If you want to improve your conversion rate over holiday sales, you must focus on optimizing your customer experience for online shopping. Today, so much of what guides the success of your business and sales department is the customer experience.
Your customers want transparency, easy-to-use systems, and convenience. Understanding customer behavior can help you best appeal to your customers and improve sales this holiday season.
So, without further ado, here are seven areas to focus on for customer experience optimization for Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.
1. Improve Your Load Speed
The first optimization you will want to fine-tune is the load speed of your website. We are used to being able to find anything that we want online in just seconds.
The sense of urgency amplifies this expectation of fast service on a website that Black Friday naturally brings to the table. Your customers do not want to miss out on any deals or products they are looking to buy, and because of this, a slow loading time can lead to them completely abandoning your website in search of somewhere else that offers the same product or deal.
To prevent this loss of customers, check on and improve your load speed before Black Friday. Do what you need to to make sure that your website is functioning at top speed before the big sale hits to keep your customers coming to you over your competitors.
How do you know which pages load slowly? Easy open Mouseslow heatmaps and identify pages with the highest render time.
2. Streamline Your Checkout Process
The checkout process for your website should be easy, fast, and straightforward. This is the last step in getting your customers through the conversion funnel. It should be effortless for your customer. You do not want it to be long and tedious, so your customer rethinks their cart.
A variety of payment methods can help streamline this process, allowing customers to make purchases in their preferred method (which usually involves a much quicker process since they can save their information and simply press “purchase”).
There are several ways to approach this with Mouseflow. First, you could use Conversion Funnels to identify where most of the users drop off in the checkout flow. Further, investigate what’s preventing them to leave by checking out the recordings of the dropped visitors or looking at heatmaps.
Read how Danish fashion brand, Rains, increased their conversion rate for the checkout flow by 10.8%
3. Pay Attention to Your Mobile Site
While many people use desktops and laptops to do their online shopping, more and more people are turning to their mobile devices for their shopping needs.
Mobile eCommerce sales have been growing steadily over the years, and in 2021 72.9% of eCommerce sales were done on mobile devices. This amounted to approximately $3.56 trillion, and the number is expected to continue increasing as the years go on.
So, make sure that your website is optimized for desktops, mobile devices, and tablets.
4. Update Your FAQ Page and Enable Self-Service Chats
One of the most effective customer service optimizations is ensuring that your FAQ and self-service systems are up-to-date and running effectively. There is nothing more frustrating for a customer than to have an otherwise pleasant shopping interrupted by inaccurate or confusing answers to their questions.
The reality is that most customers like being able to find the answers to their own questions. This saves them time and allows them to move on to the other deals they are looking for.
5. Change Your Shipping Cost
Everyone loves free shipping. When people see free shipping, they think that they are getting a great deal. One way you can use this is to offer free shipping when the items in the cart amount to a certain amount. Many businesses do this already, but it can be beneficial to lower this required purchase amount just a little bit during the holiday season. This can result in more people wanting to pad out their shopping carts just a little bit to reach the free shipping without feeling like they have to spend a lot of extra money.
You may also want to play with your shipping method. For example, maybe you could offer gift wrapping or eco-friendly packaging materials. Or, if you usually only offer standard shipping, you can also offer an expedited shipping option. This can be a great way to reach customers who want to make a purchase with your store but wouldn’t be able to due to the shipping speed or method.
6. Rescue Abandoned Carts
Unfortunately, card abandonment is a common problem throughout the year, and the holiday season is no exception. To help recover sales from these abandoned carts, you can send automated emails reminding customers of what they are missing. You can use this time to offer a small coupon or sale that they may be able to use if they purchase the items they left in their carts during the holiday sales.
Another thing you can do to help prevent the prevalence of abandoned carts is to impose a “hold limit” on the items in a cart. This creates a greater sense of urgency and encourages customers to purchase their items before moving on to another store or option.
7. Improve Your Social Media Customer Experience
People are on social media all the time. If your business does not have an active presence on social media, you could miss out on several advertising opportunities.
Not only will your customers be looking at social media to find good deals to act on during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, but they will also likely be on these platforms during the holidays. This means that you can continue to remind them of the deals and products you are offering during this time and encourage them to take a look at your website for their shopping.
Conclusion
By paying attention to different parts of your user website experience and performance, starting from paying attention to speed and reliability – and all the way to optimizing conversion funnels and rescuing abandoned carts, you can significantly improve holiday campaign performance. There’s, of course, much more to the global process of eCommerce website optimization, including optimizing product pages, leveling up your SEO game, and more. The tips listed in this blog post, however, are a great place to start if you only have limited time and resources, and Black Friday is nigh.
