The holidays are the busiest time of year for ecommerce and when providing a great customer experience is of utmost importance – and at times the most challenging. Keep reading for some great tips and refreshers as we enter this holiday season and beyond.
1. Simplicity
The best customer experiences are the most simple. Simplify the process for your customers by removing any barriers your customer goes through before they check out. Accomplish by providing a personalized shopping experience with upselling & cross-selling and geographical recommendations. Keeping the shopping experience simple leads to customer satisfaction, which leads to better conversion rates.
2. Human Connection
Human connection is at the heart of every digital interaction. Customers have desires, feelings, and opinions, and they want to feel heard and understood. Communicate with your customers and get to know them. Cater to who they are as a person before breaking down data to fuel the tactics for success.
3. Customer Mindset
Put yourself in their shoes. How would you search for terms? What would you like to see as you search? Would you want to see new products first, best rated, top sellers, or A-Z for each category? Once you work through these questions, optimize your site this way. Each category or top search should be set up in the most useful way for shoppers to find what they need.
4. Educate
Use tools such as inline banners to educate your customers on what sets you apart from the competition. Once your customers understand your value, you create a loyal customer base. With an influx of visitors to your site during the holiday season, it’s the perfect time to remind your customers why they buy from you – and why they should continue to buy from you.
5. Front and Center
Search is the first place most customers go on an ecommerce site. Research proves that users of site search buy more. Make sure the search on your site is unmissable.
6. Make Products More Findable
If you want customers to buy, they need to find what they are looking for easily. Focus on making search more granular and you’ll be creating a loyal fanbase while watching your conversions soar.
7. Don’t Underestimate Site Search
We’ve said it before and we’ll keep saying it; Search. Is. King. Convert more by understanding shoppers’ intent on finding the product. With a robust site search using solutions such as predictive text, you will create an unforgettable customer experience.
8. Guide Shoppers
By utilizing popular keywords, categories, product names, and blog articles you will help guide customers to the right products quickly. Having a well-designed autocomplete helps get shoppers on the right product discovery track faster.
9. Optimize Search, Spelling & Synonyms
Account for user errors such as misspellings and synonyms. What’s a toboggan to one person is a sled or a hat to another. Optimize your site search to help customers have a great experience and find the right products.
10. Get Trendy
Get higher conversion rates and reinforce authority by embracing trends. Present unique trend propositions and create an aspirational journey for your online shopper.
11. Test What Works
Not everything will work. But the good news is that you can find out what does and make a plan around it. Look for tools that will assist in creating and testing rules to boost and merchandise the right products for your customers throughout your ecommerce site. Adjust your strategy based on what customers are responding to and provide the optimal customer experience.
12. A Beginner’s Mindset
Start at the very beginning: Onboarding. It may sound a little strange to onboard a customer, but it is best practice to assume visitors don’t know anything about you or what you’re selling. Make them feel welcome and more comfortable with your product through articles and guides that help them through the buying process. Help them make an informed purchase, and they’ll checkout feeling confident – not only with what they purchased but also with your online store.
13. Your Best Foot Forward
It may seem obvious to put your “best” products at the top of your results, but “best” is subjective. However, bestsellers are a proven conversion driver. Automate the merchandising of your best sellers to the top of results as it serves both your business and the customer journey.
14. The Best of Both Worlds
Keep it simple for your customers AND for you too. Let technology do the heavy lifting by automating time-consuming merchandising; without losing the control to manually curate results when new collections launch.
15. More Time Together
It’s a fact that customers who spend more time on your ecommerce site have higher conversion rates. Get them to stay on your site longer with tools such as banners on search results pages and personal recommendations.
16. Don’t Just Discount
Yes, price matters, but there’s a bigger reason online shoppers stay on your site and buy more. Create messaging pointing customers to services provided such as customer support. Customers value great service. Provide it and show how you stand out in the crowded ecommerce space.
17. Give the Customer Control
When optimizing your site and merchandising, think of the customer’s journey through the site and give them control over how results are served. Make the process clean and easy through filtering, sorting options, and personalization. Giving your customer control to personalize search results speeds up product discoverability and boosts conversion rates.
18. Personalized Recommendations
Machine-learning-based personalization can quickly help you create a more relevant CX at scale. By using personalized recommendations across your online store, you can create a tailored customer experience based on your previous engagement, purchase history, and even price sensitivity leading to higher spend and conversion rates.
19. Personalized for You
Up your game through the use of personalization tools such as “You May Also Like” on product detail pages. Use data and reporting to find out more about your customer’s viewing and shopping habits to provide a one-of-a-kind shopping experience.
20. Be Memorable
You’re not just selling a product, you’re selling an experience. Be memorable and provide a great customer experience by anticipating their wants and needs and making the entire process as seamless as possible.
By creating a great customer experience, you are creating customers for life. This holiday season may be the first time someone visits your ecommerce store, but it doesn’t have to be the last. Provide your customers memorable, simple, personalized experiences while also providing great service, and they’ll become one of your raving fans.
What other tips would you add to this list?
