A great branded experience in eCommerce is what your potential customers view and feel about your online presence, products, and services.
The impression that your visitors and customers receive from your brand through social media posts, images, memories, product stories, and existing customers’ experiences is concluded as a branded experience.
At a certain point in time, we’ve all been there, when we wanted a seamless eCommerce shopping experience from the D2C eCommerce brands.
The expectation is to receive real-time visibility (for inventory, shipping status, etc.), personalized experience with the product and packaging, access to browse purchase history, and order details.
Here are 12 hacks that your brand can create to provide a great branded experience:
1. Remember what your customers want
Stop treating your customers like a pile of papers, treat them as separate individuals. You build your business to serve these people and remember their wishes and desires. Focus on what your customers want. Feed your audience with their requirements and good service.
If you think, you don’t know what your customers want. Then don’t be worried, you’re not alone. This can be confusing at times to understand your customers.
We understand that your 1st priority is products but don’t neglect your customers here. You are possibly missing valuable information on potential customers that can increase sales.
Record your past purchasers, look at what they bought from you. Keep checking for shopping trends in the analytics that reflect the experiences you’ve had with your customers. Analytics are really helpful, they can give you direction to understand your customers better, especially their relationship with your products.
Data analytics for abandoned shopping carts, purchase funnel, most popular products, most returned products, best repeat purchased products, etc. can be of great help.
2. Communicate your value proposition well
Convince your potential customers about your products and services that they are more valuable to them than any other offered in the marketplace.
Customers must be valued for what they purchase. You as a brand shall not only deliver the product but the brand experience attached to it. As your eCommerce online store, your website, raise your bar high with a perfect easy-to-navigate website. The speed to load the website and homepage should be less than 0.5 sec.
Convey your customers’ what exactly are you helping your customers with? How are you different from all the other alternatives in the market?
3. Help customers choose the right size
More and more eCommerce brands have come to realize that the big reason for clients returning products is mostly due to “sizing issues”. When selling online, providing a full range of sizes so that consumers can easily find the right size for their choice of products, has the greatest chance of increasing conversion rates.
Product size matters and it is considered bad business to get them wrong. Kiwi Sizing offers a customizable Size Charts (with unit conversion) and Size Recommender to help your target group find the right size without the hassle!
4. Streamline your checkout process
The checkout process of an eCommerce store needs to be well optimized and easy to process.
Remember when the visitors add products to their shopping cart it is with the intent to purchase, losing them at this stage can affect your sales as well as brand value.
Make sure that you have created a simple and easy checkout process, just like what Amazon does.
It gives a short and clear check-out process. Their customers go to the product page, read descriptions and reviews, add the product to their cart, login page, payment, and are done. The process is complete.
Design your checkout process in the most simplified way:
- Make your Add To Cart page simple and clear.
- Create the Pay Now button that is highlighted at all times.
- Display your shopping cart page contents well (quantity of product added, product name, etc.).
- Always offer a guest checkout.
5. Provide customized packaging and free deliveries
Create custom packaging to drive your customers’ loyalty toward your products and brand. Influence them with your product packaging (the bottle that stores your product), and create it steady, unbreakable, and sustainable.
Provide an optimized level of protection to your product during transit. It reflects your brand identity and target an effective market through your creative product packaging.
Create individual packing for all your products (or product range) to achieve better results.
There are great examples of 2 renowned brands:
Nike – They launched a new shoe range Nike Air. To sell their idea of lightweight shoes, they packed them in air pouches and gained a massive response for it.
Sony – They introduced their new waterproof Walkman, an MP3 player, and to support their idea they came up with creative packaging for it. They packed the pair of headsets in a bottle containing water to effectively market their waterproof product.
6. Create a great unboxing experience
Check what you pack and how you pack. Except for the product’s packaging material or its quality, the product’s boxing should be exciting too.
Create a fun unboxing experience for your customers. Use their unboxing experience to encourage them to share your product on their social media. This builds a long-term, sustainable branded packaging experience for your customers.
Did you know that 52% of consumers like to repeat their purchase from the online store that delivers premium packaging?
Nearly 6 out of 10 consumers are likely to share the image of a delivery via social media if it came in a unique package or else they will create an unboxing video of the product.
You can add the following elements to their product packaging delivery box and make it more interesting:
- Wrap the product in the colorful or exciting paper.
- Use fillers like styrofoam, packing peanuts, foam inserts, air pillows, or bubble wrap for packing.
- Design and use your branded stickers to seal the product with a paper cover. Or use it for customized printing of your box. Stickers are literally inexpensive and versatile.
- Put your business card in the box, give it a traditional touch to display your brand information.
- Put a custom handwritten note in the box to add that personal touch.
- Add a small gift or any of your product samples to surprise and delight your customers and increase their overall experience.
7. Provide personalized upselling and free products
When we talk about creating a branded experience for eCommerce customers, the first thing you can do is increase personalization. Personalized products, emails, follow-ups, packaging, etc.
