When it comes to building relationships with our customers, we may be lost on where to start. In eCommerce, we can’t simply talk to our customers at the cash register as they browse and shop for our products. Instead, we have a variety of communication channels to choose from, and knowing which one is the “right one” can be hard, especially if we don’t fully know our customers’ preferences. However, by determining what kind of relationship we want to have with our customers, we can better identify channels that we can get started with based on their capabilities and general user base.

Where should I connect with my customers?

Online customers can be found in many places. While they can be found on your own site at times, they are often scattered about the internet on different communication channels. They could be browsing their emails or reacting on social media. They could be at home on their laptop or scrolling on their phone. Defining your users’ preferences can be difficult to do without an already active community, analytics, and overall experience in your field.

One way to gain traction despite the uncertainty surrounding our customers is by taking into consideration the channels we as a business prefer. What channels do we like to use? What kind of connections do we want to build? Different channels often come with their own limitations and benefits, and our business needs can help us figure out where to get started as we grow our business and learn more about our customer base.

What communication channels are out there?

Email

Email is a well-known and trusted way of reaching your customers outside of your website. Despite the growing popularity of other channels, such as social media, email remains widely used across the world. However, one thing to keep in mind about email is that it tends to be seen as a formal, professional method of communication. Customers often expect business updates, notifications, promotions, and personalized offers when it comes to email. While email can be a back-and-forth dialogue in the case of support, email is often used to keep people informed about your business in semi-detailed, asynchronous letters. Read our blog on email marketing to learn more about the effectiveness of email as a line of communication with your customers.

Mobile/SMS

Since almost everyone has a smartphone nowadays, accessing many of these communications channels can easily be done through mobile devices. However, some businesses also use customer phone numbers to connect with users via SMS text messages. Much like email, these text messages may contain updates and reminders regarding orders or scheduled appointments, such as consultations. Time sensitive has also been sent via text message to customers who opt-in for promotions. What makes mobile communication stand out is that, unlike email, these messages are short and concise. Text messages are often not used for detailed conversations with customers.

LiveChat

LiveChat is a communication option that is often accessed through your website by customers if available. Via LiveChat, customers can type or text with a business representative directly. LiveChat is often used for business-related questions and problem solving rather than promotions or updates. Customers go to LiveChat to get support right away. Sometimes, AI is incorporated into these channels to provide automated support 24/7.

Phone/ Call Center

While not all businesses have call centers, phones calls are still a common way that’s customers may use to connect with businesses. On the business side, we may use phones calls to remind customers about an upcoming appointment, or to reach out to a customer who has shown interest in their products. On the customer side, phone calls are often utilized to make appointments and request support. Like LiveChat, phone calls may be used to troubleshoot issues with a customer. While phones calls can be employee intensive, phone calls are crucial for more complex customer support requests.

Social Media

From Facebook to LinkedIn, there are a variety of social media outlets to consider when connecting with users. However, social media is a flexible line of communication. From updating customers on business news to asking them for their opinions, social media is an informal way to engage, entertain, and educate customers. It is often a channel to share the “personality” of your company with your user base. For a deeper dive into how social media platforms can vary, read our blog on using social media to bring more customers to your site.

Forums

Forums are community driven channels that are centered around questions and answer dialogues. Like other channels, forums are often used to support and educate customers. However, forums also offer customers an area to talk with other customers, giving them a place to discuss their experiences, complaints, and successes with your products. Overall, forums are a great space to both help your customers and receive insight into their pain points, giving you information to work with when improving your business.

What channel should I choose?

Since every channel has its own unique set of benefits and limitations, it’s common to end up working with multiple channels of communications. Afterall, your own needs as a company may not filled by just one of these channels. However, note that you do not need to have all of them. Trying to do all these channels at once, or even dive too deep into one channel immediately, could result in little gain depending on what your customers end up utilizing. Choose a handful of channels to work with based on what kind of relationship you want to have with your customers. Once you have data and feedback on what your customers want in their relationship with your business, expand to suit those needs.

