Get Your Product, Ecommerce Experience in Order

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What can you do to ensure a quality ecommerce and product experience? A lot, it turns out.

As ecommerce sales continue to rise dramatically, the digital imperative has hit the moment of truth — 58% of consumers will turn more toward online shopping after the pandemic. With information overload online, a buyer faces the gargantuan task of filtering through the information noise to make a purchase decision.

Here, to make the purchase decision intuitive by influencing the heuristics of a user, marketing and commerce teams are looking beyond serving just basic product information to customers. Instead, they must focus on product experience that continues to reign as a key competitive differentiator. In doing so, ecommerce businesses need to chart out well-organized customer journeys to deliver superior product experiences.

Here are the top eight ways in which marketing and commerce teams can improve product experiences: 

Metadata is often overlooked and is undoubtedly not as attention-grabbing for the audience as audiovisual content. But it plays a make-or-break role in delivering a complete product experience.

Accurately written metadata with essential keywords provides easier access to information for the customer and is responsible for driving traffic to a website. It can be periodically updated to increase the relevance of the content. Enterprises can use various digital assets, like blogs or videos, with accurate meta-data to keep users engaged. Having a comprehensive metadata can increase brand visibility, enhance customer engagement, provide an enjoyable product experience and ultimately increase sales.

Related Article: Examining the Importance of Metadata in Content Creation Workflows

Be it on the tidy sea or a digital app, ease of navigation is an essential pillar in determining success. Customer journeys on a webpage or an app are no different. Navigation should make the journey feel intuitive and entertaining for the users until the desired goal (sales) is achieved.

Guided by visual cues, optimized navigation by following certain visual principles like maintaining a consistent style across the product, embracing white space and having a clear hierarchy improves navigation. Having clarity in the purpose of the product, aligning content strategy and designing navigation accordingly can come in handy in enhancing the product experience. 

Copywriting is one of the oldest means communicating that still holds relevance today. High-quality copywriting can optimize the design and can enable users to interact with it seamlessly. Good copywriting should evoke trust and communicate the message with utmost clarity. Leverage copy to highlight the product’s benefits, keep it simple and jargon-free and always use an active voice.

A misleading text on a navigation button or a banner copy can frustrate a user and impact the overall experience. A copy written from the user’s perspective by carefully choosing words that resonate with the brand and product can complement the design and encourage usability. 

Related Article: How to Use Content Marketing to Your Advantage

For any product or service, having the clarity of "whom it serves" is indispensable as not every product serves every audience. Without understanding the target audiences’ needs and interests, delivering a compelling product experience is unlikely. To better understand the audience, marketing and commerce teams must know their demographic traits such as age, gender, location, income, interests and employment.

With this information, one can narrow the target audience from a much more diverse pool of customers to focus on delivering a market-fit product. One can also engage directly with the audience using websites and social media analytical tools to glean insights into the target audience and have a feedback loop that will help refine the product experience. 

A great design is anything the user knows how to use intuitively without needing any guidance. A user will always pick the former option when choosing between a product that feels natural to use.

To provide a great product experience, concentrate on designing the product’s User Experience (UX) to strike a chord with the intuitive urges of the user. Create a prototype from your experience and expertise, talk to people, gather feedback and optimize the design. There may not be any scientific data backing it, but it all comes down to how easy and efficient the product is.

Related Article: UX Is a Continuous Investment for Profitable Companies. Here's Why

These days digital natives use multiple touchpoints; they might use one channel to research the product and place an order using the other. With endless options for the customer, opportunities for enterprises to grab their attention abound. One must capitalize on that opportunity to interact with users in as many relevant channels as possible.

Understand the customers’ needs and behaviors, map out their journey, scale the product to fit across channels and have interactive support services. The positive experience at every touchpoint adds up to provide a comprehensive product experience. 

Data personalization is becoming the new norm that every customer expects from a product or service. Customers are starting to prefer brands to know their preferences and purchase history and offer personalized interaction. Connecting product data with customer data can make meaningful recommendations and improve the omnichannel customer experience.

The right MDM strategy will help streamline data from multiple sources. It connects the product, customers, supplier, and other critical data with valuable information available in other applications such as CRM, ERP and other marketing automation solutions.

Building a lasting customer relationship in this digital age is challenging, but it’s rewarding and helps enterprises sustain. Repeated customers are essential for the success of any business. That is why investing in tools that will help manage the customers makes sense. Have a tool to track how many customers return and why. Have personalized communication with customers based on their behavior and journey in the product.

Reward customers for their loyalty with personalized offers and referral bonuses. When a customer is hooked to a product, organizations can maximize the leverage by building lasting relationships with customers to increase sales.

According to Gartner, product experience outperforms product and price to create the biggest impact on purchase decisions. With 80% B2B sales interactions between suppliers and buyers to occur in digital channels by 2025, it is crucial for enterprises to focus on delivering an efficient product experience.

As the trends shift from seller-centric to buyer-centric, delivering a successful digital product experience will require a deep understanding of customers. Enterprises must keep track of the trend to evolve successfully and know how to handle customer data. Gather as much information as possible, infer it and never stop improving the product and interacting with the customer.

Ultimately, this old adage holds true even in this digital age: “Take care of the customer, they will take care of your business.”