When trying to grow an online business in this day and age everything is about the experience. E-commerce is solely about the experience of the user and the quality of the product. When the consumer finds a site or a product that they really like they will come back and the whole user journey is important in accomplishing that.
An online business needs a great website and making a great website is hard. There are a lot of factors that go into having the best website of all and the same template that works for others might not work for your business. This article wants to give three pieces of advice to give your customer the best experience on your website.
Great photographs are important
The whole user experience starts with the aesthetics of the website. How images correlate to text and how easy it is to navigate around. Having great photos and images on your website is really, really important and when photographs do their job they invite the consumer further into the site and encourage them to stay at your website – the longer they stay, the higher the odds of them buying something.
Great photographs are often done in post-production. The editing of pictures can be tough if you don’t have the right software. Great software for editing is Photo Studio Management Software by Creative Force, which is easy to use and has a lot of great tools to make the pictures look their best.
The item description has to be on-point
When it comes to the whole experience it is important to note that – more often than not – the item description to your products have to be on point. More consumers want to know what is in the products, what it is made of and what kind of fit it is. A great rule of thumb is to know what your customers look for and describe it.
Unrelated to the customer journey and the way customers interact with the website and items on it, is the fact that a great item description makes your website appear further up on google searches. When items are described well and using a lot of keywords that customers search for on Google then Google’s algorithm will rate the link and therefore the website higher. This means a lot when it comes to enhancing sales and growing a c-commerce business.
One of the ways you can make sure that your description for your items is on point is to use something called Google Adword to do keyword analysis. When knowing what to point out in the various item descriptions it is a lot easier to grow a business and it takes a lot less time to write.
How do you anticipate what the customers want?
To create the perfect user journey for your customers and users you need to know what they think, who they are and what their values are. Knowing who you are selling to, what the stand for and how they react to trends and certain things is key to knowing how to sell to them. It might seem simple but knowing your target audience and demographic is the most valuable thing in the world. But not only knowing how old they are, their gender, where they live and how educated they are – but also knowing why they buy your product, why they buy your competitor’s product and so on, is key information.
So how does one get this information? It is called market research and can be done in a lot of ways. But one of the best ways to make sure you know how your audience is reacting is literally by asking them. Conduct interviews with people who buy your and your competitor’s product. Ask them why, when, how and how much and analyze the answers. Get to know their values and how they react to the whole trend.
Let’s say you are selling sustainable clothing. Do your customers buy your product because it is sustainable or because it looks good? Would they buy your clothing just because it is sustainable? What if it were ugly? Knowing the answer to everything is key to understanding how the market works and how you should react to it.
Creating personas
Once you have all the data and all the information about your target demographic, you can now create personas. Personas are a way of making it easier to map out the user journey. Creating ‘fictive’ persons based on real data to make sure everyone on your team knows what they are working so hard to please.
Personas help navigate the whole landscape and help you work towards someone and not let it be so abstract. When conducting a marketing plan, it is easier to target “Sunny Simon” than it is targeting “men in the age of 20-25”. Putting a name and a ‘real’ person helps steer the process in the right direction and makes the path to your end goal much more easy to see.
Personas can be everything. “Sunny Simon” is just an example. It is important when creating a persona that you use all your information and do not generalize on the matter at hand. Don’t just take assumptions, but use the real data. Use what you know about your demographic and the people you have interviewed. When that is processed you should be able to make the best cases for all of your core customers – that is the key to a good user journey.
Why the user journey is important
The user journey is important for any business because it is the experience and journey that defines how they feel about your shop. Having a good time at a shop – or any place for that matter, restaurant or amusement park – increases the odds of the customers coming back and giving your repeat business. Therefore, you should put a lot of effort into the user journey.
