How to Improve Customer Experience for Vape Shops: 9 Tips You Should Know
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Few people know what customer experience is, but those that do, understand that it is pivotal for eCommerce success. If you’re looking to increase sales, engagement, and profits, you can’t ignore customer experience. So what is customer experience, and why is it important? Read on to find out.
Table of Contents
- What is Customer Experience and Why Is It Important
- Perform an Ecommerce Customer Experience Analysis or Audit
- Website Speed and Navigation
- Complete Vape Product Information
- A Smooth Checkout Process
- An Informative Content Strategy
- Increase the Quality of Customer Service
- Leverage Automation and Create Personalized Emails
- Make it Mobile Friendly
- Use Data To Your Advantage
- Measuring Customer Experience
- Conclusion
What is Customer Experience and Why is It Important?
According to Hubspot, Customer experience is the impression your customers receive from your brand as a whole through every step of the buying process. So, from the first time they enter your website to the delivery of the product, this can all be said to be the customer experience.
While most people think that the online customer experience is solely eCommerce customer service, every aspect of the online shopping journey your customers go through equals to be the customer experience. That’s why it is crucial.
In fact, brands with superior customer experience earn more than 5.7 more revenue than brands that do not take customer experience into account. And almost 86% of shoppers are willing to spend more on better customer experiences.
But how can you create better customer experiences for your online vape shop? In the following sections, we give you nine customer experience tips to take your online customer experience for vape shops to the next level.
1. Perform an Ecommerce Customer Experience Analysis or Audit
Before making major changes in your customer experience, we suggest that you first audit your website to know what to change. Some of the questions you should ask yourself when performing the audit are the following:
- How are the aesthetics of your website? Is there clear, cohesive branding?
- Is the website easy to navigate?
- How hard or easy is it to find products?
- How is the content? Is it easy to read and understand? Does it educate and inform?
- How is the shopping experience from beginning to end?
- Is it easy to revisit the shopping cart if abandoned?
- How easy is it to reach customer service? Is there a 24/7 service?
These and other questions might be important to ask yourself beforehand, so you know how to improve the eCommerce customer experience for vape shops.
2. Website Speed and Navigation
The first thing that you need to take a look at is website speed. Not only does website speed help out in terms of SEO it’s crucial for the customer experience. That’s why you need to optimize your website to make it as fast as possible. Just a few seconds of lag time can cost you a customer. Here’s an in-depth blog on how to create more conversions by improving your website speed, according to Shopify.
3. Complete Vape Product Information
One of the most essential things a vaping e-commerce website should have is complete product information. When we talk about vaping products, especially vape juices, there are certain specifications that will always help customers make their final decision. So, for example, when showing vape juices make sure to have the following information:
- Nicotine strengths: Many customers are looking for specific nicotine strength, so make sure you provide them with all the nicotine choices.
- VG/PG Ratio: Nowadays, this is extremely important since high VG ratios are not compatible with low-powdered vape devices.
- Bottle Size: Whether it is a 60ml or 100ml bottle, this information should be displayed clearly to help the customer make his decision.
Although these specifications are common sense, you would be surprised how many websites fail to provide some of them, leading to a loss of customers. You can also apply this to vape devices, disposables, and vape accessories. With every item, remember to include relevant specifications that will help the customer make his decision.
4. A Smooth Checkout Process
Another important thing that can improve customer experience is a smooth checkout process. It should be effortless to navigate from the product page to checkout. Some of the things you can do to improve your checkout process include:
- Adding a “guest” checkout option if the site requires the user to sign-up before purchasing.
- Make sure you have badges and seals of your security system for their peace of mind.
- Include links to your return policy, FAQs, shipping policy, privacy policy, etc., on the checkout page in case they want to double-check these pages.
- Display where the products can be shipped to and where they can’t be shipped to since there are many states where vape products are prohibited.
These are just some of the few ways in which you can streamline the checkout process.
5. An Informative Content Strategy
Vaping, like any hobby, has a learning curve, and it requires that users learn on their own time about the products, devices, and even the technicalities and aspects of vaping. So in order to provide an excellent customer experience for vaping customers, your goal with your content should be to inform and educate about all things vaping.
