The COVID-19 pandemic has been a game-changer for many industries, with a visible shift in the trends that most companies have started adopting. With countries being forced to be locked at home for months, businesses were forced to rethink their strategies and develop suitable ones to cater to the changing customer needs. This was when both B2B and B2C companies decided to increasingly move to ecommerce platforms for continuing their business. Research suggests that COVID-19 resulted in the global ecommerce market jumping to $26.7 trillion.

With this shift, a lot of other aspects of conducting business also changed for companies. As this approach reduces the importance of relying on sales representatives to convince customers in person, the importance of implementing better content strategies came to light. Digital shopping experiences can only be enhanced once you have a full understanding of your customer’s demands. With new companies entering the market, how do you make sure that your business delivers something different for customers to keep coming back to you? The answer is personalization.

Keeping Up with Changing Customer Expectations

With the increasing competition, companies are personalizing digital customer experiences to stay at the top. Businesses often use dynamic content, product recommendations and specific offers based on previous customer behavior, browsing behavior, purchase history, demographics, and other customer data, to enhance the digital shopping experience for their customer. These personalization techniques help you bring in more loyal customers. It also helps you increase customer retention and brand advocacy.

 

Fig. Benefits of personalization

How Important is Content in Creating Better Digital CX?

Now that you’re aware of the importance of personalizing the digital shopping experience for your customers, how can you make sure that you achieve that effectively? The first step to enhance your digital shopping experience is to realize that content is the backbone of your ecommerce marketing strategy. As shopping experiences have become digital, optimizing high-quality digital content has become essential to improve customer journeys from the first step to the end.

 

Fig. Role of Content in Customer Journeys

To elevate your ecommerce strategy, you must also focus on giving your customers the right kind of content at the right time. For instance, once your customer is on your ecommerce website, providing them tutorials and product descriptions can help increase customer engagement and convertibility.

Boosting Ecommerce Customer Experience (ECX) with Better Content

The entire customer journey that your digital commerce platform offers can be summed up into three phases. Let’s find out the importance of using the right type of content in each phase -

Phase 1: Pre-Purchase ECX

To be at the top of the market, you must make sure that you deliver the right content targeted to the right audience. For this, you must think about how your customer might find out about your brand? Companies often use online ads and other PR techniques to increase their brand awareness in the market. Other ways of increasing brand awareness can be through social media and guest posts.

For your prospect to feel more connected to your brand, you must make sure that they are clear about what your business is into. For this, delivering relevant content in the pre-purchase phase is vital.

Once the prospect has a clear idea about what you do, they might want to look at the right channels while considering the purchase. They would probably check out your business online by reading your blogs, feedback on social media and customer reviews. A good way to use content to personalize CX in this phase is by delivering customized emails directly into their inbox to increase engagement. With this, social media ads can also be a good way to give them one last nudge.

Phase 2: Purchase ECX

Once your prospect is ready to make the purchase and elevate it to the customer level, your job is to convince them that your business is there to help even after the purchase is made. A report by Microsoft suggested that 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor in deciding whether or not to do business with a company.

Customers often look for good customer support, easy check-out options and simple payment methods while purchasing. Adding effective content like product descriptions and video tutorials can smoothen the purchase process and enhance ECX. With this, sending out a personalized email and adding product recommendations derived from studying your customer’s website behavior can also improve engagement and increase profits.

Phase 3: Post-Purchase ECX

What happens after the purchase is made? How do you make sure that your customer keeps coming back to your brand? Salesforce research suggested that “89% of consumers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.” On the other hand, per Microsoft, “58% of American consumers will switch companies because of poor customer service.

Once a customer has given you their money, consider them a customer for life. To ensure that they don’t forget about you after the purchase, come up with effective content strategies to increase customer engagement post-purchase. Deliver updates, announcements, promotional offers, and more through various channels like social media and emails to elevate CX. With that, develop programs, events, and other initiatives to deliver added value to your audience. Make sure that these customers aren’t just your loyal customers but also your company’s advocates by providing good customer support even after the purchase is made.

Parting Thoughts

Research has suggested that 73% of B2B buyers want personalized experiences, similar to the B2C-like customer experience. While this is customer demand, the Forrester/Bloomreach study found that just 22% of B2B customers say their most recent online experience was completely personalized to them. Companies must provide their customers with simple and personalized CX to increase profits and expand customer bases. To do this, they must effectively use customer data to derive insights to improve convertibility. A good blend of content and digital commerce is the right approach to survive in today’s changing market trends.