Win Your Customers’ Hearts and Minds With Your Ecommerce Store (Part 2 of 5)
Your ecommerce store is the centerpiece of your online business. This is where visitors are converted into customers, credit card information is submitted, and money is made.
If the business is going to succeed, the website has to rock. And this means delivering an amazing customer experience.
There are two keys to winning customers.
First, win their minds.
The key is to not make the brain work too hard. The less your customer has to think, the easier it is to win the mind.
Organize your site in the way your customers want to shop. Provide specific details and clear pricing. Make the process of discovery, purchase and checkout as simple and intuitive as possible.
Second, win their hearts.
Use visuals and messaging to make them fall in love with your brand. You want customers to be excited and feel something special when they think of your brand and shopping your ecommerce store.
When you deliver a customer experience that wins the mind and heart, you develop an emotional and mental connection between the customer and your brand.
Now your brand has value in the eyes of the customer. Value that’s worthy of their time and money.
How Your Store Can Win the Mind
The information architecture, or how the content in your site is organized, page by page, has to make sense to visitors. They won’t buy from you if they can’t quickly understand what you are offering and find the information they are looking for. Get our of your customer’s way!
Visitors are either lasers or browsers.
The laser knows exactly what they want, and they expect to be taken to it as quickly as possible.
The browser doesn’t know specifically what they want. They peruse and poke around. They want to be led.
You need to build a site capable of catering to both lasers and browsers.
This starts with clear navigation – easy filtering and sorting, search functionality, mobile responsiveness.
You need well-structured product pages. This is the moment of truth. Visitors decide on these pages whether or not they’ll make a purchase.
Keep it simple. You need to provide enough information for the customer to make a decision regarding your product, but you do not want to overwhelm them with all of the nitty gritty details. Make sure everything on the page is useful and clear. Give the product context.
For example, if you’re selling a woman’s top, naturally there should be a photo of a woman wearing it.
Help the product sell itself.
Finally, checkout needs to be simple and clean.
Just like in a brick-and-mortar store, checkout is potentially the most painful and annoying part of ecommerce store experience.
A confusing or clunky checkout process is like dealing with the cashier who can’t figure out how to process your coupons.
But brick-and-mortar stores have the advantage in this respect. A customer is unlikely to walk out in the middle of the checkout process with the cashier standing right in front of them.
But in an ecommerce store if the process is not quick and painless, peacing out before the checkout process is complete is a piece of cake. All you have to do is click that little X on the top of your screen…
So minimize the number of steps in your checkout process. Every extra step, hitch, hang up and delay gives the customer a reason to abandon the checkout. Make it easy to enter promo codes. Be careful with upsells, calls-to-action, pop-ups and other distractions that disrupt the checkout process.
And once the store is built, use advanced behavioral analytics along with CRO software to make sure you know what’s working. A basic Google Analytics integration is a good start, but it will only take you so far.
How Your Brand Can Win the Heart
Your brand is the heart of your business, so the look and feel of your store need to fit with your brand if you expect to win your visitor’s heart.
Are the colors and fonts consistent with your logo? Do the personality and emotions conveyed by your store match your brand?
Is your website copy consistent with your brand? For example, do you call it a shopping cart or a basket of goodies?
Your messaging throughout your entire business must be in line with your brand voice. Whether it’s a tagline, social media post, blog post…even ads and banners – online and offline – everything should reinforce your brand voice.
Take advantage of the opportunity to showcase who you are, what you do, and why someone should want to buy from you through testimonials, reviews, and killer customer service.
At the core of your ecommerce business is the customer experience. Win your customers’ hearts with your unique brand and value proposition. And win their minds by making it easy to discover and purchase your products.
Nail the customer experience and you’re well on your way to having an unstoppable ecommerce business.
