How to increase revenue with great customer experience
Good customer experience (CX) is important as it increases performance, leading to more conversions and acquisitions. Creating great customer experience is about making your ecommerce website (and associated channels) the go-to place for your ideal customers. It’s also about utilising your resources and insights, whilst being agile and customer-centric.
Ecommerce Strategist at Space 48, Stephen Elldred, leads you through the steps towards creating great customer experience to increase revenue for your ecommerce business:
Top strategies for creating great customer experience
Here are some key strategies to help you deliver a winning customer experience:
Remove distractions
Modern ecommerce is consumer-led and ecommerce businesses and platforms provide customers with a frictionless route to purchase. Magento 2 boasts a streamlined checkout experience, enabling a two-step checkout. Consumers want fewer clicks and quicker ways to pay, especially on mobile, so remove distractions and opportunities to click away from the route to purchase.
Be agile and deliver relevancy
Be data-driven and utilise insights to create relevant customer journeys, considering:
- What’s currently popular and trending (products and brand content)
- Customer data to deliver onsite recommendations using third party tools
- Automation and personalisation
Here’s a great example of an agile approach, focusing on search queries:
Utilise onsite search queries through Google Analytics or your onsite search Saas. Let’s say your current top search term is “blue widgets” and in your top 5 terms was “small widgets”. Leverage these insights to inform other content channels:
- Create blog posts about “small blue widgets”
- Post relevant content via your social channels
- Use these keywords to increase relevant CTAs
- Increase email open rates by using these ‘trending’ keywords in subject lines or preheader text
- Include these products in email marketing and promotions
- Look at merchandising similar products
Being agile and leveraging relevant keywords helps to optimise your content across channels.
Offer consistency and continuity
Deliver consistency and continuity on your ecommerce website, across your acquisition and retention channels, and other customer communications. If your copy, tone or creative varies too much, it may cloud your brand message. Optimise your content for different channels, but be consistent.
Implement personalisation and recommendations
Get the basics right with personalisation, before adding complex product recommendations. Use trusted personalisation partners, like Nosto or Peerius, and maximise user insights to deliver personalisation throughout customer journeys, across channels.
Learn about key personalisation techniques with our Guide to Nurturing Customers with Personalisation.
Key factors for delighting customers
Research and testing
Do the right research to understand your customers. Use research tools, such as Hotjar and FullStory (see image below), whilst drilling into your own insights from your platform, plus your marketing, sales and customer service teams. Carry out qualitative and quantitative research to ensure you get the big picture and implement A/B testing, taking an iterative approach to changes.
Value proposition
Continue to use your research and user insights to provide value throughout the customer journey experience, improve customer service and deliver post-purchase emails and interactions at key touchpoints. Good customer experience leads to customer retention and increased customer lifetime (CLV), crucial for lasting success.
Meeting consumer expectations with search
Consumers expect easy product search. They’re used to the Google search experience, where a few chosen words allow them to reach (or get close to) their desired result. Try to replicate this on your ecommerce website, as users often skip navigation in favour of search. Bad search capabilities result in frustrated consumers, but accurate search increases customer conversion, retention and average order value (AOV).
Brand strength and consumer confidence
Consumer confidence is key to keeping customers returning to your website. Leverage your brand’s presence on social channels and review platforms to excite customers and build their trust, whilst enticing new customers.
Common customer experience mistakes
- Poor performance across channels and devices
Don’t let your brand reputation suffer by delivering bad CX on mobile devices and social platforms. Make sure your content is optimised, responsive and delivers fast page loading whatever the device or platform!
- Feature stuffing
Give customers options that suit their needs, but don’t over complicate your features. For example, pick-a-day delivery features are appropriate for some business, but not for others. Feature stuffing can slow down the checkout, cause distractions and result in cart abandonment. Talking of distractions…
- Creating distractions
Many retailers to try to wow customers with bells and whistles. You can create impact without creating distractions. Be strategic with your navigation and route to purchase, giving users visuals, personalisation and calls to action at the right times.
- Setting incorrect expectations
Live chat is a good example. Live chat promotes good customer service but doesn’t equate to good customer experience unless you manage expectations. Are email autoresponders in place? How long is your response time? Do you have adequate resources and the right live times? Be realistic and set the right customer expectations.
Top tips for encouraging customer loyalty
We’ve compiled some top tips for boosting customer loyalty and customer lifetime value (CLV):
Email marketing
Email remains highly effective for nurturing customer relationships. Here are some key tactics:
- Create welcome emails to kick-start your customer engagement
- Use segmentation to target different portions of your email list
- Deliver emails at relevant touch points in the customer lifecycle
- Setup automated basket abandonment email workflows
- Reactivate lapsed customers using re-engagement tactics and incentives
- Deliver dynamic product recommendations & personalisation with third-party solutions
- Reward loyal customers with offers and exclusive content
Social, PPC and AdWords
Use static and dynamic remarketing activities to reacquire and retarget site visitors and previous customers:
- Use third-party remarketing services, such as Criteo, to retarget previous site visitors and customers
- Implement remarketing lists for search and shopping ads (RLSAs) to maximise exposure in search engine results pages (SERPs)
- Create loyalty schemes and incentivise customers to sign up
Summary
We hope this has helped you learn more how to increase revenue by creating great customer experience. It relies on fine-tuning each element of customer journeys. Customer satisfaction is essentially about offering value, relevancy and consistency throughout the customer lifecycle, whilst being agile and leveraging all your channels and insights to nurture and retarget customers.
Space 48 is a UK-based ecommerce agency, specialising in Magento website development and ecommerce strategy. Want to learn more about online customer experience management and conversion optimisation? Download our free expert guide to Ecommerce Strategies to Increase Your Conversion Rate and start improving performance!
