In today’s digital world, retail businesses cannot underestimate the significance of a smooth online customer journey. This includes all of your customer’s encounters with your online brand, from initial awareness of the company and its offerings to the post-purchase customer service experience. If you run an online retail business, you should prioritise making improvements to your specific online customer journey. Doing so will enable you to improve consumer satisfaction, volume of sales, and long-term consumer loyalty. It’s is more than just making a simple purchase; it’s about providing an effortless, engaging experience that keeps customers returning to your business.
Focusing on the online customer journey is more important now than it has ever been, with more and more consumers preferring digital stores to physical ones. Global events such as the COVID-19 epidemic have also contributed to this shift, causing even more shoppers to choose online shopping as their default option. It is critical for you to improve your understanding of how things actually work, in order to succeed long-term in the highly competitive online retail landscape.
By building an intelligently optimised online customer journey you can achieve higher sales conversion rates, improved customer retention, and a stronger, more recognisable brand. Additionally, an optimised customer journey allows you to collect anonymised data on your customers’ preferences and behaviours, which you can then use to inform your future marketing campaigns.
The online customer journey explained
The online customer journey can be divided into multiple stages, with each stage offering you an opportunity to engage with and guide your customers. The first stage relates to brand awareness. This is where your potential client base learns about your service or product via your online or offline marketing campaigns, or possibly by word-of-mouth. This stage is followed by consideration, in which your potential customers research and compare your and your competitors’ products. The customer then reaches the decision stage, in which they decide to actually make a purchase from your business.
This is followed by the retention stage, which focuses on post-purchase customer service and encouraging repeat business. Finally, the customer reaches the advocacy stage, where (if they liked their shopping experience enough) they will go on to recommend your company to their social network. By understanding what happens at each of these stages, you can make improvements to each individual step of the journey and improve your customers’ shopping experience and overall satisfaction. This can ideally lead to long-term customer retention and improve the profitability and efficiency of your business processes.
Two key ways you can optimise the online shopping journey
- Personalise the shopping experience
One particularly effective way to improve the customer’s purchasing experience is by personalising elements to fit each specific consumer’s needs and preferences. You can use anonymised data on your consumers’ browsing history and purchasing habits to make intelligent changes to the shopping experience. For example, an online clothes retailer could use stored information to offer a customer clothing and accessories that are appropriate for their specific style and size. They could also customise their discount offers and sales to specifically offer savings and deals on brands that they know are especially popular with their clientele. Personalisation of the customer journey can also enable you to provide a more engaging and relevant experience for your customers, increasing the amount of time they spend shopping on your website compared to your competitors’. This also helps your customers build a closer connection and a more positive association with your brand.
2. Streamline your customer support services
Another important aspect of improving the online shopping experience is providing streamlined customer support services. You should explore and adopt a variety of support channels, including live chat, chatbots, and detailed FAQ sections, to provide your clients with a variety of avenues to quickly contact your customer service department and resolve any purchasing issues. For example, an online cosmetics business might use automated chatbots to respond quickly to frequently asked questions about product availability, shipping, and returns. This type of instantaneous, real-time support can dramatically improve the online shopping experience by reducing the amount of confusion or frustration your customers feel, and also shortening the amount of time they have to wait before they receive a resolution or an acknowledgement of their issue.
On top of this, you should also consider incorporating customer support into the initial browsing phase of the online shopping journey. As an example, if a customer is viewing a product page and has a query about a specific item, you can program a live chat button to appear automatically on the same page. This allows you to provide assistance to the customer without them even having to leave the page that they are on. Using a more proactive strategy like this one will not only make your customers feel more supported and valued, it will also increase the chances of them actually following through on their purchase and subsequently becoming repeat customers.
Other key considerations when improving the online shopping journey
Make the check-out process easier with an online payment system
The process by which your customers actually check out their baskets and pay for their goods is an important but often overlooked part of the online customer journey. It is crucial to make this stage as simple and secure as possible in order to avoid cart abandonment and customer dissatisfaction. One way to achieve this is by using a reputable e-commerce payment system to handle all customer transactions. Payment system providers are also able to offer consumers multiple payment methods, including credit cards, debit cards, and digital wallets. When comparing e-commerce payment systems, look for ones with built-in security protocols that can protect your customers’ sensitive financial information, offering them peace of mind when making online purchases.
Make your website interface user-friendly
An optimally designed, user-friendly website can greatly enhance the shopping experience and improve your overall sales volume. As an online business owner, you should place particular emphasis on providing your customers with clear product descriptions, high-quality photos, and user-friendly search tools. You should also ensure your website is mobile-friendly, due to an increasing number of customers choosing to shop on smartphones and tablets over laptops and PCs. In addition to this, simplifying the shopping cart check-out procedure can also reduce instances of cart abandonment and improve overall customer retention.
Furthermore, the speed at which each web page loads can also significantly impact your customers’ shopping experience and, consequently, overall sales conversion. This is because your customers are more likely to abandon their shopping cart if they have to wait an unreasonable amount of time (say, minutes instead of seconds) for each product page to load. It is strongly advisable for you to invest company resources into improving the behind-the-scenes infrastructure of your website, which will optimise and speed up its loading times.
Overall, if you are an online retail business owner hoping to achieve long-term profitability and success, you must place extra emphasis on improving the online customer journey, which you can achieve by employing some of the strategies we have discussed above. This could give you a long-term competitive advantage over other companies and help you build a recognisable brand that your customers are loyal to.
