Giving your customers a great shopping experience is very important for running a successful online business. It can lead to better reviews, more word-of-mouth recommendations, and ultimately grow your sales!
In this article, we’re going to outline how you can give your customers a great experience. Let’s get started.
Ensure navigating your website is very simple
As a business owner, you need to ensure that your website is easy to use and navigate. If it’s hard for someone to find what they need, they won’t stay around long enough to make a purchase.
Additionally, providing a positive user experience (UX) can be great for your search engine optimization (SEO). When you improve your SEO, you’ll rank higher on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs) and draw in more high-quality traffic. Google only wants to send its users the most helpful websites and information possible. But, if your website is complicated and hard to use, visitors will likely leave quickly, which search engines will pay attention to. But, if your website is easy to use, Google will notice that you’re able to help your website visitors, and it’s more likely that you’ll rank higher on the SERPs.
Let’s take a look at an example of a business that provides a great user experience for inspiration.
American International University, a higher education institution in Kuwait, provides a great navigation menu on their website. As you can see in the image above, their menu provides many different options for their website visitors to click, depending on what they’re looking for. They can select an option if they’re looking for admissions, academic information, news, and the like. This makes it easier for browsers to find what they need, making them more likely to apply or follow their social media accounts.
On your website, be sure that your navigation menu has multiple places for website visitors to click around and find what they’re looking for. Try to make it possible for someone to get what they need in just one or two clicks! This will help improve the customer experience.
Express, a men’s and women’s clothing retailer, also has a very intuitive navigation menu. As you can see in the image above, they have sections that a user can click on based on what type of clothing they’re looking for. They divide their menu up by men’s and women’s clothing, then further by shirts, pants, and so on. This is a very intuitive navigation menu — it’s common for clothing retailers to set up their menus like this, so people know what to expect. Because this menu makes it easy to find a certain type of product, it can help improve the company’s customer experience!
If you sell a lot of products, consider setting up your menu in a similar manner. This will help make it easy for people to find the specific category of products that they are looking for, improving the overall shopping experience.
Publish content that helps and informs your customers
If you can create content that helps website visitors solve their problems, you’ll show you understand them, provide a great customer experience, and secure more sales!
To help identify your customers’ problems, start by checking in with your customer service team. See if there are any questions or concerns they frequently get. If you base content on these pain points, you can save your employees time and help improve the overall experience for your customers!
You can also conduct some keyword research. Keywords are the words and phrases that people plug into search engines to find the products, services, or content they’re looking for. To find keywords relevant to your business, head to a tool like Google Keyword Planner with a list of words and phrases related to the topics you wish to cover. Plug them into the tool, and Google will provide you with a list of keywords based on their competitiveness — or how hard they are to rank for — and their average monthly search volumes.
Many of the keywords Google shows you will work as topics for content on their own. You could also form them into guides or questions. If you weave these keywords into your content, not only are you more likely to rank highly on the SERPs, but you’ll be helping to ensure that the content you produce is actually what your target audience wants. This can help improve the customer experience!
Let’s take a look at an example of a business that produces helpful content as inspiration.
Cisco Umbrella, a cloud security service provider, has an ultimate guide to DNS security that does several things well. The article outlines what DNS layer security is, who needs it, and what the advantages of using it are.
The article is very thorough and can help anyone who is aiming to understand this type of security better. People who have questions about DNS security can likely get them answered by reading this article. If you are looking for ways to efficiently manage your clients’ information, this CRM management tool by Monday.com will enhance your business operations.
Take inspiration from this and think about what subjects you understand extremely well that are related to your niche. Writing ultimate guides on these topics can help improve the customer experience!
On the other hand, Food Network, a food and lifestyle media company, has a lot of great buying guides on their website. Their article on the best air fryers outlines nine different brands and addresses how they were able to cook foods like chicken, cake, and fries. They also address different facts about air fryers and what to consider before buying one. All in all, it’s a very educational guide that can help their readers come closer to making a purchasing decision, improving the customer experience.
Think about what educational guides you could write for your website. If you sell a lot of a certain category of product, this could be a great article subject! These guides let you showcase your knowledge and help your prospective customers make a decision, providing them with a quality experience.
Show website visitors they can trust you with positive reviews
Word-of-mouth recommendations are very powerful, and you can replicate their effects by adding customer reviews to your website! This will help make customers feel more confident when buying from you and, if they feel like they can trust you, they’ll have a better overall shopping experience!
If you sell a lot of similar products or services, consider providing average star ratings from past customers to help shoppers quickly and easily compare your services. Or, if you work closely with customers and clients, consider using longer-form testimonials to give people more context about what you can offer them. If you can show positive reviews to your prospective customers, they’ll be more likely to trust that you provide quality work. This will make them more likely to make a purchase and improve their experience with your business.
Let’s take a look at a few examples of businesses that have incorporated reviews into their websites well for inspiration.
