5 Ways to Improve Customer Experience in eCommerce

The importance of an optimal eCommerce customer experience is best explained with a stat: Bain & Company found that businesses that are able to deliver great customer experiences saw a 4-8% revenue growth above their market, in turn achieving a customer lifetime value 6 to 14 times that of detractors.¹

Customer expectations are higher than ever and eCommerce businesses need to adapt to them to see greater growth across the board. That begins and ends with optimising your customer journeys and experiences.

We’re going to cover the top five ways to improve on customer experiences that always lead back to maximising your KPIs and metrics in the long run, as well as real-life examples of how Uniqodo realised this growth for our clients.

Suggested reading: Check out our blog 5 eCommerce Promotion Ideas: Your Guide to Cracking Q4 to keep your promotional strategies ahead for the rest of the year.

1. Test your promotion incentives against customer segments

Incentivising your promotions may be a tried-and-true technique for how to promote eCommerce products,  but that doesn’t mean any and every approach will work. Split testing how you incentivise your offers is key to gauging their effectiveness at different stages of the customer lifecycle. It can otherwise be difficult to discern which incentives are more appealing to your customer base and which aren’t — a 10% off offer may pale in comparison to a free shipping offer.

The power of A/B testing in analysing promotion efficiency

A/B testing is the most effective approach to measuring performance of your incentives against one another so that you can decide which to then promote. This especially helps when developing promotional strategies that are intended to help you better reach your ideal KPIs.

One potential setback to keep in mind with running A/B tests is that you may not have the resources needed to…

• Run as many tests as needed to facilitate accurate results.

• Develop promotion strategies that are sophisticated enough in the first place.

Consider taking up an automated platform that can help you run these tests as well as assist in developing promotional strategies that are effective in enhancing your business’ customer experience.

In fact, employing intelligent automation to your marketing efforts across the board is the most cost-effective and productive way of creating tailored loyalty promotion experiences that will encourage customers to continue supporting your brand.

Pro tip: Though there are a variety of metrics to consider, remember that substantial business growth will always ultimately come from improving your customer journeys.

How Uniqodo helped EE Mobile by enabling A/B testing to measure their promotions’ effectiveness  

Challenge: EE Mobile wanted to A/B test the conversion rate uplifts between their existing promotional journey and an enhanced promotional journey towards their student customer base. They were also struggling to keep up with the maintenance required to manage their promotions and code distributions.

Solution: Uniqodo’s capability in developing unique, single-use codes proved ideal in helping EE Mobile develop an enhanced promotional journey to first test against. The new journey utilised targeting URL parameters to identify traffic sources and red strips embedded into existing pages throughout the purchase flow to aid the customer’s journey. An A/B test was then run to pinpoint the impact. This test involved dividing customers into two groups — a control and a test group — and having the former receive the original journey, with the latter receiving the enhanced journey.

Result: Uniqodo’s enhanced journey resulted in a 19% uplift on the conversion rate as well as a 23% uplift on orders to boot. The platform took it to the next level by then using the A/B testing to prove the success of the improved messaging. This granted the visibility that EE Mobile needed to supercharge their promotional journeys and served as encouragement for them to roll out the new journey across all of their student traffic.

2. Create seamless customer journeys to drive conversions 

Avoid making the easy mistake of spending so much time coming up with strategies to enhance your customer journeys that you forget to make them as seamless to go through as possible. Taking up various ways to make them interesting will provide little growth if the step-by-step process of that journey is too complicated in the first place. 

To streamline your customers’ promotional journeys, you should…

• Deliver bespoke promotions specific to channel: Aim to always be providing a seamless experience for your customers across your owned and earned channels, from the initial landing page right through to conversion. This is especially important when utilising affiliate partnerships. Ensure that customers are able to smoothly transition from being on an affiliate’s website to yours - and make sure there is messaging to let them know you’ve got them covered.

• Personalise promotion experiences: Use customer data that reveals insights like buying habits and website behaviour to curate personalised and relevant promotion journeys that provide a better incentive to purchase.

• Leverage a Promotion Experience Platform: An advanced platform can automate controlled promo code distribution, and enhance the customer experience through an engaging and guided journey. We’ll discuss this in more detail below.

Sky utilised a Promotion Experience Platform to improve customer journeys

Challenge: Sky, one of the largest telecommunications companies in the UK, was experiencing extremely low conversion rates through their promotional campaigns being run with affiliate partners. They wanted to find a better way to tap into and amplify conversions from their affiliate promotions. 

Solution: Uniqodo created a bespoke onsite optimised journey for specific traffic sources to enhance underperforming journeys. This included the implementation of:

• A top of page canvas that is visible from the landing page to checkout.

• A reinforcement message of the Basket Summary page.

• In-basket confirmation messages.

Result: The reasoning behind each of these solutions was to make every step of the customers’ journeys throughout the site as streamlined and engaging as possible, by eliminating the need for inconveniences like having to open a new tab to check their baskets. As a result, the largest traffic sources have seen conversion rates increase by more than 5 times and the actual number of conversions have risen by 68%.

Suggested reading: Want to learn more about ecommerce profit margins and conversion rates. Click here for a full breakdown. 

