4 Powerful Strategies that can Win eCommerce Brands Loyal Customers
Got a sharply designed eCommerce store? Awesome. However, your work isn’t finished yet.
Why?
It doesn’t matter how pretty your website is if you aren’t holding onto customers.
Brands with the greatest customer engagement grab consumers attention so that they keep on coming back to purchase more products. Using the correct customer engagement strategies improves loyalty and helps retain customers.
In this article, we take a look at 4 strategies to create loyal eCommerce customers.
Maintain Excellent Customer Service
In 2018, there are certain features that your customers expect from you – and excellent customer service is one of these.
Put yourself in a customer’s shoes: If a store treats you brilliantly, answers your questions quickly, solves your problems and gives you what you want, you’re going to feel pretty darn positive about that store.
So positive, in fact, that you’ll probably want to shop there again, and even perhaps recommend it to a friend.
One of the best ways to improve your customer service is to install a live chat feature in the form of a chatbot. Chatbots can do many things you can’t always do. They can:
- Respond fast to your customers
- Personalize the customer’s shopping experience and make accurate recommendations (a chatbot uses AI to know more about a customer based on their past purchases and browsing history)
- Provide satisfactory and detailed answers
Because chatbots are available around the clock, your store becomes more accessible to customers around the clock. This is important when you consider that customers expect you to have answered their query within an hour.
As well as implementing chatbots, be more active on social media. If someone is asking questions or raising concerns, meet them where they are; interact with them and show them that you care.
Focus Energy on your Brand
If we can identify with a brand, and if we can see our own values represented in a brand’s values, it’s very unlikely that we’ll even glance at the competition, let alone try it.
Brand identification is key to retaining customers, with a study last year showing how important it is that a brand shares the same beliefs and values as their customers.
Moreover, according to another study, stores who put a lot of time into building a meaningful connection with their customers perform better than those who don’t.
According to the same study, 74% of people wouldn’t miss you if you disappeared. Why? Well, you hadn’t worked on crafting a memorable brand that people relate to and identify with.
Here are some tips to help you with your branding:
- Create a logo – It all starts with a logo, which is your brand’s visual identity. A logo must represent who you are, and you need to plaster it everywhere, from your website to your social media profiles to your emails
- Identify your purpose – What are you here for? What promises are you making to people? Once you know your purpose, it will then inform the way you brand your store
- Be consistent – Colours, fonts, images, and content need to be consistent so that people begin to familiarise themselves with you and so that they get a feel for who you are
- Create a narrative – All good companies have a story that they tell so as to earn the trust and loyalty of their customers through empathy. What will yours be?
If you find these tips overwhelming and don’t know where to get started – don’t shy away from outsourcing the work to experts who can really help excel in the growth of your brand.
Make the Buying Process as Quick and Simple as Possible
Shoppers are busy people, and they’ve grown accustomed to a super simple, hassle-free buying process.
Amazon holds a lot of responsibility for this. They realized that a great way to improve conversions was to add a one-click buying process. It makes the buyer’s journey simple.
Simplicity isn’t just key to instant conversions – it’s also key to long-term loyalty. If you can make this really easy for your customers, they will want to return again and again.
To this end, it’s a really good idea to add a Point of Sales card reader to your store. This allows you to sell anywhere, and it also allows the customer to buy anywhere and at any time – be it offline or online. Customers want these options. They want to be able to browse and shop anywhere at any time, and they want their data to be the same on all devices.
The POS card reader also protects your customers, which is awesome for building trust and more loyalty.
Not just this, but the card reader also stores your customers’ data so that it can personalize their future shopping experience, allowing you to recommend them more of what they want and less of what they don’t want. Again, this is perfect for building customer loyalty.
Reply to Reviews (Good and Bad)
Online reviews are good for conversions. In fact, they have the potential to boost your conversions by 74%.
When it comes to generating more customer loyalty, however, it isn’t only the actual reviews – it’s also how you respond to reviews.
Why? It improves the perception of your brand.
For one thing, it shows that you care.
As an example, let’s imagine that someone has left a negative review on your website. If you leave that review on the table without a response, it’s going to look pretty bad.
However, if you politely respond to it and show empathy, understanding a determination to resolve any issue raised, it can win the trust and loyalty of other customers.
Label Insight did some research into the transparency of this kind, and they found that 94% of customers will stay loyal if a brand shows transparency.
Conclusion
These are 4 easy ways to create loyal eCommerce customers this year. As long as you give customers more of what they want, there is no reason why they wouldn’t stick around.
