Jul 5, 2024
A few decades ago, selling online was a powerful and novel competitive differentiator. But now, with more than 26 million ecommerce sites across the globe, customers have their pick of options. That means selling online isn’t the advantage it used to be—it’s table stakes.
So how can ecommerce businesses stand out in an increasingly competitive market? Today, success hinges on providing a stellar ecommerce customer experience.
The importance of customer experience in ecommerce success
How can businesses use AI to enhance ecommerce customer experience?
3 best practices for ecommerce customer experience
Looking forward: The future of ecommerce customer experience
In one 2023 survey conducted by Forrester, an impressive 80% of business leaders said improving the customer experience was a top priority. And that’s for good reason. A positive and personalized customer experience offers the following advantages:
There are plenty of specific tactics you can use to deliver effective and engaging omnichannel customer experiences—and we’ll share those a little later.
But before you get into the nitty-gritty, it’s important to take a step back and understand the groundwork that will make those strategies even more effective. Here are three steps to work through your ecommerce customer experience analysis and ensure you’re set up for success.
Improving your customer experience shouldn’t be rooted in guesswork—it should be rooted in real-world insights you get from paying attention to how your customers think and feel about your brand. You can do this by:
Want to dig deeper into your customers’ experiences and perspectives? Use Insider to create customer surveys for your website visitors and AMP emails to collect post-purchase feedback.
Insider lets you collect preference data right within your email to tailor future recommendations
Collecting data and insights doesn’t do anything on its own—you need to take action on that information by using it to guide your customer experience.
This means less aimless experimentation (“Let’s do xyz and see if our audience likes it”) and more data-driven changes (“The data shows our audience will like it if we do xyz”).
With this approach, you’ll make far more strategic improvements and see more meaningful impacts on customer satisfaction and conversion.
Once you understand your customers’ expectations and pain points, you can examine your digital experience from their perspective. For example:
User experience plays a huge role in your overall customer experience, with companies seeing an average increase of 83% in their KPIs when their UX enhances their customer experience. Insider can help you streamline your customer experience with:
AI seems like it should be the antithesis of a positive and personal experience. But as it turns out, generative AI in customer experience offers a number of benefits for both companies and consumers.
The first is efficiency. An impressive 74% of customers say that AI improves the efficiency of customer service. That’s important, especially when efficiency is what customers value most in an experience—even ahead of convenience and knowledgeable service. However, AI has other impacts outside of sheer speed:
When you’re ready to improve your ecommerce customer experience, here are three specific focus areas to start with—and how Insider can help.
When customers don’t have consistent and cohesive experiences across all of your platforms, they’re more likely to leave without making a purchase (and they likely won’t return again).
With Insider, you can ensure every visitor has an optimized brand experience with:
Want more customers to make it to your checkout? Guide them there step-by-step rather than expecting them to fend for themselves. With Insider, you can:
We’ve already touched on the importance of a data-driven approach to customer experience. But it’s not a one-time activity—it’s something you need to default to as you continue to evaluate and improve your experience.
That’s not overwhelming with the right ecommerce marketing automation solution. Insider can help you:
All of the above can help you deliver a customer experience that engages and converts customers. But expectations and preferences are constantly changing—and technology and strategies are evolving right along with them.
So, what can we expect as we look to the next few years? Here are a few predictions for the future of the ecommerce customer experience:
Sirius AI™ helps leading brands achieve higher productivity while driving more revenue and ROI.
One thing that won’t change? The importance of the customer experience. Ecommerce is continuing to grow at a breakneck pace, which means consumers always have more options today than they did yesterday.
With that in mind, it’s no longer the place or even the products that will help ecommerce brands stand out from the crowd—it’s the level of experience they provide.
Written by
Katie Morley
Katie is an award-winning content marketer with over eight years of experience in content strategy, development, and copywriting. As Global Content Director at Insider, she currently oversees content strategy across 26 regions. Fun fact: Katie read 64 books last year (for which she owes a long commute and two week-long holidays where she spent approximately six hours a day with her nose in a book).