When looking to boost your conversion rate, key business improvement tactics can include using your data smarter and employing some smart personalisation. 

But did you know that improving your customer experience is one of the best ways you can improve your overall customer lifetime value?

Let’s take a look at why a strong customer experience strategy is key when it comes to improving your conversion rate.
 

 

What is customer experience?

Customer experience relates to the overall impression your customer has of your business based on their experience during their entire buying journey. Their customer experience will influence how they feel about your company as a whole, how likely they are to buy from you again, and whether they would positively promote your products and services to others.

In short, customer experience management is extremely important for your business; helping you create happy, loyal customers who will promote the success of your brand by contributing to both revenue and word of mouth marketing.

Customer experience encompasses everything you do as a business: the quality of your products, the ease of use of your website, the reliability of your delivery services, how easy it is to complete a return or even resolve a complaint.

 

 

What is customer experience management?

In order to improve your customer experience ratings, it’s important to gather data. 

In a similar way to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer Experience Management (CEM) tracks your customer’s interactions with your company at different points along the customer journey. 

However, unlike CRM, CEM examines what your company looks like to your customers rather than the other way round.

Unlike a sales-focussed CRM strategy, a CEM strategy will build a picture of what your customers like and don’t like, enabling you to improve upon any negative feedback and make the positive feedback even better.

Why is customer experience management important?

Giving your customers a smooth and positive customer experience can increase conversion rate and result in more repeat business, but implementing a robust CEM strategy can have other benefits too:

• It costs less to retain a customer than to acquire them. Satisfied customers also tend to spend more.
• Customer feedback will help you improve. By getting feedback directly from your customers you’ll discover specific ways of improving customer experience and retaining your customers.
• Happy customers are the voice of your brand. Customer endorsement should never be underestimated when it comes to influencing the buying decisions of others.
• It will give you valuable competitor insight. It’s only natural that customers will compare your company and its products when making their purchasing decisions - knowing why they make their choices will really help you get the edge.

 

What business improvement can you make to increase the conversion rate?

Take a look at some of these basic ways of improving your conversion rate.

 

- Are you really user-friendly?

It can be very easy to think your company is user friendly when you’re looking at it from the inside, but is it really? 

Ask your customers the difficult questions to really find out where sticking points are. Come up with a plan to improve these and then test again.

 

- Good customer experience doesn’t mean cheap

Although customers are becoming increasingly price savvy, price isn’t the only thing that should play into your customer experience strategy. 

When looking to increase your conversion rate with stellar customer service, you don’t have to be the cheapest but you do have to give them the kind of customer service they can’t get anywhere else. 

By focusing on finding out what will make the biggest difference to your customers (for example, free delivery, free returns, an extended returns policy, loyalty points) you’ll be able to put the business improvement in place that will make sure your customers won’t want to shop anywhere else.

 

- Give your customers precise delivery times

One of the barriers to customers shopping online is imprecise delivery times. 

By offering customers a variety of delivery options, you can increase your conversion rate by making it much more convenient for them to shop with you.

Giving your customers Next Day Delivery, Weekend Delivery and Parcel Tracking options are great ways to convert those customer baskets into sales. 

Removing the inconvenience of having to wait for a parcel to arrive will also make your service much more user friendly, whether that’s giving your customer one-hour delivery slots, or giving them the option of delivering their parcel to work address, local post office, or a collection point.
 

- Make returns easy

When buying products online it’s inevitable that customers are going to want to return things sometimes. 

As well as making sure your product descriptions and images are as accurate as possible, you can remove potential barriers to buying by making your returns process hassle-free. 

Offering free returns is an obvious way to go, but making the returns process as hassle-free as you can score the biggest customer experience gains.

Think of things like offering in-store returns if you can, make the returns label easy to print, or even give your customer a choice of where they can return the product (for example, to a local collection point).

Don’t forget, just because that customer has returned a product, it doesn’t have to be the end of the line. Finding the right way to re-engage with them and keep that relationship alive could result in creating a lifelong customer.