If you've been running an eCommerce business for any length of time, you understand that it takes more than great products or services to stay afloat: keeping your customers satisfied and happy with your company is tantamount to your long-term success.
Your eCommerce business needs to leave a positive and lasting impression on its customers during their purchasing journey.
Ideally, your customer experience should include multiple points at which your brand can communicate with your buyers and leave them feeling satisfied with your company.
This fact is especially important for eCommerce businesses to remember as they contend with a growing number of competitors that break into their industry niche.
In this article, let's explore how your brand can instill excitement in its customers, attract a greater amount of attention from its audience of buyers, and ultimately increase levels of customer satisfaction. Read on for our top tips to keep your customers happy while earning the profits your eCommerce store deserves.
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- Cultivate a multi-channel community of customers
- Constantly keep your near-conversions informed
- Stay in touch with new buyers after their first purchase
Cultivate a multi-channel community of customers
Before you dive too deep into making your customers happy, you should first understand how to build a community of people with whom your brand can connect.
The customers that comprise your branded community are people who live and breathe the products and services you offer: they should be engaged with you across your brand's multiple channels, whether those are online or offline, to always feel like they're members of a larger community that you pay close attention to.
Building a new branded community can seem like an open-ended task, which is why we recommend that you begin with your social media and email channels.
Start connecting with your product advocates through these channels and encourage them to leave ratings on Google Reviews as well as on your product pages.
Once you've begun to establish a larger community using a multi-channel strategy, you can also consider cultivating community discussions right on your website that cover different topics that relate to your brand.
Need a few more ideas to get your multi-channel community cultivation underway? It's not a bad idea to double down on your Facebook presence by encouraging your community members to share their own content and tips on how to get the most out of your products.
If you have the permission of your users, you can also feature your customers' personal photos on your Instagram account (you can also do this with Facebook) to generate content that uniquely reflects the brand loyalty you're establishing.
Constantly keep your near-conversions informed
Now that you've spent some time solidifying multi-channel methods with which to cultivate and grow a community of die-hard customers, it's time to pivot to your customers' shopping and purchasing experience.
You'll want to keep customers who are nearly converted constantly informed about your products and your brand throughout their eCommerce experience to incentivize them to take the plunge and make a purchase.
There are a few pieces of essential info that you need to share with your near-conversions along with their shopping and purchasing experience. To start, spend some time creating high-quality product catalog pages that make it easy for potential customers to locate your product specs, descriptions, and pricing options.
Alternatively, you can create an interactive online catalog, and embed it to your site. Otherwise, your would-be buyers may feel inclined to visit the product catalog pages of your competitors instead.
Other important pieces of info to share with your soon-to-be customers should include your brand's policies on executing product returns and exchanges.
If you don't share this information with people during their shopping and purchasing journey, they may not feel like they know enough about the products you offer and their value in order to finally make a purchase.
At this point, it may be worth exploring offers to upsell and cross-sell your products to communicate to your buyers that they're receiving as much value as possible from the products they purchase.
Keep in mind that providing an informative shopping and purchasing experience is now more important than ever in a world with mounting cost-of-living crises.
Called the "year of the squeeze" by some, 2022 has seen the cost of living expenses skyrocket for people living in the U.S. and Canada -- total costs of living expenses in Toronto, for example, average a whopping $5,523 a month.
The main takeaway is this: your online shoppers are doing all they can to locate products whose value they can quickly understand and embrace. Therefore, make it as easy as possible for your near-conversions to feel confident that they're making the right choice when they choose to purchase your products.
Stay in touch with new buyers after their first purchase
You've brought together a community of like-minded users and have instilled in them confidence in the value of your products. Your post-purchase customer experience is now the final piece to focus on if you want to keep your buyers happy throughout their entire purchase journey.
There's no doubt that you deserve to feel satisfied once you've begun converting a larger volume of customers. But once they've bought one of your products, you'll want them to keep coming back for more, too.
This means that you need to devise ways to keep new conversions engaged enough to return to your online store with the intent of purchasing a greater number of your products at a higher and more consistent frequency. How do you do this? Simple: stay in touch with your new buyers on a regular basis after they've made their first purchase.
To maximize the extent to which you stay in contact with new conversions, make sure that you're providing them with brand-related announcements and updates across your different channels.
You can also deliver more value to your community by creating initiatives such as special events and promotional programs. And of course, once you start executing these post-purchase activities, you'll want to get feedback from your community to see how much they enjoy staying in contact with your brand.
Conclusion
As an eCommerce-based brand, you already know how cutthroat your competition is. It's no longer the case that you can skirt by with only great products -- it's up to you to one-up your competitors by perfecting the entire purchase journey of your customers.
Cultivating a multi-channel community of customers who love sharing content about your products, constantly keeping near-conversions informed about your product features, pricing, and policies, and regularly staying in touch with new buyers all go a long way toward making customers happy in the long run.
