Online marketing has been changing rapidly as E-commerce gets more and more popular, while customer experience is always the key to success. It not only directly affects sales and but more importantly, it also drives customer loyalty. It is a continuous process that helps with the growth of the business.
What is Customer Experience and Customer Experience Marketing?
Customer experience (CX) is defined by interactions between a customer and an organization throughout their business relationship. An interaction can include awareness, discovery, cultivation, advocacy, purchases and service. Customer experience marketing is about being customer oriented, creating a positive customer experience by meeting customer expectations and engaging with them.
Here are some tips to increase customer experience:
- Well-designed home page and high site speed
Home page gives customer the first impression of the E-commerce. It should represent the company well, and attract customers. A good home page need to deliver the company’s marketing positions including its key products/service, brand value proposition and voice. It should be differentiated from competitors, attract and lead the customers to the next step- product search. In addition, the webpage should load fast. Nowadays, online shoppers are impatient, if the page does not load within a certain time, the customers may close the page and go to a different site. Web developers should make images to their appropriate sizes before uploading, and make sure the images are in their optimized format for web, like GIF, JEPG and PNG. It is also important to choose an E- commerce platform that is flexible and processes quickly such as Magento.
Enhance website speed navigation
Products should be organized and listed under categories. A search function, and different sorting and filtering options are important for E-commerce. Shoppers need to be able to find what they are looking for specifically with the search bar; and shoppers who are browsing need to able to find things they want to check by certain categories, and filter the products by restrictions such as price range, brands and colors. In this way, it is easier for customers to find the products are they looking for, and they are more likely to purchase the products.
- Keep the checkout process simple and user friendly.
This is the step when customers purchase the product, and therefore one of the most important step too. This page should be simple, clear, and easy to complete, so the customers are more likely going to complete the transaction.
Shopping cart must be clearly and accessible in the pages. When people add product to cart, there should be a pop up message showing “ the item is added to cart successfully” and it should also give them options to either go back to the product page4, or to check out.
At the checkout page, all prices should be final, and any other additional cost such as tax, shipping, service fee and duty should be clearly written, so the customers do not have to worry about additional cost with the transaction.
Offering a wide variety of payment option is also important to a successful transaction and to increase customer satisfaction. Customers have their preferred payment options, and it is ideal to have their preferred options listed at the check out page.
It is best to keep the check out page as simple as possible, so it should offer guest check out options along with optional member sign up. In this way, you will not loss customers by having too many steps at check out.
- Provide customer support, capture customer feedback and respond to it
It is important to have the contact information of every single page of the website, so it is convenient for customers to contact the company if there is any questions and inquiries. Employees at customer support need to be well trained, and be customer orientated, so they are able to provide support as needed. In addition, a FAQ is also necessary at the end of every page, the instructions should be clear and easy to understand. In this way, it saves troubles for both the customers and the company support line.
- Engage with customers through social media networks
According to a recent Harvard Business Review, emotionally engaged customers shop 2 times more often than regular shoppers, 1.4 times more likely to recommend retailers to others, and are less price sensitive. Therefore, make your customers engaged is a key to success. Social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook are great platforms to build emotional connections and engage with customers. You can engage with customers by posting contents regularly, creating brand hashtags and encourage posts with hashtags, like and comments under hashtags, reply comments under the posts. In this way, you can be more connected with your customers and target consumers, increase social media exposures, drive more traffic to websites, and eventually attract more businesses.
Conclusion
Customer experience is an important factor of a successful E-commerce, and customer experience marketing is a new and popular marketing strategy. Customer expectations are getting higher and higher, and the customer experience marketing an on-going process. The companies need to be customer orientated and understand the needs of consumers in order to provide better products and services. The 5 tips above will ensure a pleasant and smooth customer experience for any E-commerce.
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