Improving your Ecommerce User Experience

While potentially that of a stuck record statement, there’s no denying the colossal change we’ve witnessed in consumer behaviour over the last 18 months as a result of the Covid pandemic. Accompanying this change in behaviour was a substantial increase in the value placed on ecommerce as a channel and with retailers across the globe opening up their doors, the role that ecommerce plays is more important now than ever before.

Cindy Crijns

‘The first three months of 2020, we’ve seen 10 year’s worth of growth in 3 months’- McKinsey, Five Fifty 

Your ecommerce website is as much of a shop window as your physical store; it generates revenue, manages inventory and keeps your customers informed – and having a watertight strategy that compliments your digital, and physical presence, is crucial to success.

Exceeding Customer Expectations

Unable to visit stores or go outside during the pandemic, consumers were forced to change their normal routine and search for alternatives. With so many options to choose from, if expectations weren’t met then consumers would merely choose a different company. As such, competition in the ecommerce space is fiercely competitive. 

Consumers are offered a plethora of options for how and where they engage with businesses. They can visit the website, use WhatsApp, social media, or a variety of other channels. Meaning, how you do business is becoming more important than the product or service you sell.

Every form of communication has to be tailored to the customer’s needs. Sending an email or showing ads ill-representative of an individual’s life circumstance will only result in undesirable outcomes; such as unsubscriptions. It only takes one bad (customer) experience to form a negative opinion.

The customer journey needs to be flexible. It’s not a single funnel that leads from an ad to a website, to a sale – a customer takes different paths to reach their goal and your strategy, and approach to user experience must reflect that.

How to Improve the Customer Experience of your Ecommerce Business

So how can you improve the ecommerce customer experience, and drive profitability for your business? At Incubeta, we’ve summarised three key steps you can take to improve your business outputs via user experience. 

  • Personalise the Customer Journey
  • Build your Brand
  • Delight your Customer Base

1) Personalize the customer journey

With 29% of consumers interacting with personalized advertisements over standard ads, injecting personalisation into your customer journey is a fast and effective way to increase user engagement and ad performance. At the very least brands should be personalising their messaging based on location, shopping and browsing habits; increasing relevance where possible. Use the data you have to personalise your strategy for audiences in all stages of the funnel. The more relatable and relevant the content is, the more engaged your audience will be with your business. 

Advertising to new customers is slightly more challenging as you tend to have less available data to hand. To overcome this, consider adding more criteria to your advertising campaigns, such as predefined audiences, time of day, context on the page, and weather forecasts. 

We applied this approach to a campaign we ran with Berlin-based fashion brand, Zalando where we built an automated data-driven creative solution that leveraged dynamic capabilities to achieve a more personalized ad experience. We customized our Seamless Creative platform creating a fitting User Interface for Zalando to effectively and efficiently personalize dynamic creative. Using an easy to use creative assembly, Zalando had the option to publish campaigns immediately or schedule for a future launch date. The solution also included a custom product selector tool developed for Zalando, that gave the teams complete flexibility to build out creatives for the right brand and product requirements.

Learn More Here

2) Build your Brand

Customer perception is becoming an increasingly more important factor that needs to be considered when strategizing your approach to brand awareness. People are more likely to interact with, and buy from companies that they like; a strong brand connects with consumers emotionally and incentivizes them to return and become loyal customers in the long run.

Be sure to make your brand recognizable; a company that cuts through the noise. Those that champion transparency and showcase the core structure of their brand by communicating their values, are more likely to attract, and retain, customers. 

3) Delight your Customer Base

Contrary to popular belief, acquiring a new customer is substantially more expensive than retaining an existing one. Reaching new customers requires more marketing budget than upselling existing customers, not to mention, increasing your customer retention by 5% will increase business profits by over 25%. Focus your approach on introducing programs to increase customer loyalty and engagement, such as loyalty points per purchase, thank you notes, or gifts for the most loyal customers or brand advocates. 

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For more information on how you can improve your ecommerce customer experience, get in touch today, or download our whitepaper that explores the value and importance of adopting an omni-channel approach.

Download Here

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