Regardless of what you’re selling, whether it’s the latest technology solutions or your services as a hair salon, when you are running an e-commerce business, it’s vital potential customers enjoy their time on your website. Not only should customers enjoy their experience, however, it’s also important that customers want to return to your site with repeat business and tell their friends and family how easy to use your website is. How do you improve their experience to accomplish this challenge? There are the usual tips and tricks of how you can utilize visuals to the best of your abilities, but below are some lesser-known but innovative ways to draw customers in and keep them coming back.  

Introduce The Team

For a customer to want to return to your website and your business, they need to trust you. They need to believe that you can deliver what you’ve promised on time and in the highest-quality. Building your brand reputation and trust takes a variety of steps, but one way which people often forget is to include an ‘About Me’ section on their site. This page should be full of fun but professional information. It isn’t the space to discuss how much you enjoy watching Game of Thrones, unless your online store is selling official merchandise! However, you can take this page on step further and include short bios and pictures about each member of your team. Studies have shown that customers trust brands who show the faces behind their success; it makes them feel at ease with who you are and place their belief in what you do.

Thank You Pages

Another vital but overlooked section of your website which will dramatically improve your customer’s user experience is adding thank you pages. After all, who doesn’t appreciate being thanked for their custom? It is the same philosophy which many retail stores adopt, where they thank and tell their customers to “Have a great day!” after every purchase. For an online store, a thank you page can appear after a customer has signed up for an email newsletter, after they’ve downloaded a voucher, after they’ve followed you on social media, and so on. The opportunities for these pages are endless when you take into account how many actions a customer can perform on your site.

Utilize AI

The future is here, and the future is AI. Or, specifically for websites, the future is Chatbots. If you haven’t added one to your site already, this is one way to ensure your customer queries and complaints are handled quickly, no matter what time of the day. People don’t have the attention span they once had, which means for companies that people want their questions answered as soon as possible; they don’t want to wait. A chatbot can respond to customers, long after you’ve logged off for the day, and the incredible intelligence means they can even learn from what the customer is telling them. They can even access huge amounts of data much more quickly and efficiently than a human is able to, to ensure they find the perfect answer to a customer’s query.

Add Video   

Unfortunately, in the busy 21st century, website users don’t have the time or the inclination to read huge chunks of text. Unless they come specifically onto your site to read your carefully created and researched essays, it’s best to step away from text-heavy pages. Instead, video can effectively capture visitors’ attention and hold them on the page for as long as your video plays for, but the shorter, the better for running time. Not only will the video enhance your visitors’ experience, but Google’s algorithm also looks kindly on embedding video into your site, meaning your business can move from page 4 of the SERPs to higher.