Each line of work changes over time and there are always new trends to follow if you want your business to grow. A great shift has occurred in the past decade and retailers are starting to notice a great change in customer behaviour. In order to be able to keep up with the competition, it is very important to stay up to date with the newest customer behavioural trends.
The greatest cause of this behaviour is the wide utilization of the internet. Information about products or services has always been greatly appreciated, and the internet has made it possible to find almost anything you are interested in, and get a lot of information about it. This also accounts for a variety of products that are offered online.
Research
This is the key factor that differentiates modern customers from customers who shopped two decades ago. People always managed to find information about a product in the past, however, the main source of that information came from the retailer. Nowadays, the web is full of reviews and recommendations by both experts and customers on a variety of products and services. This has enabled the modern buyer to become well informed before purchasing a product. Some useful resource include tips from the Money Advice Service, Crowd Savers and Huffington Post.
According to these facts, there are many steps that businesses now take in order to improve their sales. The best starting point is to create high quality content on your blog. Establishing one creates several advantages for an online store.
- The store’s blog is a perfect marketing tool, as it improves SEO optimization of the whole website. This is very important for achieving consistent passive traffic to your online store, as a lot of people find products by using a variety of search engines.
- The fact that you are creating high quality content means that you are offering valuable and helpful content for your customers. This can lower the bounce rate of your online store and it creates a certain level of trust between your customer and your brand.
- Quality content also creates higher conversion rate, which increases the profit margins for your business.
This is not only one aspect of adjusting your business to fit the “newer” consumer’s needs. Reaching out to professional reviewers is a good way to improve your marketing strategy even further. Another way is to read reviews from real customers that both use and own the product. The review growth trend is only going to continue in the upcoming years, as people think twice before they purchase any type of goods.
Mobile technologies
Our lives have changed as smartphones and tablets become extremely popular. The popularisation of these gadgets also changed the way consumers look for goods. People nowadays utilise mobile devices much more than laptops or PCs. The important fact is that almost half of the users turn to search engines to find the product they are interested in. A majority of the other half directly searches for the retailer’s official application, while a small percentage relies on other sources such as discount voucher code sites, comparison sites and cashback sites.
This type of data clearly shows how important it is to, first of all, optimise the store for mobile devices. Only a couple of years ago, mobile optimisation could have been a little bit neglected, but nowadays, this is an essential move that you should take if you want your online store to bloom.
Creating your own application might require an additional financial investment, however, it offers a great advantage in several ways.
- The mere fact that you have your own application shows the customer how professional you are.
- The application is there to offer the ultimate convenience for the customer and all the included information is going to be appreciated by him or her. This improves brand awareness and creates yet another layer of trust between your business and the customer.
- As you provide another way for users to reach your business, having your own application will further increase conversion rates.
It is very important to attract customers to your store from a variety of sources. Having an application is the perfect way to diversify your customer acquisition tactics. Keep in mind though that it is very important to make the application user-friendly and well designed. Much like with designing a website, it is important to create an appealing application that’s well designed, so that the customers do not delete it immediately, but rather continue using it for a long time.
Features do matter
When a customer comes to your online store, there is already a set of things which they expect from you. Store design plays a very important factor in customer satisfaction. Many people simply decide to leave due to poor design and a bad navigation system. The customer expects something eye catching. It is expected that there is detailed information about the product and that the price is stated clearly, next to the product image.
The product should be captured and presented with a high quality image, with the possibility to zoom the image. Additionally, customers expect free shipping more than ever, as it can add quite a lot of cost to the whole bill. One of the features that are always expected is the search function, as it makes the navigation process much easier.
Enabling these little features is very important, as they ensure a complete online convenience for the customers and each of the mentioned features increases the chance of creating returning customers.
These are the main things that are expected from online stores. Creating a flawless experience for customers is the best way to ensure that they are actually going to purchase goods from you and come back in the future. Achieving all these things might be hard, but if you put in a lot of effort and take the right steps, it is certain that success and business growth will await at the end of the journey.
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