The easiest way to defeat your eCommerce competition? Provide an awesome shopping experience that makes it super simple for your customers to get what they want.
According to a Customer Experience and Impact study, customers say they will be loyal to a business that gives them the customer experience they want. And as statistics have shown us, it costs 5 times as much to acquire new customers as it does to hold onto the ones you’ve already got.
Customer loyalty, however, is just one of the benefits of awesome shopping experience. More sales and overall growth are others, while the idea that you’re beating your rivals to the punch in what is fast becoming overpopulated – the eCommerce sector, is also pretty satisfying.
Let’s take a look at exactly how you can enrich your shopping experience, defeat your eCommerce competition – and why all these matters.
Generate Lots Of Awesome Content
Does your eCommerce store need a blog? It sure does. Blogs are good for SEO, making you more visible on Google, and thus bringing more people to your site.
How does a blog enrich the shopping experience, though?
Good question. It’s important to remember that, as an online store, you may not be the biggest name on the Internet. What’s more, people who pop by your store are probably learning about you for the first time.
And as we all know, for an individual to make a purchase they have to be sure about the product and you.
In other words, they need to be able to trust you.
Below you can see a blog ASOS has published for their marketplace:
Producing awesome content about your niche and the products you sell is an excellent way to build a rapport with your customers. They will be able to make better, more informed buying decisions, and they’ll be happy that they are able to put a voice to the store they’re visiting.
Blogs are a great way to solve a customer’s’ problems, too, and this is important for a top-notch shopping experience.
Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile Responsive
Mobile Internet browsing overtook desktop for the first time last year, while more and more of us are researching products on our phones.
What does this tell you? That your website needs to be mobile friendly. If it isn’t, you risk losing customers who might otherwise have purchases from you.
It’s an easy mistake to make because lots of first-time eCommerce store owners might assume that a website looks exactly the same on a mobile phone as it does on the desktop. It doesn’t – instead, it looks messy.
To make sure that your website is mobile friendly, you need to install a responsive theme. There are plenty to choose from. Just make sure that yours fits in with your brand and niche.
Implement An Awesome Pricing Strategy That Encourages Customer Loyalty
As an eCommerce store owner, you should always be thinking about how you can encourage customer loyalty so that once a customer has done business with you, they’ll want to keep coming back.
One of the ways to retain a customer is by implementing an effective pricing strategy.
There are many customer acquisition strategies you could use. One of my personal favorites is the instant reward. When a customer makes their first purchase, you could reward them with a discount on their next purchase.
Some eCommerce owners fall into the trap of offering a discount on a customer’s first purchase – but this isn’t a customer retention tactic. To retain a customer, you want to adjust the price of their next purchase.
When a customer sees that you’re willing to reward them, their sense of loyalty kicks in.
There are other pricing strategies you can implement to reward your customers, build loyalty and kill your competition. For example, you could adjust the prices of certain products once a customer has spent X amount of money, offer a discount for shoppers who are purchasing the same thing over and over again (think consumables such as makeup) or lower your prices for specific customer groups, such as veterans.
Collect Consumer Data
Imagine you’ve just wandered into an online clothing store. This isn’t your first time here, but for some reason, you now can’t seem to find anything you like.
Disappointed, you leave.
This is a bad shopping experience that costs eCommerce store owners cash and sales. But how can you tailor the shopping experience so that a customer sees products they will definitely like?
Collect consumer data.
The more data you have on a customer, the more you can discard all those items they don’t want to see, and instead present to them the stuff they will love.
To do this, you can install a point of sale system (POS). This collects and stores key data about your consumers, such as their previous purchases and browsing behavior.
Then, you can use the info to personalize their shopping experience via email. Speaking of which …
Optimize Email Marketing
Each time a first-time customer makes a purchase, make sure you (legally) capture their email address. There are lots of email auto responders that do this for you.
Once a customer is on your email list, you can then provide them with an even better shopping experience by offering them great deals and discounts right in their inbox.
You can also use emails to make a customer aware whenever you have a new product in the store that you think they’ll love. This means they don’t even need to spend the time popping into your store and looking for it themselves.
Below you can see a company that sells Mavic Skins offering a 15% discount for email addresses:
These are some ways to improve the shopping experience for your customers while at the same time destroying your competition.
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