Customers are facing challenges due to the current shutting or restraints on their physical stores. People continue to look at what is open and what is close to them. It puts all the responsibility on retailer’s e-commerce sites to not only sell stock and make money, but also to assist, update, and encourage customers. It might be a crucial balancing act, but it is not impossible.
Retailers can adopt the following eight strategies to offer their customers with pertinent, easier, and simple shopping experiences.
1. Prioritize Business Challenges
Your team is going to get lots of requests and novel ideas. But it is not possible to handle them right away. The key is to prioritize your business challenges. Assess whether there are phases of your site’s messaging or design that is harming the brand or having a negative influence on customers’ experience. After adjusting that, dig into optimizations that can either improve the experience or improve performance.
Match the messaging on your marketing channels to your site and give a thought about including site performance. Find means to optimize customer support and promotions, as well as ways to manage volatility in site traffic and transaction volume. Pay attention to those projects that will have the most influence, then define how you will measure their success.
2. Optimize Site Speed
Stores are closed, and people have no option but to shop online. Your retail website should be able to handle this rise in volume. Follow these tips and you will be prepared.
- Examine your content delivery network (CDN) providers to ensure it can fulfill requests faster.
- Implement easy HTTP-caching ways that enhance load times for returning users and decrease server load with minimal code changes.
- Compress your images and text to make your site load quicker but don’t compromise visual quality.
- Have a font-display swap so that shoppers can read your site’s text, even if the primary font doesn’t load fast enough.
- Erase unused tags from your tag managers, clean up bloated CSS and JS code, and delete other deplored elements.
- Check your site’s speed frequently with tools such as Test My Site and PageSpeed Insights.
3. Provide A Seamless Checkout Experience
Seventy-six percent of smartphone users are probably going to buy from companies whose websites or apps let them buy stuff rapidly. Make your payment processing system quick and easy. Also look for methods to include personalization enhancements, like keeping shopping info or recently searched products. In brief, your front- and back-end background and technology should provide the best experience possible. Have the infrastructure and tech stack that supports your site and its seamless interaction.
4. Leverage Technology To Alleviate Customer Support Demand
Brands can be most helpful to the customers if their customer service teams are trained to best handle their needs in today’s environment? Use your teams and chatbots to explain customer service updates, be clear about expectations, and signpost handy resources. Allow and look for any customer messages on your Google My Business profile too, which will provide easy and quick answers to the questions of the customers.
5. Use Prime Real Estate For Critical Information Alerts
The majority of the customers want to know the response of the brands and companies to the crisis. You can use the homepage of your site to let the customers know about how you’re supporting them. Stay accurate, avoid corporate-speak, and simplify your banners and other site notifications, but make them different with calm colors and fonts. The users should easily be able to “X” close any banners so they can remain navigating.
6. Make Your Product Offerings And Promotions Relevant
The routines of the customers and their priorities have changed due to the closing of nonessential stores. What you’re presenting on your website should be pertinent to this new normal. Promote the items that can be of most help to your customers. Customers who are unable to find the products they need or want to purchase end up buying brands they wouldn’t normally buy. The new retail categories are rising and businesses need to keep pace with quickly changing consumer needs during COVID-19.
7. Adapt Your Creative And Media Campaign Strategy
Shopping behaviors just like routines and schedules change to fulfill the requirements of social isolation and shelter-in-place orders. Your brand campaigns and creative assets must reflect that. Keep your content updated to get customers to your site rather than physical locations that may be shut.
Stop campaigns in regions where it is impossible to work or where the content may seem insensitive, for example, the areas where your supply chain is disturbed or stores are shut. Your brand message needs to be creative and relevant. Use automated solutions that respond to real-time signals to carry on with customer demand and optimize within your digital budget.
8. Be Consistent Across Channels
People are stressed to get trustworthy and reliable information, and they’re going online in search of it. People are curious to know what’s open or closed near. Make sure the messages reflect what’s on your site, whether you’re communicating product availability, shipping times, or brand messaging.
Zahoor Bhat has over 10+ years of experience as an online editor and media manager. He has worked with major online news and content sites as a media manager. He is well versed with major content management systems and web platforms such as WordPress and social media networks including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google Business, Yelp, Instagram & Linkedin. He is an expert in content creation, proofreading and finally making it live. Being a social media expert, he is able to make relations with social media influencers and make sure to generate leads and grow business via different social media platforms.
