Online retail is a competitive sector and if you run a website for your business, you’ll need to know that you are doing everything that you can to keep up with the competition.
Adding functionality to your site is one way of doing this, but you should take the time to truely consider the customer journey.
In this article, we’ll look at ways that you can improve the customer experience delivered from your website.
Improve Your Customer Experience With Better Ways To Communicate
When you are in a store and you need help, you can always go and ask one of the store colleagues if they can give you some assistance. In fact, in a well run store, you will probably find that the assistants will have already spotted that you need help and will have approached you. But when it comes to managing your online store, how do you replicate that level of service?
Encouraging visitors to send an email isn’t ideal – because it can take so long to give a reply.
One of the ways that you can replicate traditional store service is by using live chat. Having chat functions on your site will mean that your customers can speak to an advisor straight away when they need it the most.
You could also use chatbots to save on having to have your website customer service department continually staffed.
Check out this web chat software review.
Make Your Site Navigable
How easy is it to get around your site? Can customers find what they are looking for easily?
Your site should be laid out in an intuitive manner. Think about the products that your customers are coming in for the most and that attract the best margins for you- these should be in the most prominent place on your site.
Make it as easy as possible for customers to find the products that they are looking for by using simple and uncomplicated menus. Navigation bars should be somewhere that they can be easily found – either at the top or on the side of the screen.
Offer Free Shipping
One of the problems with online shopping is that you need to ship the items to the customer. They don’t get to own the items right away and they have to pay for shipping. But if you were to offer free shipping, then you could attract far more customers.
Free shipping can make the difference between making the sale and having abandoned shopping carts.
Retarget Your Customers
Retargetting is a way of converting missed sales into actual sales. If a customer has been looking for certain products on your site, but then didn’t buy them, you should retarget them with ads on social media and in their internet search. You can tailor your ads to feature the specific products that the customer was looking at. Often, this can be enough to spark the customer to return to the site and complete the sale.