Want to Learn More?

To effectively communicate with your customer base, it is important to continuously collect and analyze what your customers want so you can optimize your strategy accordingly. Read our blog or listen in to our podcast for more tips and guides on making your business the best it can be! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to help you turn more visitors into customers.

When it comes to identifying areas of opportunity on our websites, we have to consider our customers. What do they expect from us? Many times, meeting expectations can be key to turning visitors into customers.

When it comes to eCommerce customer expectations, there are three areas we should focus our attention on in general: Transparency, ease of use, and value.

Transparency

When it comes to both online and offline storefronts, trust is important. If a customer can’t bring themselves to trust your company or products, they most likely won’t buy from you. In a brick-and-mortar store customers may wonder where or how your products or made, or ponder about your return policies and general customer service. If such questions can’t be answered by the documentation around your store nor your employees, customers may not trust the store enough to do business with you.

Be clear with your policies and processes

Similar to retail customers, online customers share the same concerns. Instead of looking for a poster by the register or an employee to talk to, they expect documentation on your site to ease their concerns. Your return policy, shipping methods, fees, and privacy measures should all be available for customers to see. This transparency will allow customers to understand what the process, benefits and potentials risks are when dealing with your company.

Make sure your products & services are detailed and accurate

Another aspect of transparency is your products. In a physical store front, customers can physically interact with products and ask questions as they go, but for eCommerce stores, customers have less opportunity to ask questions and in general have a shorter attention span. It is important that our product descriptions, images, and stock information are accurate and detailed enough to make our products or services tangible.

Offer a way to contact your company

Even the best sites may not be able to fully answer every question a potential customer may have. The next step for an interested but confused customer would be to contact your company. How can they reach you? It is important to have contact page that is up-to-date and offers multiple avenues of communication for customer service. If your company is quite large, it may not be reasonable to talk to all customers directly. In that case, a chat bot may help answer common questions and hand-off users to someone who can answer the rest.

Ease of use

Customer’s don’t want shopping to be a hassle. The more inconvenient it is to peruse your store, find what they are looking for, and pay for your product, the more likely it is that they will never buy from your business again. The same applies for our online shops: we need to make it as easy as possible to find what they want and buy it.

Optimize your navigation from start to finish

Since shopping online isn’t new, customers may have high expectations when it comes to navigating your online shop. Your website design should be intuitive to use, meaning that the placement of your buttons, call to actions (CTAs), links, and so forth should be placed where users would expect them to be. For example, the contact us button tends to be placed in the upper right-hand corner of your navigation. Users may look to that location out of habit, and if your contact us page is not there, it may leave them confused. The same applies to other aspects of your site: customers have pre-existing ideas of what they can do and will have to do to buy your products.

Optimizing your navigation is a whole site effort. Navigating your product selection, your cart page, and your checkout process are all important to ensuring that your customer has a good experience with your site.

Make sure your site feels fast

How fast your site feels to a customer can be a make it or break it moment. Customers expect your pages to load in a timely manner. If your pages take too long to load, they may just leave your site entirely. Tracking the speed of your site with metrics such as Google’s [] is important to making sure your site is performing well. Beyond load time, the process of going through your site through feel fast as well. How many pages or steps do users have to go through before they arrive at the checkout confirmation page? Keeping things short and sweet will help users feel like its quick and easy to shop at your store.

Consider multiple devices and payment options

When designing a website, we must consider that users may be visiting our site from different locations, and thus different devices.  Phones, tablets, desktops, and so forth can easily access your site, and users will expect your site experience to work on the device of their choice. Making sure that your online shop looks good, runs well, and is easy to use across devices is important.

Another aspect to consider is that users may have different preferences on how they purchase or receive their products. Having a variety of payment methods helps you ensure that you can accommodate multiple customers’ preferred method. The same applies to shipping. Having different shipping options can make buying your product an easy decision rather than a disappointment when a customer discovers that they can’t receive your product.