Do These Shocking Web Design Fails Scare Your Customers Away?
These days, building a website has never been easier. But designing a website that meets the appeal of your potential visitors is a little trickier.
It takes more preparation and careful examination to ensure that your website lives up to its fullest potential and converts as many users as possible into paying customers.
If you are unsure where to start, this article should help. We have picked out a selection of common web design fails that you should resolve in order to increase your sales.
Poor Responsive Design
Let’s be honest, everybody should have a responsive design for their websites today. Mobile users account for a prominent chunk of the global internet traffic. In fact, it’s sitting at 51.89% as of 2018.
If you are designing a website, you’ve probably heard about responsive design a thousand times. However, you may not have heard that not all responsive design is the same.
Whether you’re using an eCommerce platform like Shopify, you’re using a CMS platform like WordPress, or you’re developing your own website from scratch, responsive design is something that needs to be carefully looked over.
Once you have a responsive website, carefully analyze your website on the three major platforms – mobile, desktop, and tablets.
How does the website respond? What do the menus look like on these platforms? Are your landing pages as pretty as they could be across all display sizes? It’s here where you have to be brutally honest with yourself.
Chances are, your website might need some extra tweaking here and there. Thankfully, it’s very easy to use CSS to make slight changes to the layout of your web page depending on the display size. If anything is slightly out of order, it shouldn’t be too difficult to fix.
With 57% of mobile users saying that they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site, it makes sense to get yours right as soon as possible.
Slow Page Load Time
Just like with responsive design, it should come as no surprise that page load time impacts your visitors’ opinions of you.
40% of web users mentioned that they will abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. In the same study, it was found that a 1 second delay in page response would result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
Those are big statistics that cannot be ignored. You can use tools like GTmetrix to carefully analyze how your website performs. You can find bottlenecks in your performance and find easy methods to optimize them.
GTmetrix uses a variety of testing criteria and gives you information on how your website compares to the average web page. You can run the test on multiple pages, so make sure to test important areas such as your homepage, blog, and store page.
Poor Image Design and Web Copy
Have a website that loads quickly and gets displayed properly on all platforms? Great! You’re off to a good start.
Optimizing your web design doesn’t stop there, though. It’s just as important that you take time to perfect your web copy and improve the quality of the images you use.
During an eye tracking study conducted at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, a number of interesting stats were found that relate to images and web copy.
- The average time a users’ eyes fixated on the main image was 5.25 seconds
- The average time a users’ eyes focused on the main written content was 6.44 seconds
- The average for the logo and the menu were 5.94 seconds and 6.48 seconds, respectively.
If your users are going to spend this much time with their attention on these specific areas, they should be given dedicated resources to make sure they are perfect. If you’re having technical issues trying to build these features out correctly, we recommend using a page builder. They can save you time as well a lot of resources.
Placing CTAs Without Testing
Finding the perfect CTA is difficult. It may even require A/B testing and lots of visitor data to find out what works best.
Testing your CTA is a crucial method for optimizing your conversions.
It’s a common myth that your CTA should be placed above the fold. An excellent article CTA location shows that it’s less about the position and more about the copy that precedes it.
The article above makes it clear that whilst placing your CTA above the fold or just below usually works, it’s only going to convert exceptionally well if you provide engaging copy before the CTA.
It doesn’t stop at the copy, though. You must test your own CTA to find the best results. The studies below show just how far extra testing can take you.
These particular findings are anecdotal, so they may not be directly viable for your website. However, these stats show that there’s no such thing as ‘too far’ when it comes to testing your CTA performance.
First tip: Remove Clutter
Making sure your CTA stands out without being hidden amongst other web page clutter seems to be very important. Open Mile saw a 232% increase from their homepage by reducing clutter around their CTA.
Second tip: Make Buttons
Using buttons as opposed to text seems to be a powerful way to increase conversions. CreateDebate saw a 45% increase in sign ups by swapping out linked text with a button.
Third tip: A/B Test Everything
Once you’ve tested the obvious things, you may think it makes sense to give it a break. You don’t want to overcomplicate such a simple element of your web page, right? Well, this seems to be false.
In an article by Quicksprout, it was revealed that SAP increased their conversion rate by 32.5% by changing their CTA color to orange, whilst Performable saw a 21% increased conversion by picking the color red.
Simple changes like this show that additional testing can always lead to better conversion. If you are able to, test everything.