3. Enhance customer engagement with sophisticated gamification 

Gamifying promotions may be a recent and rising trend but they shouldn’t be treated as a passing fad. A study by Ask Your Target Market found that 38% of customers enjoy when eCommerce sites include games and interactive features throughout the customer experience, with 36% saying they are more likely to visit sites that have interactive capabilities. Growth-minded eCommerce business leaders can utilise gamification to enhance their customer experience and better attain their ideal KPIs.

Take gamification of your promo campaigns further

The key to gamifying promotions successfully is by understanding that it’s their interactivity that encourages customers to keep coming back to your business because it gives them engaging, memorable experiences on your site. Methods like spinning wheel plugins that users can spin to potentially win discounts and/or prizes and offering “mystery discount” codes that they won’t be able to get until they redeem said code work because they make the customer feel involved.

But coming up with and applying engaging promotions on a constant basis can be tricky to do for most eCommerce businesses without some help. Partnering with Uniqodo will not only keep you aligned with experts that are well-versed in enhancing customer experiences, but you also have the guarantee of bespoke promotion journeys that are best-suited to your business.

4. Leverage exclusivity to generate higher demand 

The VIP experience for customers really comes down to recognising the value they bring to your business and returning the favour by providing them with exclusive opportunities. Doing so helps make your customers feel appreciated and allows them to see the benefits to continue purchasing from your business. This increases their customer lifetime value. 

3 tips to creating more effective VIP promo marketing experiences: 

• Use your CLTV metrics to identify your most valuable customers.

• Target these customers with early access rewards before you launch a new product or announce another limited-time event or exclusive offer.

• Limit and personalise your promotions to your most valuable customers by using unique, single-use codes. These also protect your promotions from being misused and leading to over-discounting.

How Uniqodo helped Beauty Bay reward VIP customers and maximise ROI

Challenge: Beauty Bay had announced a highly anticipated product collaboration with NikkieTutorials. The product was expected to sell out fast and Beauty Bay needed to have a strategy in place to reward existing customers and NikkieTutorials own followers with early access to the product before general release. 

Solution: Uniqodo created a bespoke promotional journey that enabled Beauty Bay to email a unique code to customers who had signed up to get early access. VIP customers could then use the code to gain access to an exclusive page where they could purchase the product before it went on general sale. 

Result: The rollout of exclusive codes for customers who signed up achieved two objectives: 

• Improve Beauty Bay’s CLTV by incentivising its customers to continue purchasing from and interacting with the business so that they can redeem reward offers.

• To actually reward these VIP customers so that it is established that Beauty Bay’s customer base can reliably expect enhanced customer journeys from the business.

As a result, 87 thousand new customer sign-ups were generated before the campaign launch and there was a 23% revenue increase in promotion related sales.

5. Implement intelligent audience targeting to revive abandoned carts 

Cart abandonment may seem like a basic point to pay attention to, but they play a major factor in your business’ success and are ideal indicators for how effective your customer journeys are.

Did you know that roughly 81% of website users across all industries worldwide abandoned their purchases in 2021?² Delays and complex processes are some of the main reasons why customers abandon their carts at checkout. For instance, if they are required to create a new account before making a purchase or technical problems lead to slow page load speeds. 

Again, having customer experiences that are frustrating or just plain inconvenient can spell damage for eCommerce business owners, so addressing the quality gaps in your customer journeys should be a priority. 

Employ advanced strategies to offset basket abandonment 

There are several strategies you can implement to stop customers from abandoning their carts altogether. Such as:

• Simplify your checkout process with supporting text outlining the next steps of the promotion to make the process faster and easier for your customers. 

• Use flash sale and timed offer promo codes to create a sense of urgency. Look to multiple channels to do this, like email follow-ups stating that items will only be held for a certain time period, e.g. 24 hours. 

• Ensure promo codes are visible and accessible at every stage of the customer's journey.

• Exit-intent pop-ups for when a customer tries to leave the site e.g. Are you sure you want to leave? Our promotion has now increased to 30% off!

• Offer dedicated customer support through tools like live chats to assist customer queries and reduce cart abandonment rates. You can also integrate single-use promotion generation capabilities within your customer service systems to help resolve issues through further incentives.

You should also be thinking about how your promotional campaigns can be optimised to further encourage customers to see their purchases through. Consider taking up the help of a solution like Uniqodo’s Promotion Experience Platform, which activates your ability to distribute unique, single-use codes and craft engaging promotional journeys that deliver marketing ROI.

Suggested reading: For a more in-depth guide on how to prevent cart abandonment, read our blog How To Use Promo Codes To Stop Basket Abandonment.

Conclusion

Customer expectations are increasing and your eCommerce business needs to address those expectations to be profitable. This very profitability comes about when you channel approaches that improve your customer journeys, leading to improvements in key metrics such as your CLTV and customer retention rates.

These objectives are best realised by a Promotion Experience Platform like Uniqodo that can help you create authentic, personalised, and valuable promotional experiences that increase your conversion rates, and maximise your ROI and profit margins.

Uniqodo has many years of expertise helping well-known eCommerce brands like OVO Energy, Sky, and Beauty Bay deliver exceptional customer experiences through engaging promotional campaigns. Our innovative platform develops promotions that enable greater efficiency and control over your campaigns, along with consultative services to create bespoke and innovative customer journeys.

Check out Uniqodo’s recent success stories or get in touch with the team if you are interested to know more about the platform.

¹ Are you experienced? | Bain & Company

^{2 2021 Ecommerce Stats & Trends Report | SaleCycle}