Value

For a customer, the value of your business comes from your ability to solve their pain points. How will your products and services help them? What makes your company stand out? Why should a customer choose your company over another? For many customers, the answers to these questions are expected to be readily available for them as they consider your company.

Explain why customers should do business with you

When a potential customer first arrives at your page, they want to know not only what your business is about, but why they should consider buying from you. Your “why” should be obvious and visible upon landing on your page. Whether it be a CTA in your above the fold content, or descriptions later down the page, customers don’t want to search too far for why your business is valuable.

Another aspect that customers may want to see is why your business is more valuable than other competitors. What makes your business stand out? Sharing what makes your products and services unique can help answer these questions swiftly rather than leaving customers to search for those answers on their own online.

Put customer reviews where visitors will see them

Customer reviews are key to illustrating your business value to customers in a way that is believable and relatable. While we can explain and praise our own value directly to customers on our own, hearing our value shared by real customers can make our business feel real and legitimate.

Want to learn more?

There are many ways that we can better understand what our customers truly want. Check out our blog for more insight on how to optimize your website for more customers. If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

When it comes to measuring the success of a website, conversion rates are a great metric to track. Not only do conversion rates give us an idea of how well our site is attracting user interaction, but it also gives us a number to target when it comes to future business goals. However, what is considered a good conversion rate?

What are conversion rates?

Conversions are actions we want users to take. Whether it be buying our products or subscribing to our email lists, conversions can be any user action that we consider valuable to our business. For example, conversions we may want to measure could be:

• User Sign ups for email, events, text message notifications, etc.
• Account creation.
• Social media interactions, such as follows, likes, shares, etc.
• Downloads of freebies and promotional materials.
• Product reviews or ratings.
• Views or clicks on specific pages.
• Products added to cart or schedule consultations.
• Purchases of your products and services.

Our conversion rate is the percentage of users who convert over the total number of user interactions. For example, if we were measuring the conversion rate of users subscribing to our email list, the rate would be the number of users who submitted the subscription form over the number of users who clicked on the subscription page.

Why are conversion rates important?

Conversion rates are key to identifying how well your online business is doing. Whether it be purchases, open rates on emails, social media followers, or so forth, knowing how often users end up doing what you want can be used to identify what you need to do in the future. Pages with high views and clicks, for example, can help you understand what your users want to see. The same applies idea applies with low conversion rates. If your email subscription form’s conversion rate is low, it is a sign that it may need re-worked or edited. Overall, by having a metric that reflects the success of your desired business goals, you can approach optimizing your site with data-backed decisions.

What is a good eCommerce conversion rate?

When people talk about conversion rates, they are often talking about eCommerce conversion rates. eCommerce conversion rates are the rate of overall user purchases and orders. In the case of monetary gain, a good eCommerce conversion rate is between 2% – 5%.

How do I increase my conversion rate?

Meet the customer where they are

The first step to increasing your conversion rate is making your customers feel seen and heard. To do this, we need to know our target audience intimately. What are they struggling with? What are their obstacles? What kind of solution are they looking for? Having answers to such questions allows us to create relatable and appealing content by clearly showing them that we understand what they want and need.

Have an enticing offer

Whether it be buying a product or signing up for emails, it is important to tell users what they will gain by doing so. After all, if they don’t know the benefits of converting, it makes converting less enticing. Explain the benefits of converting. If we want them to subscribe for our email list, for example, tell them what kind of information they will gain, what potential special deals they could be sent, and so forth.

Make it easy to convert

Both physically and mentally, converting should be an easy decision to make. Meeting the customer where they are and laying out the benefits clearly already makes converting an easy decision mentally. But we also need to make sure it is easy to physically purchase our products, fill out our email forms, schedule a consultation, and so forth. It should be easy to find the add to cart button, for example. Forms are more likely going to be filled out if they only contain a few fields. Many times, making converting easy involves making the option to convert obvious and making the process short and sweet.

Want to learn more?

