Forbes Magazine recently reported that
58% of companies who are more profitable than their competitors have their CEO in charge of customer experience management. This is a staggering number, and reaffirms why top retailers are committed to delivering the best customer journey possible to their loyal shoppers. How can brands put their customer experience first when planning their ecommerce website design strategies? Here are three key features of a successful and robust customer experience.
1. Easy To Navigate – Marks & Spencer
In order to make a customer journey seamless, the navigation must be intuitive and efficient. There’s no point in investing in rich content if your customer cannot direct themselves through it easily! We love Marks & Spencer’s school uniform checklist for just this reason. It’s a fun and interactive experience that is also incredibly easy to navigate. With colorful on-brand graphics (like arrows and plus signs) guiding the shopper through each product, it simplifies the often difficult and time-consuming process of back-to-school shopping. And carousels sliders make perusing products quick and simple.
2. Rich + Interactive Content - Dormify
A quality customer experience should use beautiful images and rich content to tell a story, so a static product page simply will not cut it. This is an opportunity to surprise and delight your shoppers before they ever even have the product in their hands. Dormify does a great job delivering this engaging content to their customers. Their latest experience, “How To Bring Hygge Home,” teaches shoppers how to bring coziness and style into their own homes. With a step-by-step guide, rich imagery, and helpful tips, it’s a powerful example of how content can go beyond a product page. Customers are getting useful style advice while they shop, so even if they don’t follow through on the buy they’ve come away from your website with something of worth. It’s a strong example of providing shoppers value outside of the purchase.
3. Easy To Buy - Aerosoles
Once a shopper is ready to buy, the last thing you want is to lose them in a sea of product grids. That ready-to-purchase moment is precious, so make it easy for them to follow through. Integrated quickviews allow customers to add to cart, and even proceed to checkout, without ever leaving the digital experience. A great example of this is Aerosoles’ Spring 2017 Collection. With a wide range of content types – gifs, video, and images – they managed to make everything instantly shoppable. The moment a customer falls in love with a pair of pumps, they can simply click to activate a quickview and seamlessly add to cart. There’s no wasted time spent scrolling through a product grid, meaning shoppers are spending more time buying your products.
How can you strengthen your customer journey?
When ecommerce brands focus on the ecommerce customer experience, both they and their loyal shoppers win – by keeping the navigation simple, the content rich, and the path-to-purchase streamlined, retailers can deliver a one-of-a kind experience that delivers engagement and conversions.