In the world of e-commerce, customer experience and customer satisfaction are crucial to business growth. As there is practically no item you can’t get delivered straight to your door from an online shop, the competition is fierce, and every edge you can find will be a useful one.
Luckily, technology is helping store owners build much better shopping experiences, tailor each customer’s unique experience, and streamline or automate a large number of their processes. Here are seven ways you can utilize the latest advancements in tech to make your customers more satisfied:
WRITE BETTER-OPTIMIZED PRODUCT COPY
Product descriptions are a vital part of any e-commerce store, and they need to target both human consumers and digital search engine crawlers.
A simple keyword research tool can thus help you optimize your descriptions for better rankings. However, you do need to refrain from over-optimization and remember the human factor.
AI-driven tools can also help you analyze:
- customer behavior
- the time customers spend on a page and how they engage with it
- customers’ general interests and preferences
With that data, you can customize your product descriptions or even create different landing pages for different customer types.
And since there are so many similar stores out there selling the same kinds of products, you also want to use a plagiarism checking tool like this one from Quetext to ensure you haven’t inadvertently described your own items just like someone else has.
IMPROVE SOCIAL MEDIA AUTOMATION
A customer’s experience with your brand often starts away from your website. They may see your display ad, or they may come across you on social media. This is why you also need to ensure that your social media presence is admirable and that your customers have something to engage with.
There are dozens of social media automation tools that can help you cut down on the time required to be present and engaged across a variety of platforms. For starters, you can schedule your posts for all your networks from a single dashboard, so you won’t have to be present in real-time.
You should also make very good use of all the social monitoring and behavior analysis tools that will help you get to know your audience better and understand what it is they are looking for. This can help you add new products to your store and come up with new, creative ways to advertise them.
However, keep in mind that you do need a human to get involved in order to succeed on social media. So, don’t leave it all in the hands of technology, and schedule some time for engaging with your customers.
TIME-SAVING EMAIL AUTOMATION
Email marketing also plays an important role in customer experience. After all, customers will see several emails from your store: one to let them know their order has been placed, one to let them know their items have been shipped, and probably one to ask them for a review.
Technology can first help you automate these emails completely and let certain actions or events trigger them. For example, you’d send automated emails for cart abandonment, a customer’s birthday, a flash sale, etc. It can also help you track your open and click rates, letting you improve your subject lines and your email copy.
To ensure the right messages reach the right people, you should also make good use of solutions that help you segment your email list. Proper segmentation will help you make your customers feel heard and seen, no matter their experience with your brand.
HANDLE LARGE VOLUMES OF CUSTOMER DATA
E-commerce stores need to go through large amounts of data on a daily basis, which is not something a human can ever be expected to do well or in a timely manner. This is where technology, especially AI-based solutions, step in to monitor data sets and data flows.
AI can help you identify behavior patterns and determine which items are often bought together to improve your cross- and up-selling tactics. It can also alert you to any anomalies. For instance, one of your products may not be selling at all, which you would have trouble noticing with just a human set of eyes.
There are also invoice extraction tools that can cut down on the time you spend doing your finances, as well as productivity tools that can alert you to important dates and deadlines.
Relying on technology to help you streamline and track all of your important processes can obviously help you save time. But more importantly, it will help you secure more headspace, which you can then occupy with improving and growing your business.
PRECISE TARGETING WITH VOICE-ACTIVATED ADS
Voice-activated ads are a relatively new and increasingly popular way of reaching your audience. They use smart speakers to communicate with the user and essentially conduct an entire conversation between device and customer, prompting them to respond with short answers that will impact how the ad is further served to them.
Estee Lauder has had a lot of success with the voice ad campaign they ran on Spotify and Google Home, which targeted users based on their listening preferences.
This kind of precise advertising gives you plenty of room to improve customer experience, as you can take their specific needs into consideration. Instead of bombarding them with an ad they don’t want to see (or hear), it allows you to show them a product they would actually want to buy.
HASSLE-FREE INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
Customers will have a poor experience with your brand if they:
- are served an ad for a product that is out of stock
- place an order for an item you aren’t able to send them immediately
- have to go through a complex process to return an item
In fact, by improving your inventory management system and ensuring that you can stay on top of your incoming and outgoing stock at all times, you can ensure customers never have to complain about shipping delays or long lead times.
There are numerous solutions you can use that can easily be integrated with your shop and that will also run practically on their own, so you don’t have to keep tracking your items yourself. You will be alerted to every important chance by your clever software system.
PERSONALIZED EVERYTHING
Finally, technology can help you personalize almost every aspect of your marketing and sales funnel you can think of. There is a tool out there that will help you personalize emails, chatbot scripts, product recommendations, and so on.
As customers are more and more interested in personalized advertising and tailored messaging, most of your competitors are already most likely making good use of these solutions, so make sure you don’t miss out on the opportunity yourself.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Technology can help you build a much better customer experience for your shoppers. However, no matter how helpful it is, don’t forget that a human brain still needs to be calling the important shots!