Loganix is an SEO fulfillment firm, and it’s incredibly important that we show website visitors how great our services are using past clients’ thoughts. On our local citation building service page, for instance, we have written testimonials from some of our clients. As you can see above, we have a review from Dev Basu, the founder of Powered by Search. By adding an image, audio recording, and the credentials of Basu, we give credibility to the review.
Furthermore, the review addresses common pain points prospective customers tend to have in our field — in this case, struggles with local backlink building. This review can reassure website visitors that we provide great services and can address their concerns, improving our customer experience overall.
Consider showing written testimonials on your website, especially if you work closely with customers and clients. Also, consider adding an image of the reviewer and their credentials in order to give your reviews more credibility. If prospective customers see that people just like them have had their pain points addressed by your products or services, they’ll be more likely to make a purchase and have a better experience with your business!
On the other hand, Purple, a mattress retailer, uses star ratings on its website. Because they offer a wide variety of generally interchangeable products, they use star reviews to help website visitors quickly compare their best offerings. People really value their sleep, and star reviews help visitors determine what the best purchase is going to be for their needs. These star reviews can help improve the customer experience and increase Purple’s sales!
If you have a lot of products or services in the same category, use star ratings to help your customers compare their options. This will help your website visitors find the best products for their needs, helping improve their experience with your company.
Allow customers to personalize their shopping experience
Personalization is becoming more and more important for successful businesses. This means that you need to be doing everything you can in order to help your audience tailor their shopping experience towards their specific needs and wants.
There are a lot of different ways you can personalize the shopping experience for your customers. Interactive tools are great for this because they will help a user to see how your products or services can benefit them specifically, or they can help website visitors to feel more in control. If you provide interactive content on your website, you can help users personalize their experience on your website, building trust with them and giving them a better experience.
Here are a few examples of how you can use interactive content to help customers personalize their shopping experience:
- You could provide a calculator that helps prospective customers to work out how much time or money they could save by investing in your services
- You could provide try-on features that show what your products would look like on the user
- You could create quizzes that show the user what products or services they should be using
Let’s take a look at an example of a tool that offers a personalized shopping experience for inspiration.
NYX, a well-known makeup brand, offers a personalized experience with their website’s virtual try-on tool. This helps a website visitor to see what different products would look like on their face, so they can choose the right styles and colors to achieve the look they want. This can help NYX’s customers make a purchase they’re happy with, and it’s very fun to use, improving the shopping experience overall!
If you sell wearable products like makeup or accessories, consider offering a virtual try-on service like this. These tools can personalize the user experience and help people make great purchases, leading to happier customers.
Ensure it’s as easy as possible to contact you
Some people that visit your website might have questions or concerns about your products. To help put their minds at ease and move them closer to making a purchase, you need to make it very easy for them to contact you.
Different people will want to contact you in different ways — this means that you need to offer several contact options to keep everyone happy! Email, phone, live messaging, and social media direct messages are just a few potential customer service options you may wish to use.
Just keep in mind that you should only offer the channels that your employees can handle. This will prevent burnout and ensure your customers aren’t waiting too long for a response. If you’re not sure what customer service platforms you should use, monitor your existing customer service channels and see what people prefer. You might find that some of your customers like phone customer service, while others would rather use email. Choose your most popular channels as your main focus, as that will help improve your customer experience.
Try to build a real connection with your customers
If someone feels a connection to your business, they’re likely to have a much better experience of shopping with you. Fortunately, there are a lot of different ways you can build a connection with people who visit your website! Here are a few examples:
- Humanize your business by showing off images of your team or yourself
- Show some behind-the-scenes aspects of your business
- Showcase user-generated content from customers using your products or services
- Use images of people who represent your customer base
Let’s look at an example of a business that does a great job of building a connection with their customers as inspiration.
KiwiCo, a craft and toy subscription box retailer, has user-generated content on their homepage. As you can see in the image above, KiwiCo has images from their customers’ social media pages. This shows website visitors that lots of people are thrilled with their products from KiwiCo! These images show KiwiCo’s visitors that people just like them love these products and get them excited about making a purchase. By seeing this user-generated content on the website, prospective customers at KiwiCo will have a better customer experience.
Consider publishing user-generated content on your website to help build a connection with your customers. Just be sure to ask people for permission before using their images, which you can do by sending them a direct message. This is important for copyright reasons. User-generated content can show website visitors that lots of people just like them are happy with your products and services, building a connection with them and making them more likely to make a purchase. This will give people confidence in your company, improving their experience overall.
Summary
Providing a great customer experience is vital to running a successful business! In this article, we outlined how you can improve your customers’ experience with your business using helpful content, reviews, and more.
Need more help? Check out the LiveWin blog. They have articles on capturing leads, eCommerce, and more!
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Author bio & headshot:
Adam Steele is the COO at Loganix, an SEO fulfillment partner for agencies and marketers. We build easy-to-use SEO services that help businesses scale. If you liked this article, please check out our SEO guides and templates on the Loganix blog.