A brand can sell more by making their customers happy. Online businesses in 2017 are at a thrilling crossroads; AR and VR are throwing up advancement in technology opportunities, whereas clients are now challenging every brand for better, to get more authentic experiences. Here are some common e-commerce myths that businesses need to leave behind this year.
- Fulfillment isn’t that important
People usually wrongly focus on the customer experience before the sale, obsessing over how to convert leads into clients, but client experience crunch time often comes much later.
Fulfillment is the crucial stuff of online business – you absolutely need a good fulfillment strategy in order to please customers and build a brand that will last.
- A bad delivery experience can sour a customer’s experience of a brand. 60% of people will shop somewhere else after a bad delivery. Fact. Wrong delivery times, inaccurate delivery times, little insight into tracking, ambiguous delivery instructions – these will all make a busy customer see red and take the joy out of online shopping.
- The packaging says a lot about how much you value your products, your customers, and your brand. Make sure yours is saying the right things. Unboxing has become a public event – don’t ruin yours with cheap packaging or comedy sized boxes that dwarf your products.
- Customer support and marketing are totally different departments
Supportive selling is essential for e-commerce brands – sales and support aren’t mutually exclusive and need to learn how to work together. Both teams need to work together for a smarter customer experience.
- You want your customer to reach the buying decision almost independently– if they make it themselves, they will hold onto it. Discourage pushy sales tactics and make sure that people on the sales team are as clued up on the product as the support team.
- Giving more support during the sales process means that your customers will ultimately be happier; you will get better reviews, fewer returns, and fewer support calls.
- The best content is focused on sales
E-commerce merchants who are too focused on sales forget to put themselves in their customers’ shoes. This is a very dangerous habit, especially when it comes to inbound marketing. Effective inbound marketing is all about building relationships and creating great content – not droning on about products.
- A good e-commerce blog has to have a wide variety of content – some of it not about selling at all.
- Blog content should always be seasonal – make sure you cover interesting events and seasonal dates in detail.
- “These product images will do”
Often, they won’t. For better sales revenue, you need to invest in high-quality product photography. The right lighting, setting, and model can make all the difference to conversions.
- Think about the setting and context of your photos – what can you say about your brand with your background? Use every opportunity to put your products forward in the best possible light. Interesting colors and juxtapositions are a great way to add a narrative to your products.
- More accurate product imagery will save you grief down the line – make sure people can tell how big products are and what they will actually look like (different angles and shots will help here).
- Customers will do what we ask them to do
Or they will do exactly the opposite. Customers are unpredictable and you can never 100 % say what they will (or won’t do). You should develop buyer personas and map out a coherent user journey, but don’t ever assume that you know what people will do. It’s easy to look at something internally, think that it’s ‘obvious’, only to discover that customers don’t have a clue what you mean.
- Check your analytics on a regular basis to see how users are using your site – which pages are they finding engaging (and why? React to user behavior by updating pages accordingly.
- Customer service departments need to be ready to deal with anything that is thrown at them – and they must always have a ready reply. Make sure that their contact details are easy to find.
Don’t get trap by the honey trap of quick wins and easy solutions – you can definitely automate things to save time, but running an e-commerce business is still a lot of hard work. Put your energy into getting the basics right and pleasing customers, and you’ll do just fine!