The most vital but often ignored aspect to think about when you start the planning of your eCommerce business is planning the path you wish your customers to go on.
A lot of businesses get focused on the work in the business instead of improving and focusing on the field.
This brings us to the following question: are you aware of the path you’d prefer your customers to go on? And perhaps, more importantly, are you aware of the actual journey that your customers are actually going to be
We dive a bit more deeply into the ways you can think about designing your customer experience and easy ways to resolve the most frequently encountered issues.
Stop speculating; start measuring.
The only thing you’re most likely at is guesswork. We often do at times, but now in 2016, there’s no reason to guess for 95percent of your company because there’s evidence available.
Even if you believe you know the customer journey they take doesn’t mean you’re correct, and most importantly, it could mean prospective customers may be lost or confused and leave in frustration at some point in the journey of a customer.
In the end, if you’ve not or not spent the time planning or building the customer’s journey, then you’re more than likely to be leaving money on the table, and it will affect the conversion rate.
Web-based blindness is a genuine issue and one that people are likely to suffer from.
You visit your site often, and even if you did not design it, you definitely played a part in the layout and design.
That means you are aware of the exact location of everything and are therefore is biased in designing the customer’s journey.
The most effective method to overcome this is by using fresh eyes.
Find a friend or someone less experienced with your site and assign them the task of purchasing the product you have listed on your site and observe them as they navigate the site and take notes on the potential obstacles to avoid and ask them to tell you what they think about certain buttons and pages and ways to make it more appealing to them.
Tools that will assist you in optimizing the customer experience
Today’s customers have never experienced the same amount of attention span. It’s a noisy online world, and it has been a time when the time was a more valuable product for the sophisticated buyer.
It is generally believed that you’ve got five seconds in the first few seconds to grab the attention of your customers upon their first visit to your site.
If you do succeed in selling what people want, they should be able to get through the check out in only three clicks.
Anything more than one of these, and your chance of being a victim to opponents increase dramatically.
The most important thing you need to reduce those bounce rates is having data or, more specifically, the ability to know.
It is essential to understand the actions of your customers and, even more importantly, what issues they are struggling with.
The positive side is there are many tools you can use as a business owner today that make collecting pertinent information more accessible than ever before.
Google Analytics, for example, is an excellent free tool that will provide you with a stunning analysis of the traffic to your site as well as pages that have the highest drop-out rate for customers.
Optimizely is a different great tool that lets you test A/B for your site to eliminate any uncertainty about various areas of your website and provide you with actual numbers of your customers’ behaviour.
The least understood aspect of your customer experience
There are many elements to take into consideration in the journey of a customer, beginning when they first encounter your brand until they become repeat customers of your company.
The average of customers leaving the cart page is 68.81 per cent, as per Baymard Institute. Baymard Institute.
This is why I believe in the fact that the cart for shopping is the most minor understood element of the customer experience and, if improved, could result in the most significant growth in the revenue of your business.
The three questions you must ask prior to the process of your purchase are:
Have you been transparent with your customers to now? (Do not over-exaggerate customers at the point of purchase with extra fees, taxes or other charges. They should see the price, and that is the amount they pay)
Does your checkout process work? (One page, if you can)
Are customers able to trust your payment process? (Do your business have an SSL certificate in place, along with logos for payment cards and the appropriate security badges for payment)
Incredibly, all three aspects can be solved or addressed swiftly and efficiently with a few modifications to the design or buying the SSL certificate.
These are my top three suggestions to make sure that your checkout has the highest chance of converting your prospective customers.
There are plenty of additional areas to optimize. However, these are among the most effective locations to begin.
How do you get an advantage over your rivals?
In the article, you’re not alone if you’re negligent in your customer experience.
The good news is that I am sure that that the majority of your rivals are doing the same thing.
Recently I had the privilege to discuss this with Barclaycard on this subject, and they’re the market-leading in technology; they truly recognize possibilities in eCommerce companies.
We came up with an article that will aid you in planning your customer’s journey.
Based on the information we’ve given you, you’ll be able to confidently affirm that you have a strategy in place for your customer’s journey, and you’ve put in place techniques and the best techniques in place to keep more of your clients right until closing the sale.
With that in mind, we truly hope that you find this article helpful and are able to begin making your customer journey plan more efficiently.
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