While you are building your ecommerce store’s reputation, don’t forget to include user experience as one of your top priorities. Invest in your customers and they will be more than happy to spend their money on your online store.
The user experience of an online store is basically how you treat your site visitors and what impression does the user interface and business practice creates in their minds.
A good user experience definitely rakes in more sales, traffic and brand presence on social media.
Remember that if visitors don’t have a good experience of your online store, they are more likely to bring down the store’s reputation by posting bad reviews online, which will eventually hurt everything relating to your online business.
Therefore, in order to avoid such a scenario, we are providing six tips that can improve the customer’s experience by a great deal.
Create Awareness in Your Team
Remember, the customer does not interact with you directly. It’s your team that interacts with the customer. In this context, it is important that you invest in training your team in improving the customer’s experience.
You should try to spread positive vibes among your customers. Every instance of customers’ interaction should add to the overall experience at your store. From social media team to live support, every department should strive to make the customers feel comfortable.
Personal Interaction is the Key
Now that you are done with staff training, it is time to interact with your customers directly. You should keep a close eye on reviews, comments, emails and complains left by customers. These are invaluable sources of learning about the customers.
At the same time, customers should also realize that the topmost management of the store is directly interested in their issues. This is why most of the important emails sent by online stores are signed by the CEO.
A personalized card or a letter will do wonders for the customer experience. Imagine how would you feel if you receive a thank you note from the CEO of the store with your package. Amazing isn’t it?
Strong Interaction on Social Media
Creating a Facebook business page, a LinkedIn business profile or a Twitter account of your business is easy but the difficult part is to actively interact on all of these social media channels.
You should have a dedicated team for handling all social media communications, mainly because the customers expect an almost immediate response from businesses. These days, social media has become an alternative medium where customers are present at all times. Therefore, creating customer support teams exclusively for this platform can also do wonders to uplift the reputation of your brand.
Your social media strategy also has a direct impact on the traffic of the store. If your social media presence does not benefit your customer acquisition numbers, there is a disconnect that you need to fix. In many cases, the users define their entire experience on the quality of the responses and interactions that take place on social media.
Surprise Your Customers
Everyone, from the six years old kid to the sixty years old grandpa love surprises. A surprise birthday or a surprise gift have a huge impact on the dynamics of the relationships.
You should surprise your customers by offering them sudden discounts. Sending goodies and loyalty cards with the products might make their day and in return, it is possible that you will get a loyal customer.
Rewarding your customers via coupon codes is another great way of adding to the customer experience. Free is a word that everyone wants to hear and while extra is always a better choice, try to win your customers with surprises.
Web Experience Matters the Most
Visitors are always in a hurry and the reason is simple; they have got plenty of options to spend their dollars. Slow loading images and clunky websites annoy everyone. In addition, smartphones and similar devices now form the majority of the traffic sources for online stores. In this context, it is important that stores should have a responsive design to cater to these devices.
The user journey on your ecommerce store should be smooth. Your web store should be hosted on a robust web hosting server to deliver blazing fast page load and decreased load time.
Fewer ads, well-designed pages, a simple purchase form (a one-click checkout is a great option) are some of the key aspects that greatly improve the store’s user experience.
About the Author
Sajjad Shahid, Ecommerce Community Manager at Cloudways
Sajjad is an Ecommerce Community Manager at Cloudways -A Managed Ecommerce Hosting Platform. He loves helping out Ecommerce store owners, merchants, and marketers in establishing their businesses and startups.