If you had to decide which is more important between customer experience and conversions, which would you choose?
Online shopping is growing at a rapid rate across Southeast Asia with projections of it reaching $64.8 billion by 2021. But just because consumers are now decidedly choosing the convenience of the e-commerce route, it does not mean that e-commerce retailers can rest on their laurels. Customer experience is just as important online as it is offline.
If you had to decide which is more important between customer experience and conversions, which would you choose? Obviously, conversions are important—they’re what keep you going. Customer experience drives conversions, though, which means that it should also be one of your top priorities.
So, how can you optimise your site for customer experience? Here are just some of the things you can do right now to ensure your customers have the best experience possible when visiting your site.
How to Optimise Your E-Com Site for Customer Experience:
1. Conduct a Heuristic Analysis
If you aren’t familiar with heuristic analysis, it is a method in which a person or program will go through a website and analyse it, making a note of any points of friction, confusion, distrust, and other insights. There are professionals you can hire to give your site a thorough run-through, providing you with suggestions to improve customer experience.
To save money, or if you’re interested in trying it on your own, there are guides you can follow to go through your site, conduct a heuristic analysis, and optimise for customer experience.
Caleb Ulku, founder of Ulku Logistics, believes that constant analysis is they key to maintaining an optimally designed site. In addition to heuristic analysis, Ulku is also a proponent of ongoing split testing. He says, “There are no expert marketers, only expert testers. There are a variety of services that allow split testing to improve conversion rate. Of course, you’ll need enough traffic (read: first page rankings) to do statistically significant split tests. Traffic from AdWords often behaves differently than organic traffic, so creating and optimising an AdWords landing page often won’t translate to a page with organic traffic. In other words, split testing should be done for pages that are ranking organically, with organic traffic.
Also read: 5 features to enhance user experience of your online marketplace
2. Customise Visitors’ Experiences
Technology has come a long way. Nowadays, programs use AI to analyse individual customers’ preferences, behaviors, and online purchasing trends, displaying the most relevant content and information on your site for them. This tech makes it possible to customise each visitors’ experience without having to manually program anything.
3. Implement Top-Notch Security
A big point of friction and concern for customers is lack of security. When making a purchase, there is a lot of personal and sensitive information they have to enter before the transaction will be processed. If they make an account, that personal information is going to be stored on your site.
If your site isn’t secure and they don’t feel they can trust it, they may not go through with the purchase. Security is important to customers, and if your site is top-notch and trustworthy, that friction will be gone, resulting in a better experience.
4. Offer Multiple Payment Options
Having a lack of payment options is frustrating and could cause you to lose some conversions. Some customers may only have one or two payment methods or prefer a specific method when shopping online. If you only accept card payments, you’ll miss out on those customers who prefer to pay with services like PayPal.
5. Optimise for Mobile
Consumers have made a massive shift from desktop to mobile shopping in the last few years, and there’s no going back. If your website isn’t optimised for mobile devices, many of your customers may struggle to navigate your site. It’s important to optimise for mobile to ensure you’re taking care of not only desktop customers but also those shopping on their phones and tablets.
5. Get Social
Although your social media pages aren’t technically part of your website, it’s important to optimise them and keep them up-to-date to provide customers the optimal experience. Many turn to social media to check reviews, get information on the latest discounts and sales, give feedback, and ask questions.
Furthermore, there are ways you can integrate social media content on your website to drive community engagement. Through platforms like Olapic you can aggregate and showcase real customers’ social media posts featuring your products. Customers inherently trust others customers’ photos and reviews more than brand promotions, so highlighting real images from real people may spark more conversions.
6. Be Consistent
Consistency is key. If customers can’t figure out how to spell your products’ name because it’s different on every page they read or can’t estimate shipping because it changes every time they make an order, they will become frustrated easily. Make sure your messaging, content, and design are all consistent.
7. Don’t Forget About Branding
Although focusing on the customer is extremely important, you can’t forget about branding. Having a high-quality, recognisable logo can make a huge difference. Deluxe’s logo design program lets you design as many logos as you’d like from industry-specific templates. Once you’ve decided on the one that’s best for you, you pay a small, one-time fee and are good to go! It’ll save you a lot of time and money.
A high-quality logo isn’t all that matters, though. Believe it or not, where you place your logo matters too. Studies have shown if you place your logo on the left-hand side of your site, you’ll create better brand recall, will be considered “unique,” improve navigation, and more.
Final Thoughts
Optimizing your site to enhance customer experience won’t just make things easier on customers, it will help with conversions too. If your site isn’t fully optimised, make the changes and see how things go. What areas do you need to optimise most?
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