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Whether you’re an established ecommerce business or have just launched your own online store, the ecommerce customer experience should be at the forefront of your business strategy. But just what is customer experience and how can you create a positive ecommerce customer experience? That’s exactly what we’re here to explain today.
No business can stay in business without customers. How you treat – or mistreat – them determines how long your doors stay open.
– Harvey Mackay
American businessman Harvey Mackay sums it all up: No customers = no business.
And what the second part of his infamous quote means is that the treatment of your customers – in other words, the customer experience – is directly proportional to the success of your business.
In short: There can be no successful business without satisfied customers.
As an online business, providing a positive customer service experience can be challenging due to the lack of face-to-face interactions.
But that’s not to say that it’s impossible.
In this post, we’ll discuss the importance of customer experience in the ecommerce context and provide you with three easy ways to create a positive ecommerce customer experience to keep them coming back and to ensure the business’s longevity.
Let’s get straight to it.
Importance of Customer Experience
To implement the best ecommerce customer experience, we first need to understand what customer experience is and why it’s important.
Customer Experience: What Is It?
The term “customer experience” is pretty self-explanatory.
As its name suggests, it’s the overall feel and perception customers have of a brand. These impressions can be formed by any sort of direct and indirect interaction that may take place across all stages of the buyer’s journey.
From viewing online ads and product browsing (be it in-store or digitally) to checkout and post-purchase, every single touchpoint a customer has with a brand during the lifetime of their relationship contributes to the whole customer experience.
Why Customer Experience Matters, Especially in Ecommerce
Because the customer experience shapes consumers’ impression of your brand, this is directly related to whether or not they decide to check out your business and ultimately purchase from you.
This has a direct impact on your business’s bottom line, which is why it’s important to not only meet but also exceed buyers’ customer experience expectations.
In ecommerce, this is particularly vital.
As briefly mentioned earlier, providing a positive customer experience online can be tough because it doesn’t have face-to-face communication that often helps with creating personal (read: positive) customer experiences.
But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. In fact, providing a positive customer experience can even be easier to execute in ecommerce.
In the next section, we’ll go in-depth on three ways to improve the ecommerce customer experience.
3 Ways To Improve Ecommerce Customer Experience
1. Design Personalized User Experiences in Ecommerce
Since, as an ecommerce business, you don’t have the benefit of interacting with a customer in person, you need to up your game by designing personalized user experiences.
What this means is that you need to cater your brand’s communication to not only every individual that interacts with your business but also the stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in.
Need more convincing? We’ll let hard facts tell the story: 80% of consumers say they’re more likely to purchase from a brand that offers personalized experiences.
To be clear, we’re not just talking about including your customers’ names in sales and marketing emails. If you really want to provide the best ecommerce customer experience, you’ll need to go further than that.
The road to designing personalized ecommerce customer experiences include:
- Studying your target audience and creating buyer personas based on their interests and habits
- Creating ads that your customers can empathize with and relate to
- Ensuring your ecommerce website is localized (be it in terms of language, product features, or others)
- Deliver relevant product recommendations at the bottom of each product page
- Meet them on their favorite social media and chat platform (more on this later)
- Send abandoned cart reminders (either with an email or via WhatsApp)
2. Ensure Your Ecommerce Business is Mobile-Optimized
The world is going mobile, and with it, shopping habits are evolving.
Mobile commerce is set to hit $3.56 trillion in 2021 – 72.9% more than in 2020.
Needless to say, there are lots of sales to be made from mobile shopping, and the first step to ensuring your business gets a piece of the pie is to provide a seamless mobile shopping customer experience.
When it comes to optimizing your ecommerce business for mobile, most people immediately think about things like having a mobile-friendly website with quick load speeds and easy navigation.
Sure, those are important as they keep shoppers browsing.
But that’s not all you can do, especially when it comes to mobile optimization for an enhanced ecommerce shopping experience.
A part of getting those mobile sales is also about providing a quality mobile ecommerce customer experience beyond your homepage, such as engaging and interacting with customers on their favorite chat app, which leads us to our next point.
3. Engage With Customers on WhatsApp Business
We’ve mentioned this stat a million times before and at the risk of sounding like a broken record, here it is again because it really does paint a powerful picture of WhatsApp’s influence and reach:
WhatsApp is the world’s most popular chat app and is used by 2.5 billion people worldwide. And of those, 175 million message businesses on WhatsApp every single day.
So if you’re looking to provide a better brand and customer experience online and on mobile, you need to get onboard WhatsApp Business immediately.
By doing so, you’re meeting your buyers where they’re at and doing away with the barrier of them coming to you. After all, with so many users worldwide, the chances of a section of your target audience being active WhatsApp users are pretty high.
As an added plus, WhatsApp Business features are so extensive that there are many ways to personalize your WhatsApp interactions with them.
WhatsApp templates and automated messages, WhatsApp ecommerce integrations, and cart recovery apps are just a few of the ways you should be using WhatsApp Business to engage with your buyers.
Just keep in mind that there are different features available on the free WhatsApp Business app and the WhatsApp Business API.
For more information, check out our post on WhatsApp Business API or App: What’s the best for your brand?
Enhance Ecommerce Customer Experience With WhatsApp API
From sending out stock updates and sale announcements to delivery tracking information, the WhatsApp Business API offers plenty of opportunities for online businesses to improve their ecommerce customer experience.
As an official WhatsApp Business Service Provider (BSP), WATI can get you access to the WhatsApp API and even get you set up.
You’re free to start a free trial with us or get in touch for more information – our team members would be happy to help.
