The eCommerce industry is flourishing. While this is good news for someone who wants to start an online business, it’s at the same time troubling. How come? Launching and running your own eCommerce operation means that you will be up against the harsh competition. But don’t let this discourage you.
Customers will choose you over other online shops if they have a great experience with your online brand. How do you create these experiences, you ask? You need to delight your customers and make them remember you! Here are seven tactics to help you do it.
Make help available 24/7
There will always be customers that need some help when it comes to online shopping. To delight them, you need to make help readily available to them. There are plenty of solutions that can help you with this. For instance, you can create a self-service help center or write educational blog posts and guides. The industry standard is live chat.
Live chat is there to provide help to customers but also to answer their questions regarding the shopping experience they are having in real-time. To optimize the labor costs, you can even invest in a chatbot. These little fellas use AI and are self-sufficient when answering simple customer queries.
Ensure safe arrival of the goods
When you are in the product sales business, you need to ensure that whatever it is that you sell safely reaches your customers. You can do a couple of things to prevent frustrating your customers and at the same time make them fall in love with your online business.
Wrapping your products properly during transportation, especially if you deliver bulk orders, is paramount. You don’t even have to worry that much about money because you can get reliable used plastic machinery for a fraction of the cost.
You can also get bubble barriers and branded packaging. It will save you the trouble of dealing with returned damaged products while at the same time keeping your customers’ level of satisfaction high.
Personalize experience
People don’t exclusively shop at one online shop. They tend to browse products on several sites. Since most of the competition delivers personalized offers, they’ll also expect you to do it. This is not too hard to do. Most online website builders, CMSs, and even Magento have ready-to-use plugins for personalization. You can display them on the checkout page, product category, and product pages.
To truly delight your customers, you can go even one step further with your email subscription list. You can send personalized offers to your subscribers. Make sure to watch email open rates to fine-tune your personalized email marketing strategy if need be.
Keep ongoing loyalty program
A loyalty program is not about you generating more sales and capturing more customers. It’s more about thanking customers for choosing your shop over others. That’s exactly how it should feel if you want to make your loyal customers happy and ensure repeat business. Fortunately, there are many strategies you can juggle before you find the one that works for you and your customers the best.
A loyalty program should not only reward customers who spent months or years with you. The best ones begin with the first purchase. For instance, you can award customers points depending on how much cash they spend. They can use the points during their next purchase and redeem them for real cash. A flash sale now and then is a great idea too!
Keep your online shop optimized
You have to acknowledge the fact that in the world of online shopping, the customer experience starts the moment your online shop starts loading on the customers’ screens. Does it load fast enough? Is the search bar working? Can they easily find what they are looking for? Do they need to register to make a purchase?
Your online shop should be top-notch. It should load lightning-fast on all screen sizes and facilitate shopping. Plus, if you make it load that fast, that’s a huge SEO factor, and your shop will start climbing those search engine result pages.
Encourage feedback
Give the people what they want while it aligns with your brand image and tone of voice. Keep the communication channels open. There is no need to enforce feedback. Politely ask your customers to leave feedback after making a purchase or after deciding to leave your shop.
Customer feedback is precious as you can discover their wants and needs without having to invest in full-scale market research.
Instill trust
With thousands of online shops, customers no longer know who to trust. They are suspicious, and that’s why they turn to big online eCommerce brands. You can shift it. To instill trust, you should provide accurate company information, showcase what you’ve done to protect customers’ payment info, and have the following policies:
- Terms of Service;
- Privacy Policy;
- Returns and Exchanges Policy;
- Shipping Policy;
- Taxes.
That’s about it! Making your customers happy is not hard when you know what to do. These seven strategies will help you set your online store for success and build a happy customer base.
