Here’s our latest round of expert tips from leaders at best-in-class agencies. This time, we asked 4 experts on tips for maximizing customer happines for brands.
MuteSix
Adena Merabi, Head of Strategic Partnerships at MuteSix:
There are a couple of things that shoppers are looking for when buying online from your webstore. As a merchant, you definitely want to have 1-1 product recommendations on site, conversion rate optimization apps on your page, and you want to make sure that you’re personalizing your website per shopper.
The other component is a really good checkout experience which should be quick and easy. The best way to do this is to have great upsell apps on your checkout page and options for your customers to finance their purchase through a Buy Now Pay Later app.
In that perspective, I would recommend something like Afterpay or Klarna or some sort of installment payment partner that’s going to encourage your shopper to actually complete the purchase. This also allows you to have access to a wider range of shoppers — often times ones that wouldn’t be able to afford the purchase in full.
A great pop ups tool like Justuno or Privy is also very important because it’s a good way for you as the merchant to start collecting more data on your custom profile. On the frontend, having a pop ups tool and putting banners up of discounts, promos, and countdowns increases your rate of conversion.
On the actual checkout page, you want to make sure that you have free shipping as well. That’s always something that customers really look for.
Post-purchase, customers, I would say, are looking for a free and fast shipping experience and a really easy return process, so having a good shipping and return platform is crucial. We’ve worked with ShippingEasy, ShipStation, Returnly, Happy Returns, Loop Returns. Those are all great platforms.
I would say, from a shopper’s perspective, those are the things that they are really looking for.
Ben Zettler Digital Media
Ben Zettler, Partner at Ben Zettler Digital Media:
Communication, communication, communication! At the end of the day, how your brand interacts with customers is ultimately what will make or break their experience with your company and it is the clear difference-maker when it comes to whether a customer is satisfied, dissatisfied, or over the moon with their purchase from you.
Customer has an issue with a mistaken shipment? Say you’re sorry, empathize with their issue and do everything you can to overwhelm them with a make-good that stretches beyond their expectations, whether that happens over a phone call (best), email, live chat, tweet, text or direct message. Often, and I mean often, the best customer relationships come out of turning around a negative situation.
The same principle applies to any issue, or frankly, any positive experience that a customer may have with you. Give your customer the opportunity to showcase their happiness. Reward them for it, too.
Molsoft
Alexandre Fortin, Co-Founder of Molsoft:
In terms of the experience, you always have to take into consideration how customers interact with your product, aka how is the flow like from learning about your brand to showing interest, to deciding to make a purchase, to checking out and receiving their order at the end. The best way to prevent unhappiness is to go back to that flow and try to find the pain points customers might experience during the process.
If one customer is unhappy and goes the extra mile to tell you, you can be sure that you have at least a few others that feel the same way and just didn’t tell you. Best would be to address those and rethink your flow to make sure that you have gone through every detail your customers might dislike when doing business with you.
To analyze the flow and find those pain points, we use two basic apps. Google Analytics, where you can see how long your customers stay on your site, at what page they exit, and what’s their flow like on your site. From that, you can see where you lose most of your customers. The other app is Hotjar, it basically creates recordings and heatmaps from visits, so you can see where your customers click and where they scroll. You can even see recordings of real clients to see how their mouse interacts on your site when they are browsing. Combine your findings from those two and you will most likely be able to identify major UX problems.
Something super useful we are doing with a client right now to make sure we get started right: We interviewed some of their actual clients and set up a Facebook contest to find and interview people who were close to making a purchase but did not on their site. We use the information we got out of this to design and build a custom theme for them. Doing that we were able to address all of the pain points we identified and made sure to create a perfect shopping experience for all their customers.
OnlyGrowth
Brent Godkin, Partner at OnlyGrowth:
A really unique tactic, that works better for smaller to medium sized brands, is using an app called Bonjoro. What it is, essentially, is you record a personalized quick little video message, and you can send the customer a link to it in an email. We find sending thank you video messages to customers who have made their first purchase and video messages to people who abandoned their cart to be the most effective in creating engagement and improving customer happiness.
The size of your brand and your resources will determine how much personalization goes into your video messages. For example if you are a medium to larger brand with a lot of orders you can make a less personalized message for people who bought a specific product and send the same video link to everyone who purchases that product, and customers receiving it will be really impressed because they received a thank you video from the CEO.
If you are a smaller brand with less orders or a brand that has the time and the resources, you can go more personalized with the video message and say the person’s name and a little bit more specific details in the video and make individual video messages for everyone who makes a purchase.
Sending video messages can also be an effective component of an abandoned cart strategy. Let’s say you have a really high-value item, that’s your biggest margin, so you really want people to buy that, and you saw someone abandon that cart. Initially you could send an automated plain text email providing support to the customer asking if they have questions or need help completing the order. If they do not reply try sending an email with a personalized video message with some objecting busting statements about the product they have abandoned, also talk about some benefits of that product and still provide support in the video message.
Something like that can really drive a ton of engagement and build a really good relationship with that customer, which then increases your customer retention, because they see the amount of time and effort you put into your messages and want to come back to your brand because they feel valued.
So, that’s a really different, unique way that we don’t see anyone utilizing, and we’ve had a few merchants try it and they had a lot of positive feedback.
This article originally appeared in the Recart blog and has been published here with permission.
