Do you want to improve the customer experience on your website to drive more sales this festive season but are not sure where to start?
You've done the hard work, created amazing campaigns and are now seeing a steady stream of visitors to your website. However, there's a more important question you should now be asking yourself. And that is how to optimise your website to encourage sales and ensure customers keep coming back!
How to improve the customer experience on your website
We share five simple ways you can start improving the customer experience on your website.
1. Keep transactions simple
How many times have you abandoned an online purchase because the payment processes were annoyingly convoluted? Businesses consistently leak value by failing to optimise the most important part of the transaction – payment.
While it's vitally important to both your customers and your business to ensure transactional security, customer-focused businesses should tailor their payment options to as many people as possible by offering multiple, fast and efficient payment solutions.
2. Optimise site navigation and layout
Directly associated with simplified transactions is, of course, site speed and navigation. Remember, a two-second delay in load time could result in abandonment rates of up to 87%!
Businesses cannot assume that their site visitors are all on the same stage of the purchasing journey, so ensuring all your information, products and services are well thought through, optimally laid out, and easy to find is crucial. Do your research into which site-search technologies and solutions work best for your industry, and watch your site activity and customer satisfaction flourish!
3. Leverage customer reviews
According to HigherLogic, customer reviews are trusted 12 times more than traditional marketing. That means that sharing your customers' reviews is potentially far more impactful than any expensive TV or radio advert!
Consider your own purchasing journey. After deciding a purchase needs to be made, the first port of call is often consumer reviews and feedback, as you decide which supplier or retailer to go with.
Remember, while, of course, there are numerous factors influencing customer behaviour, up to 75% of people online will trust a business after reading a positive review.
4. Looks matter
Stanford University found that up to 75% of your potential customers make decisions based mainly on visual design.
Businesses often focus on back-end functionality (with good reason). Still, unless there is a specific issue with your systems, customers aren't concerned with the elegance and efficiency of your internal processes – they care about what they see when they visit your site.
With millions of competitors selling the exact same products and services as you, ensure you stand out from the crowd with a beautiful, well-designed platform that people will want to visit.
5. Partner with the experts
In the age of social distancing and rapidly evolving consumer-behaviour projections, optimising your businesses website is the most vital business-positive step you can take this festive season. With more and more retail market share migrating to online purchasing, it's a step you absolutely must get right.
By partnering with a trusted, experienced review-management platform, your business can turn your reviews into customer-facing content today, leveraging the customer experiences you've crafted so carefully into valuable, verifiable social proof and, ultimately, sales.
While the temptation may be to go about it alone, a professional review-management and publishing platform can offer holistic, verifiable, data-driven solutions. This can include, for example, automated, SEO-optimised widgets and extensions that continually update your companies reviews and, thus, your online presence.
It's all very well sourcing a bunch of customer reviews. Still, without the tools to manage and engage with your review community and without the competitor insights a good review platform will generate for your business, any return on investment is lost.
Sign up for your free Hellopeter Business account and take your customers’ experiences to the next level!