Today, the success of a business depends largely on the Customer Experience offered to its customers. In fact, users make a purchase, site visit or newsletter subscription only as a result of pleasant moments experienced with the brand on their sites and/or apps.
Advertising is important, but no longer sufficient.
In fact, when you have succeeded in landing people on your platforms, it is imperative that they have easy and intuitive navigation.
And that is precisely why the user journey before and after a purchase becomes crucial.
Before delving into the specifics, however, let us briefly look at what is meant by Customer Experience.
What is Customer Experience
Customer Experience is the sequence of interactions that occurs between a user and a brand, during the Customer Journey. This term denotes the customer lifecycle, which leads the customer to take an action that is meaningful to the brand, such as a purchase.
During the experiential journey, theuser reaches and passes several touch points, that is, stages at which the potential customer comes into contact with the company. To give examples:
- A billboard or TV commercial;
- Social profile;
- A YouTube video;
- Walk past the physical store.
Designing them all from a strategic perspective can turn them into an important weapon in your favor.
When it comes to a people-to-people relationship, the overall customer experience is the result of how customers are greeted in the store, how you make them wait for their turn, how you stand as you deliver service or assist them in making a purchase, and to how you greet them when they leave the premises.
Bringing all these aspects back into digital is more complicated, but it is of equal importance. In fact, these user-business interactions generate different types of reactions, including:
- Cognitive – Process of acquiring knowledge through thinking, senses and experience;
- Emotional – Stimuli that activate emotional states in us such as surprise, disgust, joy, etc;
- Behavioral – These are determined by how we interpret the situations in which we are involved.
By leveraging them, you are able to generate a more loyal customer base, resulting in a growth in loyalty to your brand. The result is a loyal user, who becomes a spokesperson for your products and/or services, to potential new customers.
Read also:
What it means and how to do branding
How Customer Experience Affects Your Sales
As you may have guessed, the customer experience affects your sales and revenue. In order to be able to turn a “casual” user into a customer, and then build their loyalty by enticing them to return to your channels, you need to offer a truly enjoyable experience on every page of your e-commerce. This is essential to be able to turn a user (who is interfacing with you for the first time) into a customer, enticing them to return to your site.
Don’t forget that the customer experience is based on user perceptions. This means that you must focus on what attracts your customers’ attention through the data that informs you about their interests.
Only in this way can you accompany the user from the first stage(the search), until the last(the purchase).
In this regard, you might be interested in:
Writing empathetic web content: a mini-guide to find out how to do it
To better understand when it is important to focus on this aspect, know that Customer Experience has a dual power:
- increase your business
- damage it irreparably
It all depends on how well you take care of it. Let’s see why.
Customer Experience Increases Your Business
Providing every user with a positive experience is essential to the growth of your business. In fact, the customer experience directly impacts your bottom line. Especially considering that it is more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.
Designing and implementing the customer experience in a very thorough manner requires substantial investment, but in the end, the benefits that result far outweigh the economic and time resources used.
Customer satisfaction lowers the churn rate and fuels word of mouth among users. These factors are crucial in reducing the cost of individual customer acquisition and lowering Cost Retention (activities performed by a company to keep its customers over time).
Think about it: What do the best do?
Companies like Apple, Zappos, and Starbucks put the customer experience first. In fact, they have realized that it can be even more important than the products themselves, therefore deciding to offer their customers unique and engaging experiences.
Further reading:
Corporate Fonts and Colors: how to choose them to lead the customer to purchase
A negative customer experience hurts your business
On the contrary, a negative customer experience is one of the main causes of declining growth in your business.
This happens for multiple reasons, including:
- Increased site and shopping cart abandonment rates;
- circle of word of mouth and unflattering reviews that is difficult to remedy;
- Google’s disinterest in offering you as a solution to the needs of web surfers.
In the digital age, this can happen numerous times. For example, through social media and opinion-gathering portals, it is very easy for users to share their experiences. It is precisely these that a potential customer will go to read before making a purchase.
So here is yet another reason why you should curate the customer experience down to the smallest detail.
How to tell if your website’s customer experience is optimal
To assess whether your customer experience is optimized to deliver an enjoyable user experience, you need to monitor the following metrics:
- Revenue Growth
Revenues allow you to see if indeed your customer experience is pleasing to users, inducing them to purchase through a pleasing path. - Customer retention/abandonment
This metric indicates that the customer did not complete the purchase, thus abandoning the shopping cart. If high, clearly your site is not performing as it should. - Cross-Selling and Up-Selling Amounts
Cross-Selling allows you to target your customers by placing one product they purchased, side-by-side with another. Up-Selling, on the other hand, encourages users to buy a higher-end product, than the one they were initially interested in. Can your e-commerce do this independently? - Customer Service Costs
Are your customer service costs (e.g., returns of purchased products) too high compared to your business revenue? This means something is wrong.
We recommend that you recheck the Customer Experience to try to limit this negative budget item.
In any case, also try not to neglect monitoring the pages of your site that you consider most important, the length of time spent browsing per session, and the conversion rate.
Do you want to know more?
5 secrets to creating a successful e-commerce
Enhance your Customer Experience with Isola
Want to improve the shopping experience users have with your brand? Rely on the Team of communication experts of Isola!
Together with us you can create a corporate website already optimized with the best graphics, a copy appealing and the SEO as high performing as possible. In this way, we manage to offer your customers the best customer experience, increasing the possibility of acquiring new customers and getting a good search engine rankings.
Request a free quote now!
If, on the other hand, you want to continue to delve into the world of web marketing, here are a number of interesting guides:
How to increase visits to your site
Keyword research: how to identify the most relevant keywords for your website
Selling abroad: how to open a new market
