Here we introduce 7 ways to improve the sales experience on your website. The sales experience on your website is critical to gathering leads or even to get your visitors converting to paid customers . Only focusing on the features, services, and items is not enough if you want to outpace your rivals in online sales. You should provide a seamless customer experience. Only focusing on the features, services, and items is not enough if you want to outpace your rivals in online sales. You should provide a seamless customer experience. Online shopping has become a trillion-dollar industry, with many preferring the convenience of at-home purchasing rather than making the trip to a retail establishment. But that does not mean that customers do not miss certain aspects of the traditional shopping experience from time to time.
The personalized attention from a store assistant, and quick and easy information about products, are some aspects of the retail shopping experience that online marketers are trying to bring back into their websites. Some tricky problems characteristics of online shopping platforms are also being paid close attention to improve the overall customer experience. Brands are working hard to make the sales process as simple, easy, and quick as possible.
In today’s day and age, when the e-commerce market has become highly competitive, subtle improvements in sales experience for the customers can go a long way in building customer loyalty and increasing lead conversions.
7 ways to improve the customer experience on your website
- Engage the customers in the R&D process
Customers nowadays have thousands of options in every product category and price range. Competition in the online shopping sector is intense. So, customers have become very picky about what they like, and they will only buy products with certain specifications. Brands often struggle to meet these extremely particular requirements and deliver an engaging sales experience.
Still, an easy solution to the problem involves customers during the product development process, where customers can share their feedback about what features they want to add or remove. This can be done by inviting customers to join seminars, workshops, and other online events through the website. Brands can look online for registration form inspiration for these events. These online seminars can also be good for brands launching new products that must explain and demonstrate their usage to the public.
- Make sure to check website speed
Online shoppers generally make purchases primarily to save money traveling to a store. So quick response time from online shopping is one of their main concerns. Business experts have found that 53% of smartphone users leave a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load. This leads to a decline in their traffic volume. Customers have no time to wait half a minute for an elaborately designed web page while shopping. Similarly, the transaction page should load, respond, and process payments quickly to give customers the most satisfactory experience.
- Assess mobile responsiveness
An essential element of online shopping is the ability to make purchases from your smartphone. Most online retailers have a mobile application, or their website can also operate on mobile. But some sites do not open properly on mobile, the page view gets distorted, speeds are slower, and the page responsiveness declines. These problems will discourage many visitors from repeating your site’s purchases. A vast majority of online shopping happens via smartphones, so ensuring the mobile responsiveness of your e-commerce website should be a top priority for all brands.
- Introduce live chat
One of the biggest factors customers miss from traditional physical stores is the ability to instantly communicate with a real human employee about any questions or concerns. Online brands are now trying to replicate this interaction with the help of a live chat option on their site. This chat option allows the customer to speak directly to support service personnel. Customers can ask questions about specific products, payment methods or delivery estimations. The support employee will immediately answer the customer’s queries so they do not have to wait and can make their purchase immediately. Live chat is a great way to quicken conversion at the final stages of the sales funnel and boost the sales experience for your visitors.
- Allow customers to share product photos
Most online stores have options for customers to rate their products and share their reviews. Online stores also, of course, provide multiple pictures of their products. But these pictures are primarily clicked in a studio setting, and customers remain skeptical about how exactly the product will look in their own home setting. So, some brands have now started allowing customers to share pictures of the products after receiving them.
These pictures can be posted along with their reviews and will give other prospective buyers an idea about what the products look like in a real-life setting. These pictures often push buyers to be convinced about certain products finally. But of course, this strategy works only for certain categories of products.
The online store should also have a monitoring system to ensure that customers do not post anything inappropriate with their product photos. Brands can also pay social media influencers to make real reviews of their products and share them with their customers for more real-life proof.
- Good landing pages
Many online brands are now driving traffic to their websites with the help of social media posts and PPC advertising. The customers can click on the links shared in these posts and ads and take them to the brand’s official website. But instead of just taking customers to a generic product search or a product category page, it can be more effective to make the landing pages more specific.
When customers click on an ad for a particular product, they should be brought to the landing page to purchase it. There can be options to search for similar products, but the basic landing page should be hyper-specific. This will encourage customers to make quick and immediate purchase decisions because it is convenient to buy from your brand.
- Personalized sales recommendations
Finally, introducing personalized sales recommendations is one of the most important improvements any brand can make in the online sales experience. Online stores have the ability to store customer information very easily. They have plenty of data on what customers made what purchases on what date. So, the next time a customer visits the online store, this prior data can be processed through data analytics systems to create personalized product recommendations for the customer. These new soft sales skills recommendations will be in the product categories and the specific customer’s preferred price ranges. This customized sales experience makes customers feel more connected and loyal to the brand.
They also save a lot of time and will most likely return to the same online store for future purchases. In case new customers for whom the brand does not have any existing data, they can recommend their newest launches and best sellers.
How to build the perfect online sales experience?
The perfect online sales experience is all about the right mix of ease of usage and element of interest. An excellent online store must have an intuitive user interface and a simple navigation system. But the website design cannot be too generic and simplified. It should look sophisticated and well-planned to the user to gain confidence about the brand’s authenticity. Most brands use social media and traditional advertising to build customer trust. Still, no amount of marketing will be able to convince customers to make purchases if they feel that the website is not well-protected and is casually designed. For the vast majority of customers, the website design is a good indicator of the trustworthiness of any brand.
Of course, functional elements like device compatibility, speed and responsiveness are also important elements of the customer experience. Data analytics is another background process that can greatly impact how a site’s sales experience is designed. Data analytics will identify which stages of the sales funnel are experiencing the most attrition. Then those web pages can be worked on specifically to make improvements. Analytics is also beneficial in devising personalization strategies for the sales process. The more a brand can personalize its sales experience, the more customers will feel wanted by the brand and return to the same online store.
Many software solutions are now available online to automate different parts of the sales process. Data collection, data analytics, recommendation engines, and landing page generators can now be fully automated. Business owners with a small technical team can introduce complex technologies in their online store. All that is needed is a vision to build the ultimate sales experience for the customer. So, if you are trying to out-pace your competitors in the online sales sphere, remember that it is not enough to just focus on features, services, and products that your brand can offer. The focus has to be on building a complete experience for the customer from start to finish. Also don’t forget to provide sales training on your web and social media strategy.