Building an Unbeatable Customer Experience with BigCommerce Partners

A strong, customer-led ecommerce strategy is crucial in boosting consumer loyalty and retention, and it starts by improving the end-to-end shopper journey. 

The term ecommerce customer experience refers to the sum of every touchpoint, engagement thought or feeling that occurs, or is exchanged between a customer and your brand — all as experienced from the customer’s perspective. 

In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed how to grow audience trust, build a unique selling proposition and create perceived value for your brand. Here, we’ll explore taking those strategies to the next level, through the help of some of our powerful partner solutions available on BigCommerce. 

Hear more from our partners at InstantSearch+, LiveChat, Shogun, Stamped.io and Omnisend.

Optimize Your Shopping Experience with InstantSearch+

Fast Simon is a leader in AI-powered shopping optimization, providing merchants with a self-service, AI-based platform and tools to optimize growth and improve shoppers’ experience across desktop, mobile, web and mobile apps. 

Fast Simon’s app InstantSearch+ is a best in class ecommerce AI search, smart collections, merchandising, personalization, product recommendations, visual discovery and email/SMS marketing optimization. It fits both turnkey implementations on both platform themes and headless commerce (JS SDK, React). 

As a BigCommerce Preferred Technology Partner, Fast Simon supports B2B, B2C and headless commerce merchants, increasing conversion rates and average order value (AOV) by automatically matching shoppers’ purchasing intent with merchandising priorities. 

If you are a B2B store, here are modules that can you can benefit from:

Product Finder: Guide customers in finding what they are looking for — the way they are used to. Make/Model/Year or similar product finders are industry standard in automotive, industrial goods and parts and home decor, where customers are looking for products that relate only to that particular subset.

Customer Groups: Presents custom prices and products for different customer groups. Whether you have signed in/ VIP/ new customers, InstantSearch+ will show the relevant products and prices on both collections and search.

Industrial B2B Filter Search: The customer can search within the filters in order to get to the desired results faster.

How about experiencing new Merchandising possibilities for Categories and Search?

Visual Merchandising: Create a targeted experience for your shoppers using a simple, drag and drop visual editor. 

Rule-Based Merchandising: Merchandise in your categories is automatically sorted according to user intent, combining visual, rule-based product placement with search data to increase conversion. 

Merchandising Strategies: Give your pages an esthetic look, provide a diverse set of results, interweave loss leaders and high margin products to maximize margins, and more.

Personalization.

InstantSearch+ delivers real-time one-to-one micro-segmentation with AI-powered predictive personalization based on shopper behavior, store inventory and data.

There are plenty of other use cases that can boost your store’s conversion rate in 2022. Start with a 14-day trial today and witness how Fast Simon can help you achieve your business goals.

Assisting Shoppers at Every Stage of the Customer Journey with LiveChat

The pandemic has changed the ways we live, work and shop. Instead of visiting a brick-and-mortar store, we order a few sizes of one tee, and expect free delivery and easy returns. 

Lockdowns and constant wariness has altered the buying behavior of 67% of consumers, accelerated digital transformation and forced businesses to go online. Ecommerce has boomed, and it will likely continue to grow. 

“A package a day keeps sadness away,” right? 

With more people shopping online, the marketplace is becoming increasingly competitive. Competitive advantages stretch beyond product quality, accessibility or branding. This brings us to customer experiences — simply put, customers expect great customer experiences. 

From personalization, omnichannel support, faster answers, richer product experience to smoother checkout — consumer expectations have risen. And one of the best ways to provide an awesome customer experience is to use live chat software. 

A live chat tool is customer service software that allows back-and-forth communication between visitors and support agents on a company website. It’s an effective way to connect with customers, get to know them and assist them at every step of their buyer’s journey. 

Time is of the essence for customers. They reach out through live chat because they expect immediate answers. Quick replies foster relationships between consumers and a brand. Since there’s a human on the other side of the wire, live chat adds the human touch to every interaction. This is why chat usually delivers superb customer satisfaction. 

Apart from troubleshooting, live chats help in acquisition, sales and retention of customers. Personalization is an ongoing trend. Integrating live chat with CRM software makes it possible to collect customer data from various surveys. With more data, online stores can provide more tailored experiences, for example, to spark conversations with personalized greetings based on visited pages. 

Consumers expect consistent interactions regardless of the communication channel they use. Some live chat software allows omnichannel support via Messenger, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, or SMS. Using automation, you keep the conversation going round the clock. You can provide asynchronous communication even when agents are off, so your customers feel taken care of 24/7. 

Some tools, for example LiveChat, integrate with BigCommerce and provide agents with more user data. 

Integrating live chat with a BigCommerce store allows agents to send interactive product cards right inside the chat. In doing this, your agents save loads of time on switching tabs, and they increase responsiveness and, all in all, sales.

Live chat is worth considering for businesses of all sizes. Data shows that 79% of businesses offering live chat saw a positive effect on sales, revenue and customer loyalty. Live chat is a good fit for solopreneurs as well as online stores and enterprises. 

