Customer Experience Tips for Fashion Retailers

Modern ecommerce is all about the customer. Recent research shows that 86% of buyers will spend more money when they have a good experience. In addition, 54% of consumers say that most companies can improve their customer experience efforts. This leaves a large opportunity for organizations that can make the right adjustments.

This doesn’t come without challenges, though. Modern customers have high expectations and a low tolerance for their experiences. 58% of customers will stop doing business with a company after they receive a poor customer experience. That doesn’t leave much room for error.

Successful Shopify retailers find ways to offer excellent and consistent experiences for their customers. Below, we’ll look at 8 tips to help your digital store delight and excite your customers throughout their whole journey.

Prioritizing the Whole Journey

The ecommerce customer experience begins the second potential buyers notice your brand. It also continues past the first purchase. Customers go on a journey with your brand, and every step along the way is an opportunity to provide them with a great experience.

Great experiences make it easy for the customer to move through each stage while enjoying their current one. Pre-purchase experiences might include informational content that adds value to customers where they’re at. Things like this build trust in your brand early on.

Social media is a great place for these quick, first-impression experiences. A high-end fashion brand without quality images will quickly lose the customer’s interest. If they find the images entertaining or aesthetically valuable, on the other hand, they will be intrigued by the brand posting them.

Positive customer experiences can be used after purchases to promote customer retention as well. Follow-up emails that bring value to your customers and predict their future needs will keep them trusting your brand and encourage them to do more business with you as time goes on.

It’s not hard to overcomplicate things. With different analytics that tracks user behavior, studies that show consumer habits, and research on what customers expect, it can be easy to make conclusions about your customers without ever actually talking to them.

Those resources are definitely helpful. They provide valuable insight that can lead to positive change. However, there’s really nothing better than getting direct feedback from your customers.

Enabling online reviews allows your customers to share their thoughts, which can give you a strong idea of how they really feel. When positive, reviews also help boost your brand’s social proof and give other shoppers confidence in your brand.

Private surveys give you another way to collect direct feedback from your customers. The invitation shows your customers that you care about their experience, which can be another added bonus. You can send surveys to your whole customer base or just a specific, segmented audience to collect responses on a certain aspect of your business.

Optimize for Mobile

The power of ecommerce now stretches beyond desktop computers, laptops, and tablets. One study showed that 45% of ecommerce sales happen on mobile devices.

From an experience standpoint, browsing on mobile looks and feels different than on a computer. The screen is smaller. It often requires more scrolling and faster decision-making. Shopify retailers are charged with the task of creating a seamless, easy experience on desktops and mobile devices.

Neglecting the mobile experience can cause problems for digital sellers. 62% of consumers are less likely to purchase from a store when they have a negative mobile experience. The stakes are high. Customers want great experiences literally at their fingertips.

Shopify automatically includes some mobile optimizations, but a few simple tips can help bring your mobile store to the next level to increase sales and keep customers happy. Shopify suggests the following tips to improve your mobile experience…

Have a fixed navigation bar
Center your photography
Keep text to a minimum on product pages
Make the “add to cart” button easy to access
Use photos for product variants.

Regularly Anticipate What Your Customers Want

Excellent customer experience comes down to giving people what they want in the simplest way possible. The most successful brands find ways to anticipate their customers’ wants instead of responding to them. They answer questions before they’re even asked. This builds more trust in your customers because they start to see your brand as a source of valuable insight into their lives.

Brands can accomplish this by incorporating cross-selling and upsell apps. These not only help boost sales on your end, but they also help customers see that your brand understands them. An app like Shop the Look makes it easy for customers to bundle an outfit when they see it modeled in product pictures. Instead of forcing them to find each individual item in the store, the app prompts shoppers to click a button that brings all the pieces together. Such efficiency anticipates where they might go next and simplifies the process of getting there.

Engage Customers With Meaningful and Personalized Content

Customer engagement can happen across a multitude of channels. Social media posts, PPC ads, and website copy all can help your customers to get to know your brand. But one of the most productive channels for engagement comes from email marketing.

On average, an email marketing campaign can generate $42 for every $1 spent – a massive ROI. Emails work so well because they give your brand a chance to engage directly with your customers. Every modern email marketing software has the option to personalize your messages, adding the customer’s name or segmenting them into specific audiences. This personalization increases open rates by 50% because it shows the customer that you understand their individuality.

Personalization alone won’t work in the long term, however. Emails need to add value to the customer’s life through meaningful content. Ideas might include

A blog post or video related to their purchase,
A request that asks them to share their thoughts on the subject,
An invitation to share a photo of them modeling the product, or
Other creative content ideas that make the customer feel valuable to your brand.

Offer Effective Support

Modern customer experience includes so much more than customer support, but support still plays an important role in developing excellent experiences.

In the past, support included direct emails or phone calls to the company. This can still be helpful, and customers do value it when they can easily access contact pages. However, the tides are turning as one Forrester study found that 72% of customers prefer self-service options to resolve their support issues.

This means that creating a DIY helpdesk can serve your customers and take the burden off of your support team. Pull together a set of FAQs and create a knowledge base that customers can access to find solutions.

Build a Community

The digital world enables brands to build a community of their customers. Doing so reminds shoppers that they’re part of something greater. They don’t just make a purchase; they enter into a group of people and gain a sense of belonging.

The sense of community should be felt across all channels. It can start with something as simple as a unique hashtag and expand into something as broad as a discussion group where customers share product photos, reviews, and fashion tips with one another. Nike went as far as creating a running app that brings their customers together, uniting them around the common mission of exercising.

The specific ins and outs of your community will be dictated by your brand. But the more you make your customers feel part of something bigger, the more their experiences with your brand will go beyond your digital store.

Measure Effectiveness

All these efforts will mean nothing if you can’t prove that they’re making positive changes. Customer experience can feel like such an intangible concept, but there are metrics out there to help you measure its effectiveness including…

Net Promoter Score
Customer Lifetime Value
Retention Rate
Churn Rate
Customer Satisfaction.

Knowing these numbers can give you a sense of how successful your customer experience efforts are.

Closing Thoughts

Modern ecommerce sales demand customer-centricity. Shoppers want more than a transaction; they want an experience. Implementing these tips will help create positive customer experiences that increase sales and promote brand loyalty.

If you are looking for more ways to optimize your Shopify fashion store, subscribe to our newsletter where we offer regular tips and trends for online fashion retailers.