Give the Gift of Great UX: 3 Ways to Turn Holiday Shoppers into Year-Round Customers

With the holidays fast approaching, customers have already begun preparing their shopping lists and checking them twice. However, amidst the holiday hustle and bustle, shopping can sometimes be regarded as a chore, with friends and family making the yearly trek to their neighborhood malls, or spending hours carefully selecting the perfect gifts online.

Relieve your customers of this routine by livening up the shopping experience both in-store and online. Once brands have successfully employed these 3 tactics, consumers will delight in the fast and easy approach to holiday shopping, effectively converting into repeat shoppers.

Tailored shopping recommendations

Customers today demand increased accessibility and personalization when shopping online. Take for example Amazon’s popular product suggestion feature: “Your Recommendations,” to which the E-Commerce giant attributes 35 percent of its sales (Business Insider). Using an algorithm, this feature tracks users’ on-site actions and provides smart suggestions for future purchases. In delivering recommendations, brands showcase more products directly to customers, while customers love how easy and convenient it is to find products tailored to their likes, tastes and interests.

The holiday season doesn’t just revolve around gift-giving. Customers also need to purchase last-minute items for themselves – perhaps some spooky decorations for a Haunted House, or an evening dress for a New Years Eve bash? In order to provide your users with a convenient and highly customized experience when shopping online, allow them to identify themselves by registering for an account. By providing users with an option to log-in socially, brands can responsibly capture rich permission-based social identity data, including customers’ locations, favorite brands, activities and more. This data may then be leveraged to provide personalized recommendations and offers, saving your customers time and energy navigating your site and increasing shopping cart conversions and ATV.

User-generated content

Shopping is no longer just considered an individual pastime. Today, 90 percent of consumers turn to product reviews to help them make purchasing decisions (Marketing Land). Consumers trust their peers’ opinions and are more comfortable purchasing an item which has been previously reviewed. Capitalize on peer recommendations by providing customers a forum to voice feedback and syndicate their reviews with their social networks. In turn, social sharing boosts word of mouth marketing, driving referral traffic back to your brand sites.

Identifying customers at the point of site entry via registration and social login enables you to measure and leverage their on-site activities by attributing them to individual user profiles. By capturing and consolidating social and behavioral data into a singular customer view, brands can easily tie on-site user activities such as leaving comments and reviews directly to purchase behaviors and other KPIs like referral traffic, identifying their most valuable customers and rewarding influencers.

Reach your customers on the go

Keep in mind, consumers are not just tethered to their desktops when holiday shopping. Be sure to customize the in-store experience by creating a seamless and interactive experience across web and mobile applications, and find ways to bridge digital and real-world user experiences in innovative and useful ways. For example, Target’s Cartwheel mobile app delivers users in-store offers, resulting in frequent customers that expend on average 30% more each visit (Fortune Magazine).

Providing a seamless experience starts with identifying your customer across multiple touch points. In order to deliver an engaging and personalized omni-channel experience, brands need to be sure they’re employing a database which can reconcile data across multiple channels and devices. By creating a single customer profile, brands can ensure customers receive relevant content in real-time.

Make holiday shopping convenient and enjoyable for your customers by providing a highly accessible and tailored user experience. In aggregating and leveraging users’ permission-based social and behavioral identity data across web and mobile, brands can create valuable relationships with their customers that extend far beyond the holiday season. To learn more about how to increase shopping cart conversions using customer knowledge, download our free eBook, “Turn Anonymous Shoppers into Known Customers.”