
You should also work to make sure that the entire shopping experience on your website is simple and easy to complete. That means shortening the number of steps it takes to go from landing on the website for the first time all the way to order confirmation. It also means simplifying product pages and making sure you aren’t including any fluffy copy that could distract would-be customers from adding products to their shopping carts.
7. Build a Community That’s Bigger Than Your Business:
The final way to improve customer experience is to create a community or movement that is bigger than your business or brand. Online consumers want to interact with companies that support a cause, promote a way of living, or offer up a special community that they can be a part of.
When your customers are part of a community, they’re not just buying products from you, they’re becoming part of something bigger. Something more meaningful.
Now, you can easily connect your Business Applications viz. ERP, CRM, Ecommerce Stores, Marketplaces, Shipping and POS Systems under one single platform and automate the Business Process!
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