Personalized product recommendations are highly recommended as they generally lead to reduced churn rate and an increase in profits. Suggest and offer them over their general concerns while shopping online. If the product is right for them, is its quality good, is it worth purchasing, etc.
Offer them a better and expensive product, when they add their desired product to their shopping cart or at the check-out page. Upsell them so that they can purchase more and it will help you increase average order value.
Here are some statistics you should consider regarding upselling:
- Upselling has shown an increase in revenue by 10-30% on average. Also, Upsells are 68% more affordable than acquiring a new customer.
- Offer them free deliveries either for a limit on purchasing time (free delivery only, if they make a purchase in a few hours or within a few days) or limit on purchasing amount (free delivery only, if they make a purchase of more than $500).
8. Keep your customers updated with personalized emails
Update your target audience with regular updates via personalized emails. Understanding customer’s behavior and sending them emails considering that can help you earn more customers and repeat purchases.
You can study customers’ behavior and build an action plan according to their living demographics, website visit session duration, log-in details, website page visits, geographic location, gender, etc.
Add a little personal touch to these emails for a better-branded experience:
- Add the recipient’s first names
- You can ask questions in your sign-up forms
- Send surveys based on demographic
- Schedule emails according to the recipient’s time zones
- Embed personalized landing pages links
- Use Marketing automation software to set the email frequency
- Personalized product recommendations
You can send these personalized eCommerce emails to get feedback as well as just after the customers have placed their order, or when they receive the product.
9. Build a strong community on social media
Social media is very strong among the GenZ. They can make or break your game. To survive you have to rush hard towards your social media, build a strong community that trusts you, follows you, recommends you.
Direct emails and ads are not the only ways to personalize your website. You can add chatbots to your social media handle and website to personalize the customer experience.
Did you know that 47% of users are open to purchasing items through a bot nowadays?
These auto-responders on your social media can consistently work 24*7 around the clock. You can automate your ordinary tasks that are time taking and shift the chargeback in your hands whenever you are available.
Use your social media to share your industry advice, perform quick questioning rounds, advertise your products, etc. get social proof for your brand, make it your priority.
Social media has the power to get more engagement on your website and increase sales.
- Find your niche influencers and ask them to use your product and share their experience about it in their own creative way.
- Find media of your niche to help in generating buzz for future product launches.
- Continue to create a buzz on your own social media account as well.
10. Engage your customers post-purchase
Continue to engage your customers to post their purchase as your relationship doesn’t end after they pay for the purchase with your brand. As the product is yet to get delivered.
Provide them regular updates on emails or SMS about their product shipping, when it is packed, when dispatched, out for delivery, etc. Continue to build the buzz for their product.
Customers’ satisfaction can lead you to easy repeat purchases from your existing customers.
After a customer has checked out you can please them with:
- Thank you page for a successful purchase
- Order confirmation email
- Shipping confirmation email
- Memorable unboxing experience
- Follow up emails for new customers who’ve not purchased yet
You can also take your customers’ loyalty and satisfaction measurement by asking them how much they liked your product or services, and how likely they are to recommend it on a scale of 0-10, through Net Promoter Score.
11. Establish a powerful customer service
Ensure your customer that you provide powerful customer support. If anything breaks or goes wrong, you’re available 24*7 for their assistance. A customer when receives a broken, damaged, or spoiled product (or some other unhappy scenario) makes them more emotional. They can leave you a terrible review of the situation they had.
Turn it to your side by handling it right, change their mind from what they received to how you assisted or helped them out. It all depends on how you handle your customer queries.
They could say aloud to hate your brand and ask their circle to boycott you. But with your stellar support, you can change the situation in your favor that will help you get many, many more sales.
12. Branded tracking experience
When talking about improving customer’s post-purchase experience, the most complicated is the tracking they experience for their product before it is delivered.
All of us are concerned about our shipment when we order something online. We also need regular updates on it. Whether it is going to be delivered on time or getting delayed for any reason, we like to get the prior update from the brand.
You can enhance your customers’ tracking experience by giving it a touch of your brand. Yes, a branded tracking experience.
Because when you choose to get your shipments tracked by another party, most of the time you lose your brand’s identity there. This makes your customers unsure of their purchase as they can’t build trust over you.
Make them trust you more on every passing stage.
- Create a branded tracking page, allow your customers to track their product on your website instead of a carrier website.
- Reduce their queries and your energy in taking support calls. Send them automatic delivery alert updates via Email, SMS & WhatsApp.
- Schedule reviews upon delivery.
Wrapping Up
Customer experience is a really important part of the eCommerce business, to advance its branded experience is highly used to attract more customers and increase repeat purchases.
Branded experience is highly influencing customers these days increasing your repeat business and word-of-mouth marketing, making a large difference for future growth as well.
Upcoming or new D2C eCommerce brands should excel to their customers by giving them special personalized touches in their online shopping, shipping services, and let them feel a great branded experience.