The customer journey: it’s one of the essential considerations for anyone in the ecommerce world.
In fact, many retailers spend the entirety of their careers thinking about it: how can they make it better? How many contacts does it take to create a sale? How can they move leads into the purchase funnel?
While understanding the customer journey is essential, finding ways to improve upon it is the one way to launch your ecommerce brand to success and ensure you stay there for years to come.
If you’re looking for ways to one-up your customer journey, here are a few tips you can implement now.
Innovation Pioneers Success
Leading companies are investing in the customer experience, which currently allows them to grow 14 percent faster than the laggards, according to Forrester. With this huge push to perfect the online buying experience will come a constant one-upmanship. Meaning, businesses are going to have to constantly innovate new ways to make their user experience as good or better than their competition if they want to stay in the game.
5 Ways to Improve The Customer Journey
The customer journey is the bread and butter for your ecommerce company. When you take proactive steps to improve it, your customer satisfaction rating and bottom line will grow, as well. Make your customer journey more compelling and productive with these smart tips:
1. Make Your Site Faster
Improving your site speed is one of the best (and easiest things) you can do to improve your ecommerce customer journey. There are many reasons for this. The first is that a faster website creates more conversions.
According to HubSpot, 79% of customers who are dissatisfied with a website’s performance say they’re less likely to purchase from the same site again.
Need additional proof for this effort? Check out this conversion rate by page load time graph:
2. Base Your Marketing on Facts
If you’re not relying on fact-based marketing, you’re missing out on a significant opportunity.
With this in mind, improve your ecommerce marketing strategy by making it dependent on facts and analytics. While this may seem obvious, it’s something many marketers miss. Here are a few things to pay attention to as you build your marketing strategy and enhance your customer journey:
- A/B test your landing pages, conversions models, and favorite product pages
- Experiment with adding products to the funnel – focus on creating and gaining statistical feedback and using it throughout the rest of your marketing
- Integrate funnel and conversion tracking metrics analytics software
By collecting this data, you can build a fact-based marketing plan that considers the information of your organization, and uses it to drive real results.
3. Make a Plan for After Marketing
After marketing is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing, yet many professionals forget all about it. With this in mind, make a plan for after marketing.
After marketing, if you’re not familiar, is what goes on in that crucial time after a customer purchases from you, commonly referred to as the after buying experience. When you do after marketing the right way, you keep your brand top-of-mind for your customers. You also ensure they remember you the next time they move to make a purchase and that brand recognition remains strong.
Here are a few tips for excellent after marketing:
- Offer custom, branded invoices and shipping labels
- Send handwritten thank-you notes or follow-up thank-yous to people who buy from you
- Offer discount codes for returning customers
- Customize your packaging
- Offer customer surveys
After marketing does more than just make your brand look good; it also helps remove customer pain points and ensure your return rates remain low and manageable.
4. Remove Pain Points
If there are pain points you’re aware of in your customer journey, remove them immediately. Again, this sounds simple, but it can be complicated enough that many retailers decide to forgo it altogether.
Unfortunately, you can’t afford to leave these pain points as they are. The reason for this is simple: your customers will remember them, and it will harm your ongoing retention and sales volume.
Start by identifying the pain points in your customer journey and making plans to remove them. If you can’t completely eliminate the pain point, make a plan to diminish it as much as possible. You can also focus on resolving other issues that can help streamline the journey.
5. End With a Bang
If you want customers to keep coming back, you’ve got to wrap their experience with your brand up with a bow. Remember: customers aren’t going to forget their final experience with you, and it’s essential to make it memorable. Not only do customers remember this, but executives see it necessary, as well.
According to a study by Oracle, 74% of senior executives believe that customer experience has a direct impact on the willingness of a customer to be a loyal advocate. That’s not the end of it, though, 60% of execs believe that customers have more power today than they did three years ago.
Wondering how to end things with a bang? Consider a brand like Backcountry, which sends out wine club gift cards with orders. In the world of ecommerce, giving to get is a smart practice, and can help keep customers coming back for more.
Bettering The Customer Experience
The customer journey is an essential marketing consideration, but it’s also a human interaction. Forgetting that is easy.
On the other side of the customer journey is just that – a customer, and a human, at that. When you remember this and take steps to improve your relationship with those customers, great things can happen. While there are many ways to improve the customer journey, the five outlined here are an excellent place to begin.
By making your site faster, basing marketing on facts, making a plan for after-marketing, removing pain points, and ending with a bang, you can streamline and improve your customer experience, and keep your brand top of mind.
If you haven’t been paying much attention to your customer journey before now, these trending methods are a great option.
While it’s easy to get wrapped up in the hustle and bustle of the ecommerce world, your customers are your most important asset, and placing them at the center of everything you do is the best way to ensure long-term success and mobility. Plus, one-upping your customer journey is a great way to stay ahead of the competition, and keep dominating your niche, both now and in the future.