Not Optimizing Your Product Pages
If you are able to bring a visitor to a product page, you’ve already won a big battle in captivating that visitor. However, the battle is not over. Here are a few things to consider for optimizing your product pages.
Show Better Images
The images for your products are just as important as the images on your homepage, and for similar reasons. The image of the product you are selling leaves a lasting impression on the buyer. Make sure your store offers a zoom in feature so that users can get a better idea if the product is suited to them.
Show Stock Levels
If you have a physical store location, you should keep your stock levels up to date. 44% of UK correspondents and 36% of US correspondents said that they always research a purchase on the internet before visiting a local store.
If you use Shopify, you can use their card reader to automate this process for you. A POS also allows your customers to purchase from you in any physical location.
Include a Live Chat
If you have a contact form or live chat feature on your website, you should make it easily accessible when a visitor is on a product page. 65% of American shoppers have engaged in live chat, and 53% of UK shoppers use it.
Summary
If you want to ensure you don’t run into shocking fails like these with your own business, you should consider working with a designer to perfect your website experience.
Interested in discussing your project ? Get a Free Quote
Do you know the importance of blogs for your business?
There are many perceptions about blog writing its significance in organic google rankings. A lot of people feel hesitant or simply ignorant towards to importance of blogs. Understanding your situation, we would like to pen down some tips for efficient blog management and how to get maximum benefits from it.
As a business owner you will be thankful for the concept of blogging if introduced to the miracle it can do for your business. Considering its benefits in online marketing. we are strong adviser of content publishing.
Now, without any further delay, here are the benefits of blogging for your website!
INCREASE IN SEARCH ENGINE TRAFFIC
Blogs play a major role in terms of search engine optimization and directing the web traffic towards your website. Leave your blogs on web as you drop your hooks in water and see how it works for you. The more blogs we have the more we get indexed by the search engines. So, why to miss a chance and stay active on web.
ADD CREDIBILITY TO YOUR BUSINESS
A blog is an opportunity to present your business an establish a strong brand reputation by sharing insights about your business with your readers. You can build the trust and familiarity of your readers and become authorized providers in your domain.
CONVERSIONS
The quality of content on the blog can be a deciding factor for your audience. The continuous activity on your blog will keep you alive and active on web. Your recurring activity and effort will be observed by the readers and they would love to partner with you.
LINK BUILDING
Blog writing gives you an opportunity to build high quality inbound links for your business. By adding new content on your website you connect with a community of online marketers and writers that will be beneficial for your online presence.
KEEPS YOU ACTIVE
Nobody is unaware of the fact that Google love their audience and the one who serve better wins the higher ranking position. So, the better content you provide to your audience the better you get served by Google.
Considering the benefits, We would like to state that blogging open business doors for you an you should not miss the opportunity to compete with big brands and differentiate yourself from your competitors.
We wish you all happy blogging!
5 Reasons you need website redesigning
Does your website stand up to your expectations?
Well, if you yourself aren’t happy with the way it looks and works how could you expect your audience liking it. With the advancement in technology and competition on web everybody is standing in a race to dig their flag at the top and win the maximum conversions.
You probably might not be having an idea or reason to spend some extra bucks on redesigning your website. But I would like to draw your attention towards few major aspects of your website as following.
Loading Time of the Website
According to a recent survey, 49% of consumers expect a site to load in 2 seconds o less and rest 51% are patient enough to wait for the website to load.
So, would you like to risk a huge amount of traffic and loose your audience because of your damn high loading time. Well, I believe you won’t!
Interface
How often you find time to visit your website and check if the user experience you are offering is good enough to retain visitors or not?
If you haven’t visited your website lately then possibility you could be missing some quality checks and might have overlooked. So, keep an eye on the display, user experience and performance of the website.
Mobile Experience
Undoubtedly mobile traffic has surpassed web in a huge volume and you can well understand the significance of mobile users. So, make sure your website is easy to navigate on mobile devices and offers a good interface for smaller screens.
Conversions & Sales
Are you happy with your online revenue ? Does your website brings enough sales ?
If your answer is No, then it’s a high time to consider it seriously and look into the reason of loosing the high volume of people who are making online purchase. A good design and call to action have proved to be a magic wand in success of online stores.
Bounce Rate
If you are not able to retain your visitors more than few seconds and meet your business goals then its a matter to think upon. You will have to find out the root cause for this bounce rate and increase your effort towards improving your user experience.
If any of the above is being one of the reason for your failure , you should work with a designer having good experience with branding.