Shifts in the modern commerce journey and customer expectations
Tara Daly
·July 17, 2024
Learn how to build a customer journey that includes a strong post-purchase experience to boost retention.
The commerce journey is evolving—and as a merchant, it’s crucial to build a business that resonates with shoppers’ needs and expectations, or you’ll find yourself falling behind.
Online shopping is continuing to explode, now representing 22% of all retail sales. While the trend has been on the rise for over 15 years, COVID lockdowns spurred growing comfort with online purchases, and it’s estimated that a quarter of all shopping may be done online by 2025. Increasingly, shoppers are completing purchases via their mobile devices, with 76% of shoppers saying they make purchases on their smartphones.
That’s all good news for ecommerce merchants like yourself—but you need to do more than make it easy for customers to buy products online. Increasingly, customers are prioritizing a strong post-purchase customer experience, too.
In this article, we’ll look at how to build a customer journey that meets the modern shopper’s expectations.
How to optimize the customer journey funnel
Here’s how the traditional customer journey goes:
Awareness: The customer sees an ad for your brand, spots it on social media, or hears about it from a friend.
Interest: They engage with your content, whether that’s an ad, reviews, blog content, or branded videos.
Desire: After consuming your content (whether ads, social media, marketing content, or UGC), they form a desire to make a purchase. Offering limited-time promotions can help you manufacture that desire.
Action: The customer makes a purchase.
But if that’s the end of your customer journey, you’re leaving out a crucial step: the post-purchase experience.
Especially in ecommerce, close to 18% of your sales are likely to end up as returns, and even higher in certain industries. As such, a positive returns experience is an important part of the customer journey. In fact, 67% of shoppers check a returns policy before even making a purchase.
Here are some guidelines for building a modern commerce experience that guides customers through every stage of the buying cycle:
Build an engaging funnel with personalization
Build a cohesive customer experience across all the channels you use to engage with customers, including web, mobile, email, SMS, in-store, and direct mail. Use technology that enables you to build personalized customer experiences on an individual basis, triggering marketing campaigns that are tied to user actions. For instance, if a customer looks at a pair of shoes on your website, you can follow up with a campaign reminding them of the product and offering a limited-time discount code.
Make sure that every part of their brand journey ties together, integrating data around engagement, purchases, customer support requests, and returns to ensure that you can get a holistic look at each customer, providing them with relevant content and timely responses to their requests.
Optimize the checkout process
Almost 70% of online shoppers abandon their shopping carts before completing a purchase. To keep more of your sales, it’s important to build a streamlined checkout experience that removes friction from the process.
To do this:
- Don’t force customers to set up accounts
More fields to fill out leads to higher abandonment rates. Give customers a hassle-free experience by requiring only the bare minimum of information from them: a shipping address, a contact method, and payment details. You can give them the option to create an account and tie their order to it at a later time. - Be transparent with your fees and shipping times
Customers often bow out of a purchase after seeing unexpected fees, or discovering that shipping times are far longer than they’d anticipated. Make it easy for shoppers to see their fees and shipping times up front by simply plugging in their zip codes, rather than waiting until the end of the check out process. - Integrate with payment solutions
Customers don’t always want to complete a sale if they need to get out a credit card and type in their number. Give them options to use stored payment info via Apple Pay, Google Pay, PayPal, and other payment providers.
Enhance the order tracking and delivery process
To maintain a positive brand experience, it’s important to provide ongoing updates about your customer’s order once they’ve made a purchase. Start with an instant order confirmation email that serves as their receipt, and lets them know next steps: i.e., “We’re preparing your item for shipping and will send you a message once it’s on its way.”
When the item is scanned for shipping, you can provide the customer with real-time tracking details and an estimated delivery date. They should be able to click on the link to get continual updates around the package status. If there is a delay or delivery error, be proactive and notify them immediately, including how you plan to remedy the solution.
By providing frequent updates and the ability to check order status at any given time, you’ll be able to give your customer confidence in your brand, and reduce the number of customer support requests that come in related to order status.
Provide exceptional post-purchase support
Finally, if the customer wants to return the product, make the process as simple as possible. Using Loop, you can provide access to a self-service portal where shoppers can request refunds, exchanges, or store credit. Creating a hassle-free returns experience will help you ensure a positive post-purchase experience, encouraging the shopper to continue their relationship with your brand. By tracking insights around return reasons, you’ll also be able to identify trends in product returns that will help you discover product flaws or sizing errors that you can remedy to improve the customer experience for future shoppers.
By enhancing all aspects of the commerce journey, you’ll be able to deliver highly relevant, personalized experiences that will keep your customers coming back again and again.
Want to learn how Loop can help you optimize the commerce journey? Get a demo.
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