Keep in mind that apart from instant communication with your customers, live chat software also provides solutions that help you turn visitors into returning customers with tailored experiences.

Boosting Customer Loyalty with Stamped

The best strategy to increase trust in your business is to integrate more reviews and UGC to your storefront. Just one review on your product page can boost conversion rates by 354%. 

Stamped’s Reviews & Ratings software enables your customers to easily submit and share their positive reviews. You can market those reviews on your site, retargeting ads, Google and social media.

Once you have new customers, a loyalty program helps reward them for continuing to shop with you. Stamped’s Customer Loyalty & Rewards software helps brands reward loyal customers while incentivizing purchasing. This gamified customer journey keeps them coming back for more.

This is why BigCommerce and Stamped work together. BigCommerce helps you set up your online store and sell your products, and Stamped’s tools help to convert and retain customers. 

Stamped reviews and ratings. 

Stamped makes review collection and visual marketing easy for you and, more importantly, for your customers. Here’s exactly how we do that:

1. Automatically capture reviews from customers wherever you interact with them.

• Email: Our tool lets you embed your review form directly in your emails so customers can complete the review without being redirected to a new window. We’ve seen conversion rates increase by as much as 100%.

• Facebook Messenger: Automate your Facebook Messenger reviews in a one-click form.

• SMS: SMS review requests show higher open rates and customers who are happy to leave a review.

2. Showcase your best reviews on your BigCommerce store.

Once you’ve collected reviews, Stamped directly integrates with the branding and styling of your BigCommerce store.

• Homepage: Add credibility to your brand.

• Product pages: Help customers use social proof when they are deciding on a purchase.

• Dedicated review pages: Optimized for search engines to drive traffic to your store. 

• Your shopping cart page: Increase conversions by mitigating any last minute hesitation. 

Stamped Loyalty & Rewards.

Stamped’s Loyalty & Rewards boosts your customer engagement and repeat purchases to reduce customer acquisition costs. Here’s exactly how:

1. Build the most engaging rewards structure for your business.

2. Automate a referral program to reward customers when they refer their friends. 

3. Create Brand Advocates with a VIP program. 

By rewarding customers for shopping with you, you incentivize them to return to your show and in turn leave great reviews. It’s a path to accelerated growth. 

Check out Stamped’s blog, free guides for ecommerce merchants and explore use cases from their network of happy Stamped customers to learn more.

Marketing with the Right Channels with Omnisend

Improving the customer experience applies to all facets of a business, from customer service to marketing. Consumers today expect brands to give them the royal treatment. When it comes to marketing, this means sending relevant messages at the right time via the right channels. 

This is why marketing automation is incredibly valuable to brands looking to provide an exceptional customer shopping experience and increase sales. In 2021, behavior-based automated emails helped Omnisend merchants generate 29.6% of all email marketing orders with only 2.2% of sends. 

Brands are finding automated message success at all stages of the customers’ purchase journeys. Welcome messages, those sent to new subscribers, generate a conversion rate of 2.8% compared to 0.1% for scheduled promotional messages.

Browse abandonment messages, those sent to shoppers who viewed products but did not place items in their carts, see a conversion rate of 0.97%. And cart abandonment messages, those sent to shoppers who left their cart without completing their purchase, see a conversion rate of 2.4%. 

But email isn’t the only channel brands are focusing on — especially when it comes to automation. From guiding new sign-ups to purchase or recovering lost sales with abandoned cart messages, combining email and SMS marketing is the modern-day one-two punch brands need to stay relevant to consumers and grow their business.  

Take the clothing company B-Wear Sportswear, for example. They split their messaging within their automated abandoned cart workflow to send different messages via different channels based on the total of the abandoned shopping cart. No longer would the person abandoning a $20 shopping cart receive the same message as someone abandoning a $400 cart. This makes sense, as these two shoppers have different motivations for purchasing and reasons for abandoning. 

Now, when customers abandon their online shopping carts, B-Wear shoppers can open the timely and relevant messages on either their laptop or phone, giving them access to their shopping carts via the device that matters most to them at that time.

By focusing on what matters most to their customers, B-Wear increased its recovered revenue rate by 15%.  

How Omnisend helps BigCommerce merchants.

Omnisend is an email and SMS marketing automation platform built specifically for ecommerce merchants of all sizes and offers easy integrations with major ecommerce platforms, including BigCommerce. 

We offer intuitive, easy-to-build automated workflows that allow brands to combine multiple channels, such as email, SMS and push messages, into a single automation — giving brands the ability to seamlessly provide consumers with the right messages at the right time via the right channels.

If you’re an ecommerce business looking to improve the customer experience and increase sales, Omnisend is a perfect fit. 

The Final Word

Whether it be from dynamic merchandising, integrated customer service and communication channels, abandon cart tools or loyalty programs — enticing shoppers with customer-centric technology tools has never been easier. In an era of online retail that’s constantly evolving, it’s crucial you arm your business with the latest tools to meet your customers at the right moment, and in exactly the right way to suit them.

On BigCommerce, we’re proud to help you wow your customers, powered by best-in-breed marketing technology and integrations.