If you are looking to increase your sales, then you might assume that the obvious choice might be to spend more money on marketing. However, did you know that you could be losing conversions through your sales funnel?
64% of consumers think customer experience is more important than price. If you want to increase the turnover of your e-commerce, it’s time to create an extraordinary user experience by following these 7 trends
1. The mobile customer experience
From now on, we are not just talking about e-commerce, but m-commerce. In 2020, mobile purchases are expected to represent more than 70% of online commerce. According to Think with Google, 77% of shoppers are likely to order from mobile sites where purchases are made quickly and easily.
To respond to this trend, eliminate unnecessary tabs, compress images, remove pop-ups and sidebars, and use a responsive theme. Adapt your content and shopping guides so that they promote shopping with one click on a smartphone. No longer settle for a responsive theme. Build a full-fledged mobile e-commerce platform.
Here are some interesting marketing insights to consider:
- Almost 70% of consumers admit that page load speed influences their desire to buy
- 90% of consumers have already left an e-commerce site that was not loading quickly
- 57% of consumers leave a slow site for the competition
- For every second of delay in loading mobile pages, conversions can drop by up to 20%
The more the years go by, the more Internet users want speed and fluidity. Improving the customer experience necessarily involves optimizing the loading of your pages.
How to reduce the loading speed?
Here are some avenues to explore:
- Use the new Google image format
- Prioritize content at the top of the page
- Host the videos on a third-party service and not on its website
- Limit animations
- Allow resource caching
- Minify CSS and JavaScript elements
- Use CDN technology
2. Personalization for customer experience
One of the major trends in e-commerce is creating a more personalized experience for consumers. According to Accenture, 33% of customers who abandon an e-commerce site do so for lack of personalization. A real world example would be a vet service. They do not always provide a personal experience for their customers. In comparison, mobile pet care services tend to provide a more personal experience.
Is there a way to personalize the shopping experiences on your merchant site to boost sales conversions. Here are what some of the leading sales training speakers suggest:
- Offer targeted recommendations based on the customer’s previous purchases
- Display additional products in the shopping cart.
- Integrate augmented reality to test or try a product virtually
- Use geolocation to suggest the nearest stores or pick-up points
- Use predictive targeting to adapt the home page to the Internet user
- Use customer visit or purchase history to deliver targeted coupons
3. Using a chatbot for customer experience
40% of Internet users don’t care whether they are being helped by a robot or a real human. What matters to them: responsiveness and relevance. It’s no wonder that 45% of users rate chatbots as their first choice for contacting customer service.
And in the e-commerce sector, this virtual assistant is very useful for boosting conversions: 47% of consumers say they are ready to buy items using a chatbot. In fact, 35% of online shoppers have already ordered a product using a chatbot.
For example, WhatsApp, a popular social media platform, has a vast user base and high engagement rate, which increases the likelihood of business messages getting noticed. This makes it an ideal environment for business transactions to take place. As a result, many companies use automated chatbots for customer service to resolve primary issues quickly and efficiently. If you’re looking for the Best whatsapp chatbot for your business, it’s important to personalize the chatbot to align with your specific needs, thereby streamlining your services and enhancing customer satisfaction.
Developing a chatbot makes it possible to capture visitors looking for information. If they can quickly find out about your delivery terms, your return policy, or the products on your website, they will be much more likely to buy.
AI chatbots play a crucial role in the automation of customer experience. If you got this question: “what is customer experience automation?” you need to know that it is the process of managing and enhancing interactions between businesses and customers. This can be enhanced with the usage of technology and automation. Increasing customer expectations for seamless interactions and competitive pressure are some of the reasons for implementing chatbots, which can bring about an increase in sales.
According to many customer experience experts, a chatbot reassures you about your dynamism and your reactivity. It unclogs your customer service while providing a personalized experience to your visitors.
4. Social multi-channel customer experience
You know, your customers are on social media. But what you might not know is that they like to stay there and do everything: read an article, play a game, chat privately with their friends, contact a brand…and go shopping!
A study by BigCommerce reveals that 30% of online shoppers are ready to order a product on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat.
Social commerce consists of selling products directly on social networks. The shopping experience is completely internalized to the platform. Read here to learn more about the state of social commerce in recent years and how it develops with customer experience.
Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat all offer social commerce functionality. The advantage of allowing purchasing on social networks? The process is smoother, as the customer has all the necessary options (chat, delivery information, payment methods) in one page. There are fewer steps and clicks than in a traditional online store.
Result: the customer experience being more interactive and fluid, the conversion rate increases.
5. Voice commerce is on the rise
The user experience also develops outside of your website. At a time when connected speakers are booming (Google Home, Alexa …), voice commerce is also doing well. In a single sentence, it is now possible to order a pizza or a product on Amazon.
In the short term, the easiest way is to open a store on the Amazon marketplace to take advantage of this bargain.
In the long run, develop your own voice app that will allow consumers to get buying guides, reviews, and your news. Not to mention the possibility of ordering one of your products directly by voice!
6. The visual customer experience
The visual holds a preponderant place in the customer experience. However, image recognition technology has reached a certain level of sophistication in recent years.
Now, on Google or Pinterest, you can easily search for products using a pre-existing image or an image captured with the phone. These two platforms have very powerful features to find products identical or similar to those required in visual searches.
What can you do to take advantage of visual commerce and improve the experience of your visitors? The answer is simple: position yourself through the images.
We are not talking about traditional SEO positioning, in which you just have to include the keyword in "title" and "alt" . In the field of image recognition, technology is able to identify a visual by scanning and find matches without using descriptions or tags .
More than ever, you need to use product photos that are clear, with proper backgrounds, in the different colors available and from different angles.
The goal is for users to be able to locate your product from a photo taken with their phone, seen on social media, or appeared in their Google searches.
7. Transparency motivates your customers to buy
Transparency now applies to all elements of your e-commerce. Generally, when we talk about transparency in the world of commercial sites, it is about transparency about the use of data. However, in 2020, transparency goes much further by applying to the origin of your products and the values of your business. Buyers are looking for labels and guarantees about what they consume.
According to a recent survey by Motivation Ping, they found that 86% of consumers only want to buy from online retailers who are 100% transparent about all aspects of their business.
Another Ipsos study reveals that 72% of consumers expect brands to take responsibility and be transparent. 89% are even ready to stop using a brand if they feel they lack information or are being duped.
Optimizing the customer experience involves displaying clear labels on your site and product sheets. Be transparent about the origin of your products, their composition, your commitments and your intrinsic values. This is the key to increasing the confidence of your visitors and driving conversions.
All of these points can help you start to create a customer experience strategy. If you need any further assistance, then have a look at a company like Qualtrics who can be found at https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/customer/design-customer-experience-strategy/.
