Many eCommerce businesses seem to ignore the notion of user experience and don’t know how to optimize it. Customer engagement is not a topic they think about intensively. It’s a shame since improving user experience directly translates to maximizing ROI. User Experience is basically every process in the company ensuring that the potential customer has the most pleasant time when shopping on your website. It is a total satisfaction from visiting your store, getting to know the products, buying and using them. Pleasant experience equals truly satisfied customers. Frustration with your website, service or product will keep customers away from coming back to your ecommerce. What’s even worse, dissatisfied customers will talk about their bad experience. Not only with their friends, but also with millions of people via social media. You don’t want to risk that.
User Experience in eCommerce
When it comes to eCommerce businesses, user experience is present in every step of the user interaction. It’s how you generate your leads, your user interface, information architecture, as well as the look&feel of the product you offer. Ecommerce platforms need to make sure that all of the aforementioned elements create customer confidence in your product. The confidence then leads to the purchase and a new satisfied customer that brings you money.
Excellent on customer survey - Business man with smiley faces
Collecting feedback can teach you a lot about your target audience (Source: http://theyec.org/)
eCommerce customer engagement
In order to drive the customer engagement eCommerces need to first know exactly who their customers are. Basing on social media or user research (e.g. survey), establish your buyer personas. Personas will allow you to better fit in your target audience needs. It will be easier to start the conversation with the potential leads and make them discover the product. The key element in engaging future customers would be to create and promote high quality content directed at your target users. It is all about creating a relationship between you and your customers and the community where you create and then answer customers’ needs. You have to create a feeling of sensation in web visitors’ mind. Make them think if their website and the content is so good, their product must be even better. Hopefully after taking care of every step of the purchasing process, you’ll succeed and you’ll get your sale, but what’s next?
The customer lifetime cycle
Creating great customer service as well as the after sale experience with your product will lead to more purchases over time. Whether it’s e-mailing clients with special offers or asking for feedback and getting to know more about them, as soon as your activities create a sense of loyalty, you’re good.
The whole point of taking great care of customer engagement is, of course increasing the retention & repeat purchases, but also creating the advocated of your brand. Satisfied customer will not only come back, but they will tell their friends and Google that you have great products or service driving further growth of your eCommerce. Whatever you do remember that your customers are your best people and if you answer their questions and fulfill their needs, they will not only come back to you for more, but they’ll bring a lot of valuable friends with them.
Torsten is CEO and founder of Userpeek. He is an old stager in the online business with 20 years of experience as an online marketer, conversion rate optimizer and UX strategist.
