Increasing Sales: Crafting a Satisfying Customer Experience

To increase sales on your e-commerce site, there’s a number of different things you can do. The main keys are A. Bring in new buyers B. Bring back previous buyers C. Closing the sale. Crafting a satisfying customer experience helps decrease your cart abandonment (closing the sale) and it will add incentive to bring back previous buyers. Your customer experience should be where you start to better serve your current and future customers. There are five stages that go into creating the ultimate user experience.

1. The customer needs to be guided to your site

This is done through advertising, which can be online or through word-of- mouth. A satisfied customer is your best advertiser – he/she would gladly recommend your website to others, and without hesitation. Rarely do people talk positively, even if they had a good experience. As customers, they feel they are entitled to it, and this is not without good reason – it is their hard-earned money that they are spending on your site after all. So the trick is not to create a ‘good’ customer experience, but an ‘awesome’ one that will leave them raving about it on social media. But to get to this point, you need to have customers in the first place. If you haven’t that many customers, then you need to focus on maximizing the yields on your marketing spend. Do the pop-ups link correctly? A review (and complete overhaul) of your marketing strategy might be in order if the marketing ROI (Returns On Investment) is low at present. There are always alternate avenues of advertising, and newer demographics to market your site. Explore all your options before arriving at what is best for your site.

2. The customer needs to feel comfortable just looking around

The user interface needs to be easy to use. Too often, when a user searches for something, multiple products are shown. Although they have thumbnail pictures, these have truncated product headlines, forcing visitors to click on them. After looking through 2-3 product pages and being disappointed with it not meeting their requirements, they leave. It can be extremely difficult to get them to come again. Metrics like bounce rate and exit rate can tell you how many visitors you are losing every day

• Tip: Take a look at the design of your site and see if it needs to be changed.

3. The customer needs to find something that suits his/her needs

This is most important. After all, he/she is there to buy and not simply look around. You gain absolutely nothing if the visit doesn’t end in a sale.

Why are people visiting your site and not buying?

Are the rates higher than your competitors? If yes, you might want to consider reducing them to make them more competitive, provided they are utilitarian and not in the luxury segment. If your e-commerce site sells luxury items, you might need to have better (read well-taken) product photographs, and more enticing product descriptions. An expert can tell you if they are visiting your site from a search engine, and what keywords they queried for. Why this is important is you need to know if they came to your site looking for something which you do not sell. If it is out of stock, you need to remove the listing; otherwise you need to figure out how exactly your site showed up in the search results for those particular keywords. The chances are it is due to some dated content somewhere which hasn’t been removed. You would need to clean up your site.

• Have you entrusted your marketing to a third party who bid on these keywords? If yes, you lose money for every click – and make nothing in the process.

4. The customer must have an extremely easy time at checkout

This is the most important part of the sale. If they are having a hard time at checkout (did you know that the most commonly cited reasons for shopping cart abandonment are technical reasons, like being timed out or the transaction taking too long to process?), they leave, never to return. No one who came with the intention of buying from you deserves to be treated this way. Analytics can tell you if they tried to make a purchase, and if this is happening to a lot of customers, you need to set things right.

5. The customer should be contacted later, to elicit feedback

If the sale was successful, you need to follow up with an email along the lines of “Thanks for shopping with us. Is there anything we can do to make your experience better the next time?”. If it was unsuccessful, shopping cart abandonment emails can help recapture some of the lost sales, but keep in mind they might not yield any significant results if checkout difficulties remain.