6 Customer Experience Tips to Boost Your Sales

Customer experience (CX) is all about how your customers interact and experience your website, services and products during all stages, from the first visit to your store to the payment.

It should be one of the most important aspects for entrepreneurs to focus on improving, but is often undervalued and neglected.

How CX can help you ?

Successful businesses, whether traditional brick-and-mortar or online, always think from their customers’ perspective because it is the key that helps them outrun their competitors.

How CX Can Increase Your Sales?

Putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and experiencing the buying journey as someone who knows nothing about your website, you will always pick up some tiny little details that can worsen your customers’ shopping experience. Those little details not only make your visitors find your online store less enjoyable, they also decrease the conversion rate and retention rate of your customers.

Attract – convert – retain, it is the fundamental model of how businesses operate and make sales revenue.

While marketing takes care of the “attract” part, improving customer experience is the secret of “convert” and “retain”. If you really want to scale your dropshipping business to the next level, then you must learn how to enhance the customer experience on your online store.

Tips to Improve the Customer Experience

Now, let’s move on to some of the actionable tips DSers have gathered for you.

User-Friendly Website

Having a user-friendly website is critical if you want to improve the customer experience. It is also one of the most obvious things people get to notice after they landed on your website.

Creating a user-friendly website is not only about decorating your website with a professional style and design, it is also about simplifying the navigation for your visitors.

Easy in-store navigation allows your customers to know which page they are on. You need to assist them to find the products they are interested in so that they can easily put those products in their cart and check out.

If they can’t figure out how to interact with your website and feel miserable, they will quickly leave and shop somewhere else.

Other than in-store navigation, it is also important to work on things like having a clear product categorization, offering advanced product filter options and simplifying the purchasing process to further make your website more user-friendly.

All those tiny details will add-up and help improving your customer experience, and in return, might help improve your retention and conversion.

Loading Speed of Your Website

You don’t want to underestimate the importance of the page loading time and its impact on your sales. Search engines like Google penalize websites that load slowly, which raises a red flag on your SEO so that less traffic will be attracted to your website.

More importantly, people will stop visiting and buying from your website if they find the loading time too long and annoying.

Imagine yourself as a new visitor to your online store, ask yourself “would you purchase products from a website that takes a while to load?”.

The answer is probably no. It works the same for your customers. Studies have shown that 1 second delay in page loading time means a 7% reduction in conversions.

Whenever customers visit an online store, they expect a smooth experience from the moment they land on your website until check out. 47% of customers expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less.

Loading speed should be the least you can achieve and guarantee to your customers. Don’t disappoint your customers and make them leave before seeing your product page.

Create a Customer-Centric Brand

Make sure to build a brand that is customer-focused. This means that you need to first understand what your customers want so that you can prioritize their needs.

Asking feedbacks can be a great way to start with. The feedbacks you gathered will help you understand how to better serve your customers and cater a buying journey that satisfies them.

Another approach for you to determine who your customers are and understand their needs is to utilize social media and email newsletters.

You can learn about your audience such as demographics from the analytic tools of each social media platform. It is important that you know the demographics of your visitors and buyer, for example, so that you can better target your ads.

In addition to that, you can start a poll on social media, like Facebook, to ask for your customers’ opinions. The poll can be about anything you want to learn from them.

It can be topics like “what products are you the most interested in” or “what kind of promotional events do you like”. Also, you can add a dedicated section in the sign-up form of your newsletter to gather personal information from your customers.

The better your customer experience is, the more willing to purchase products and keep returning to your store your customers will be.

Promotions

Promotions have always been one of the most powerful and effective ways for business owners to please their customers. It is your job to ensure that your customer is well-informed about your on-going promotions.

Creating a banner, making special marks on your product titles, sending promotional emails, having marketing events on social media…There are many ways to ensure your customers are well-aware of your discounts.

To further improve the customer experience, you can also offer exclusive discounts to them but make sure it is easy for them to become eligible for those exclusive discounts.

For instance, you can offer membership to your customers. Once someone new has landed on your website, they can immediately register as a member to receive certain exclusive discounts.

Offering free shipping is another way to please your customers. You can easily embed the shipping cost by slightly increasing the product price to offset the extra shipping expenses.

It will greatly increase the conversion rate of your customers. You can always check out the online stores of all the big names, Nike, Amazon, etc., to look for promotion ideas.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to engage with your customers and improve their experience.

Learn more about Email marketing:

What is Email marketing and how to start - DSers

Find why Email marketing is an important part of any business growth strategy and how to implement it.

DSers BlogJean-Baptiste

Email marketing serves more than a means to inform your customers about on-going promotions. You can also send them a welcoming email the minute they subscribe to your newsletter as it helps to build a strong connection with them.

Moreover, you can email your customers to remind them there are items left in their cart that are waiting to be paid.

You may also want to offer discounts to them if the products have stayed in the cart for quite some time. A thank you email after the order is fulfilled also helps your customers think they are being valued.

Don’t forget to personalize your emails and ensure they are clear and professional.

Email marketing is a great way to reach out to your customers to encourage them to purchase from you again. Best of all, the cost of email marketing is relatively low compared to other ways of marketing.

Build a Community on Social Media

Utilizing all kinds of social media channels plays a vital role in improving customer experience. It is the perfect way to engage with your customers.

You can start a poll to gather customer opinions and share promotional posts as we mentioned above on your social media.

More importantly, you need to create and share interesting content so your customers will feel like they are part of your brand.

Promote your online store aggressively and creatively on social media. Talk about new products that are now available in your store. The more involved your customers are, the more repeated orders you will get.

Therefore, it is important to build a strong community on social media to promote your brand and become more present.

Conclusion

Running a successful online store that stands out from your peers requires constant learning and dedication.

You won’t be able to boost sales or increase conversion rate and retention rate without providing your customers the right experience.

In this article, we’ve gone through 6 tips that help you improve customer experience to achieve better sales. Those 6 tips are merely the tip of the iceberg.

There is so much more you can learn about how to better satisfy your customers. Visit and analyze the major players of online stores like Amazon, Apple, Nike, etc. regularly.

Pay attention to the details and study how they please their customers. Make you customers happy and let them be the ambassador to promote your store. After all, 81% of the consumers nowadays value friends and family’s advice over the recommendation from a business.