As more people bring their shopping bags online, providing a personalized experience to your customers has become inevitable. If you don't do it, people will move to your competitor's website in a couple clicks of the mouse. This post will give you a quick run through features you can utilize to create exceptional digital experiences for your customers.
1. Personalized web experience
Market research is the key to understanding your demographic. You can do this on a basic level with the help of Google Analytics and cookie placement to determine who your audience is, what they want and how they can best be pleased. Personalization in simple is customization and suggestion of content. This is all over the internet, ads that follow you, enticing you into buying things you are clearly looking to buy. Based on a customer's last visit you can build a shopping list for when the customer visits again. My favorite example actually comes from a series of apparel websites like Miss Selfridge and Top Shop. Once you select an item, they quickly suggest you other items that you might be interested in buying based on your individual style.
Personalization is not a new term, it has its roots in old school CRM and is the key to a happy customer! As every aspect of our life keeps going digital, the importance of user personalized interface is only going to grow.
2. Help customers navigate
Most of us are too impatient to read through and find our way around websites that are hard to navigate. Complicated navigation can occur in many forms, you can have a long trail of links built for sub-sub-super sub categories. These are called breadcrumbs and usually appear like this: Home Page>Category Page>Sub Category
The further categories you keep building, the more complicated this menu will look.
Another issue that can hamper navigation is a horrible search feature. If you are selling products, you should have a quick search along with the option for an advanced search based on categories.
Keep consistent throughout the entire purchase cycle. Every page the customer will view should be built to create maximum conversion. This requires tweaking until you have figured out the pattern your customers generally follow.
3. Bring some fun into the equation
Entertainment keeps people engaged. There is so much one can do to create entertaining experiences for their customers, yet companies prefer to stay risk averse. With open graph API's and wicked human imagination, you can build creative games and contests to keep customers hooked. Gamification doesn't have a long life cycle but it is good enough to create a boom!
You can also add videos, play around with augmented reality, invite users to generate content, there's no limit to the things you can try.
4. Be human
This is something that strikes me as a sign of a company that cares. To create a truly exceptional experience in the online world (where customers don't share physical space with you), it is important to remind your customers that they aren't just dealing with robots. Provide clear contact information, respond to queries, deal with negative feedback, pull in your employees to express their views on your website, show the world that you are a company made up of human beings! A little assurance goes a long way!
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