Make sure that with every blog, your teaching your customers something new about vaping. Whether it is the difference between parts, the ingredients that go into e-liquids, how to make their own coils, or even how to clean their devices, If they find value in your content, they are much likely to invest in your products.
6. Increase the Quality of Customer Service
A large portion of the customer experience is customer service. It’s the direct interactions that customer service has with your customers that can really make or break the customer experience. That’s why in order to improve the customer experience, you need to increase the quality of customer service.
There are many ways to increase the quality of customer service, but here are some things you can do in your eCommerce store that will create a better experience for your customers:
- Live Chat: Installing a live chat service is relatively inexpensive to do but creates another channel where customers can reach you, which gives the customer more peace of mind.
- Train Employees: This is hugely important in a vape e-commerce store; not only should customer service employees be trained on how to treat customers, but they should also be knowledgeable on all things vaping to help customers better.
- Ask for Feedback: Another essential thing to do is asking for feedback from every customer interaction. This will let you know in what area your customer service department can improve.
7. Leverage Automation and Create Personalized Emails
Believe it or not, email marketing is also a major part of the customer experience. Not only is email one of the most effective ways to communicate and advertise sales when you have an online vape shop it’s also a great way to create unique customer experiences. One way you can connect with customers on a deeper level is by using automated emails.
Automated emails are emails that are sent out automatically after they meet specific parameters. One example of this is birthday emails. By using automation and knowing each of your clients’ birthdays, you can set automated emails that are sent on the day of their birthdays, with special coupons and offers. This will increase customer loyalty and guarantee a sale if the customer ends up using the coupon or discount code.
But that’s just the beginning; you can segment your email contact list and separate them by products bought, last products bought, and how frequently they purchase vape goods. By doing this, you can create special campaigns that, for example, are sent out one month after they bought their vape juice to remind customers to buy another bottle if they are running low.
8. Make it Mobile Friendly
If you want to better your customer experience, you have to make your vape eCommerce shop mobile-friendly. Mobile is vital in eCommerce, even more so than desktop, with nearly three out of every four dollars spent on online purchases today being done through a mobile device.
Making your website mobile-friendly will not only cater to ¾ of your customers it will also help you with SEO Since Google now requires that your website be optimized for mobile. While some people opt to create separate websites for their mobile experience, we recommended using responsive design that adjusts the size of the page depending on the device from which it is being viewed. This the Google recommended way of making your website mobile-friendly and is the easiest to implement.
9. Use Data To Your Advantage
To create personalized experiences for each of your customers, you’ll need data. Data can be gathered through account registrations, order registrations, and even loyalty reward programs. By gaining as much information on your clients as possible, you’ll not only be able to create automated emails; you’ll also be to create product recommendations based on their browsing history, wishlists, and even special promotions that take into account the customers’ order history.
Measuring Customer Experience
Now that you know some of the things you can do to better your website’s customer experience, you’ll also need to know how to measure it, to see if things have improved, and more importantly, see what areas still need tweaking. Some of the key metrics used in measuring customer experience are:
- Bounce rate
- Cart abandonment rate
- Customer retention rate
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of users that visit a website but leave before making a purchase or visiting other pages within the website. Although there is no specific rate that we know of in the vaping industry, a good benchmark to set is a 50% bounce rate for all visitors to your website. As you change your customer experience and work, you should see this percentage become smaller and smaller.
Cart Abandonment Rate
Cart Abandonment Rate is the percentage of visitors who put something on their carts but end up leaving them full and not checking out. Again while there is no benchmark percentage for this in the vaping industry, a good benchmark to follow is 70%. The lower this percentage is the more customers that are finishing their customer journey.
Customer Retention Rate
Customer retention rate is the percentage of customers you manage to obtain over a period of time. Since it is more expensive to acquire new customers, you should always try to reward and aim to keep your existing customer base satisfied. While there is no benchmark for the vaping industry, if you manage to improve your retention rate by just 5%, it could mean a 25% to 95% increase in revenue.
Conclusion
As you can see, improving customer experience will impact your revenue, engagement, and overall sales. That’s why it is so important to dedicate time to improving your customer experience because the payoffs could be immense.
