Customer engagement is crucial for planting your brand on the radar of your potential customer and generating sales. Without the in-person interactions that brick and mortar stores offer, engaging customers and establishing trust is a challenge that eCommerce businesses need to overcome.
The power dynamic that impacts conversions has largely shifted in favor of the customers who make the purchase decisions based on the experience they have when browsing through your eCommerce website. Your brand needs a finely curated customer engagement strategy that aims at providing enhanced customer experience and the design of your eCommerce website plays a crucial role in it.
As per a recent study, 46.1% of customers pay attention to the website’s design to decide if the company is credible or not. Apart from presenting an impressive homepage and captivating users with stunning images through your website, you require a few more tactics to make an instant connection with your audience.
Designing the user interface and user experience goes beyond ensuring mere visual appeal and involves ensuring website functionality as well. A strategy that focuses on conversion-focused eCommerce website design will explode customer engagement for your business and skyrocket the sales. Here is a list of design principles that you need to follow for ensuring the same.
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1. Leverage customers psychology in designing your website
Scarcity can act as a super effective persuasion tactic enabling customer engagement and can help in eliciting more sales. Designers can make use of powerful psychology, fear of missing out(FOMO) that can trigger users to get the product right now. For instance, your product page indicates a popular product and shows that most of the stock is already sold out. Now, FOMO triggers users, as they anticipate that their desired product will be soon “sold out”.
However, apart from scarcity, urgency can also be a tactic in boosting sales. Working on the same human psychology, you can reveal awesome deals that are about to expire in a few days if they don’t hurry up.
2. Drive sales with personalized user experience
Users are generally bombarded with floods of information in today’s highly competitive marketing realm. This is making it difficult for users to analyze and process all the information. So, you need to make it feasible for users to find out what product they are looking for, this can be done by personalizing the user experience.
Customizing UX for every single visitor works as an eCommerce optimization method as it tends to avoid extra information the user needs to go through. It can increase your user engagement and also make the audience feel important. Any user will love to see a customized website as it would appear like a tailor-made website just for them.
Apart from this, plugins such as “recently viewed products” can personalize online stores and boost sales.
3. Include the apt CTA
Clear and eye-catching Call-to-Action(CTA) can increase user engagement on your website. For this to work, you need to make sure when you build CTA for your eCommerce website, it is easily read and understood in the first few seconds.
While labeling your CTA, you need to think from the user’s perspective. Name your CTA with something like “Buy Now”, “Learn More”, “Add to Cart”. Apart from attractive labels on your CTA don’t begin to be aggressive.
For example, avoid positioning your CTA with the label “Buy now” at the home page of your website. Users may find it irritating as he/she is still in their discovery stage.
4. Avoid mandatory sign-up or keep it minimal
Sign-ups are important but any glitch or complexity may dissuade users to move forward with other options such as memberships or purchases.
Try keeping it minimal. Micro-interactions on the sign-ups can be a positive sign in keeping the user engaged. So, simply design a sign up with minimal navigation and hops. Additionally, a guide of instructions can serve as a cherry on the cake making the whole process easy and comfortable for customer engagement.
Further, you can avoid sign-ups for some cases and provide an option for guest logins too. With this, you can avoid losing customers who have come through viewing your post on social media.
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5. Filters and sorting options
With filter and sorting options on your eCommerce websites, you tend to make it feasible for users to choose their desired products and save time. Designers can design the filter and sorting options of the website in a creative way based on brands, prices, discounts, and popularity. Apart from creativity, importance on accessibility should also be given to increase customer engagement.
Somehow, the job of filtering options is also done by the search bar. But users tend to lookout for filter tools at some point in shopping. Suppose your website sells products where the brand name is important to customers. Take an example of Ray-Ban, with the help of filters you can manage to put the names of such brands upfront on your website.
6. Show your reviews and testimonials
According to a study, 91% of visitors claim that they trust the positive review that makes them more likely to use that business. When you boldly display your testimonials on your website, you tend to provide your visitors with valuable information. Reviews and testimonials are an important aspect of the overall eCommerce website designing as it gives a sense of security to your customers.
However, slapping random testimonials on every page is not strategic. You need to be careful about the placement as well as the style of testimonials you choose to display. Take for example, if your website provides services for interior designing, home cleaning services as well as home organizing. Your customer who is browsing interior designing services will not be interested in viewing testimonials related to home cleaning services on the web page.
7. Checkout should be easy-peasy
Checkout should be the centerpiece of every eCommerce store. Most eCommerce websites focus on great UI, images, homepage, and overlook the checkout page entirely. However, the checkout page is the stage that makes your audience turn into customers.
According to a recent study, the average cart abandonment rate is 69.57% which signifies that the check out page is the stage where you tend to lose the most. So, what could be the reason behind this sudden detachment of the customer?
You need to be as transparent as possible at this stage. Make sure that the payment methods, as well as the shipping cost, is displayed clearly. You need to clear about tax added to the product or any other fees attached with the product. Further, don’t keep a lengthy checkout process that will disinterest your user. It’s the final stage, here you are converting shoppers into customers! Make sure it’s as swift as a breeze of air.
Conclusion
Lastly, eCommerce websites live and die on the quality of their websites. So make sure you do your research to create a successful eCommerce website that can do the main job you need it to do which is to generate constant revenue with higher customer engagement. With these design principles, I hope that you are heading in the right direction.
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