When they say that it’s all about the customer, they really mean it! Customers are the life and blood of any organisation and it is your job to keep them coming back for more and more. Customer Experience has, over the last five years become one of the biggest buzzwords in the marketing, ecommerce and digital sphere. But why is this so?
The challenge that the online business world faces is creating an experience for customers that is actually tangible. If you consider a traditional brick and mortar store, creating a customer experience is all about creating a certain sensory journey for them. From the branding, to the music playing, the smell and the service, it is all about creating a package of experiences as soon as the customer walks in. Online is trickier. Here you have to convey your brand through a screen.
So, how do you get this right? We have some key insights to assist you, whether you are working with an already established brand or are about to start an ecommerce business, these few hints might assist with making sure your customer comes back for more and more!
Know Your Customer
Doing a customer analysis needs to be a regularly scheduled occurrence in your business. The key to any successful business is knowing who your customer is and creating a customer journey for them. You need to be able to surprise and delight them at all points of the journey.
Start by conducting a buyer persona study. Doing a deep dive into your industry, your company and your potential customers will provide you with deep insight into what your customer looks like, what their interests are, what their behaviours are like and how to target them. Mapping out the various aspects of your customer will assist you in packaging your product that it appeals directly to them and then placing it in their line of vision on all marketing platforms.
Create The Journey
Creating a successful customer journey means that you have to look at your wordpress site like a customer. You need to enter the site from all entry points like the customer would. From the social points, to organic search and from affiliates. Follow the natural course that the customer would and determine whether they got to their final destination (check out) in the simplest and easiest way possible.
Examine your content; was it insightful, useful and transparent? Relook at all of your images. Do they project the brand and the quality of your site? Are all of the colours uniform? Is your site slick and simple? Do your banners draw attention away from the key message of your site? Are your CTA’s effective and smartly placed. Make sure that every step of the journey reflects who you are as a brand!
Get Their Feedback
Many companies shy away from hearing what the customer has to say about them. This is a huge mistake for these companies and it is obvious that they simply don’t want to learn. The great thing about customer feedback is that you can learn exactly what your customer wants.
Whether it is good or bad feedback, you can get an insight into your customer’s minds. Market research can really only take you a portion of the way, but a direct line to your customer is a line of data that can be infused in your functionings.
The best way of getting direct and unsolicited customer feedback is creating a comment section on your WordPress site (and monitoring it daily!) or creating surveys that your customer can fill out. You can either add a survey form as a plugin on your site or add it into a mailer. To get even more of a response from that, boost it with an incentive or prize and let the results pour in.
Make Yourself Accessible
A leading frustration and concern for customers in the day of digital and online is not having human support. If you walk into a store, you are faced with a clerk who can assist you with you needs and requirements. This is not the case online.
If something goes wrong, the payment didn’t work, the item did not arrive or they are unsure of the process, what do they do? There are a plethora of sites that simply do not have any kind of support structure for the business and rather send you to FAQ’s or an email address. This is detrimental to your site!
WordPress offers various plugins and tools for you to make yourself available for your customer. For example, live chat tools are a great way to handle customer support. This will allow your customers to communicate directly with your company if they have questions, need assistance, have come across a problem, or even need to give you a compliment.
Monitor Their Activity
After you have set all of this up, you need to monitor how your customers behave on your site and what actions they take. Google Analytics is a powerful way of monitoring how much traffic comes into your site, where they go, what the bounce rate is and what pages succeed and fail.
Customer satisfaction metrics are vital in ascertaining how your customers are feeling about your brand. Make sure you are regularly monitoring them and getting as much data as you can to make the changes that you need to your site and business processes.
One of the biggest keys is to continually test. AB test everything. From your landing and product pages, to your mailers and subject lines. AB test your CTA’s and banners as well as your paid and social posts. Keep track of everything to see what was clicked on more and what got the most attention. You will then be able to refine your site to convert your visitors into a sale and your sale into a loyal fan.
Wrapping Up
In wrapping up, your customers are your lifeblood. You need to make sure that they are kept satisfied on your site. You also need to ensure that you take the steps to go out of your way and keep them surprised and delighted. Keep tabs on the industry and your competitors. Research what is coming out in the digital world and mould it for your site. WordPress is a constantly evolving platform. There are always new aspects and plugins and things to try out. It will never harm your business to try something. The trick is to monitor it, watch how much of a success it was and either keep, adapt or can it. Your customer will always let you know whether you are on the right track.