To boost conversion rates, we need to optimize our websites to create the best user experience we can. Check out our blog for more tips and tricks to improve your website and optimization process!  If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website, join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.

When it comes to optimizing our sites, there are many factors we need to monitor and adjust to ensure that our users have the best experience possible. One factor that can heavily impact our sites performance and user experience is bot traffic on our pages.

What are bots?

Bots are programs that are automated to complete specific tasks. A bot could be programmed to crawl a website, make a social media post, block ads, or so forth. Overall, bots are tools that can be used to quickly accomplish repetitive tasks on the internet.  More often than not, these bots interact with everything on the internet, including our sites.

There are good and bad reasons a bot could interact with our site. For example, Google uses bots to crawl and index our sites, ranking our sites and making them visible in Google search queries. Google’s bots are important for getting our site out there for future customers. Beyond searchability, bots can help create better users experiences as well through blocking ads, monitoring your site for analytics and issues, automatically posting content, and many other tasks.

However, there are also negative reasons a bot can visit a site. Stealing content, serving spam, denying service, and other malicious acts have been done through the use of bots.

What are some impacts of Bots?

When it comes to bots, there are multiple ways they can impact our sites, for better or for worse.

Performance

Bot traffic can slow down our pages while they interact with our site, negatively impacting other users. Since slow user experience can cause users to leave a site, bots can be programmed to interact with your site for the purpose of denying customers easy access to your site. Even good bots, such as crawler and indexer bots, can cause the performance of our site to decrease.

Reputation

Depending on what a bot is doing on your site, your site’s reputation can be impacted. Bots that share quality content or answer user questions with ease, such as chatbots, can improve your users experience and thus your reputation. However, on the other hand, bots can be used to spread spam onto your website, such as bad reviews or malicious links. While these bots are fake, they mimic the human language well enough that the content they share can give your site a bad reputation.

Security

While bots are not inherently a threat to security, they can be used to steal user information as well as to attack our sites. Bots can be programmed to collect sensitive user information as a customer fills out a form on your site as well as share phishing links on your site. They can also be programmed to make your site not function properly, attacking your sites ability to serve customers through a denial of service attack.

Analytics

Since bots can visit your site, the data your analytics software collects can be skewed by bot interaction. Whether it be intentional, such as through a denial of service attack, or accidental as bots crawl your site, your traffic data may have weird anomalies. These anomalies can make it hard to how well your site is really doing.

How do I protect my site from bots?

Since there are both good and bad bots, we need to be able to let the good bots in while keeping the bad bots out. There are a few steps we can use to identify bad bots and limit the negative impacts good bots can have.

To start, we should watch our site data carefully. If you are using Google Analytics, for example, watch for anomalies in your traffic. Is there a sudden spike in traffic for no apparent reason? Is there a page on your site that has an unusual number of visitors, but not real user interactions? Is there an increase in failed logins? Anomalies like these can be a sign that a bot is negatively impact your site, and possibly for malicious reason.  

Following anomalies in our analytics, we should block any identified bad bots from our site. We can do this through blocking its IP address. Since bots are visiting our sites through the internet, they must have an IP address to even start. Since blocking bots essentially by hand can be inefficient and at times impossible, we can also use an IP blocklist to preemptively block addresses that we consider suspicious or dangerous.

Since even good bots can impact our site by putting a strain on our pages, it’s important to make sure that we optimize our robot.txt files. Robot.txt files are a way we can communicate and direct crawler bots, such as Googles indexing bots, on how they should traverse our website. Here we can establish rules on where these bots can go, what they can click, and so forth. By having an optimized robot.txt file, we can limit the performance impact these bots can have on our site.

Want to Learn More?

Bot traffic is just one of many factors we need to consider when optimizing our site. Check out our blog for more tips and guides on how we can make our sites better! If you want more hands-on guidance for improving your website,join the waitlist for Carrie Saunders’ upcoming course, “The Converting Website.” In this course, she will dive into a variety of important factors that aim to optimize your website.