Improving Your Customer’s Journey Is ‘The’ Thing To Boost Conversions
Read on to know-how! (Originally published on WebEngage)
According to Statista, eCommerce will make for 17.5% of the total global retail sales by 2021. The way it is getting easier for brands to take their products online and how consumers choose to make more purchases digitally, this number is all set to grow over the years.
Some of these brands have become a household name for us, while some are struggling to bring in their day to day sales. The difference between the two is usually just the online customer journey they offer to their consumers.
What is an online customer journey?
The customer journey refers to the path a consumer follows before making interaction with a brand until they convert into a customer. For instance, for an eCommerce business, it starts from the point a consumer starts searching for products that the brand sells, to the consumer discovering their brand, goes on to check out their products, wishlist-ing them or making a purchase.
Now that looks like a pretty standard funnel for customer acquisition. Right?
Wrong. Once the shopper lands on your store, their journey with a brand goes on a different tangent. Right from the look and feel of the store, how easy it is to find products, what the product descriptions look like, and more, every little detail starts to matter.
In this article, we’re sharing tactics that are used by global brands across the store to ensure a great online customer journey. Yes, we’re talking about the likes of Nine West, Kirkland’s, and others who have had a loyal, ever-growing customer base for years — no matter how much the competition!
How do you improve your online customer journey?
1. Prevent online customer journey hijacking
The very first thing you need to do to offer a great customer journey online is to prevent anything from hijacking it. That is, when a shopper reaches your store, they expect to explore your site and not be taken away from it.
Not sure what it means?
Brands like Puma noticed 11% of their traffic seeing competitor ads, price comparisons, video ads, and spam pop-ups on their online store. The worst part is that neither did they place them there, nor were they aware of it. These came from adware injected by browser extensions and web apps on the consumer side.
So while the brand thought their store was well optimized to offer a seamless online customer journey, the truth looked something like this:
These ads don’t aim at stealing data from your store. They only lure your shoppers away from the store to other sites. Moreover, as we all know, once a shopper leaves your store, there’s a high chance they’re not coming back.
The unauthorized ads break the natural flow of online shopping, and that’s what we call online customer journey hijacking.
Now it is impossible to monitor 12,000+ new adware strains every day. So they never know what their consumer sees on their browser, imitating the site’s design and luring them to other websites.
That’s where solutions like BrandLock come into play. The conversion optimization suite uses machine learning and works with a team of R&D experts to monitor adware strains proactively, removing them before they show up.
By merely removing distractions caused by these unauthorized ads, brands have seen an increase in their conversion rate by +16%. It only proves that how bettering the online customer journey increases conversions and sales for web and mobile stores.
2. Create immersive and interactive product pages
A big chunk of a brand’s online customer journey is spent on product pages. It’s only evident for a consumer to want to know more about a product they’re interested in. They want to be able to make an informed purchase as it saves the hassle of them having to exchange or return products. However, high-quality product images and the most well-crafted product descriptions are no longer enough!
Think about why you prefer to shop from brick and mortar stores sometimes — especially when you’re trying out products from a new brand. You get to touch and feel the product, and that reassures you that the purchase you make will be worth it.
What’s more, is that you always have an in-store salesperson who is more than willing to assist you.
Now you can’t offer the exact same experience to a shopper online. However, you can make your product pages more immersive and engaging.
Use product videos and 3D model assets to add another dimension to your product page. While enterprise eCommerce businesses have been experimenting with immersive product pages for a while, even platforms like Shopify have introduced 3D models as a feature for merchants.
Solutions like WebRotate360 are already working with industry leaders like Bosch, Swarovski, and others to create interactive product pages.
However, that doesn’t mean you lose focus from the core elements like creating consistent product descriptions, FAQs, adding a clear call to action to buy the product and more.
3. Leverage gamification for higher customer engagement and conversions
Most eCommerce websites and apps have high bounce and exit rates. The reason being that a typical online store doesn’t really have anything new to offer.
For example, you visit an online store. You browse through products you’re interested in or the one product that you’re looking for. A cursory read through, and you exit the page if you’re looking at making the purchase later.
That’s a pretty standard behaviour for online shoppers, and that’s where you need to improvise.
To make this shopper interact with your brand, you need to create a unique experience for them.
This is where adding a little fun element to their online journey with your store comes in — gamification.
Gamification simply means using elements of a game in your conversion optimization strategy. This includes encouraging the shopper to play a game on your site before they leave, to win something valuable — say, a special discount!
Being targeted by a game instead of the usual email popup where it’s a standard exchange of contact details and a discount increases the engagement level of the shopper. Increased engagement leads to higher conversions on the campaign, leading to more sales.
Ikonick, an online store that sells modern art canvases, used a simple game, lucky draw, to gamify their popup. By toggling cards, their shoppers could win significant discounts. The store didn’t just see greater participation in the game, but also the same shoppers making more purchases using those coupons thereafter!
The store saw a massive growth in its email list and the shoppers walked away with a sense of winning. What more could you call a great online customer journey?
