By Albert Pusch

This means brands are now being forced to shift their focus towards creating online brand experiences that reflect their offline store experiences. So what do e-tailers need to do to ensure that their online experience matches their customers’ expectations?

Quality of technology and usability

Usability plays a key role in defining brand experience online, and users expect the same emphasis on quality online as they would get offline. So brands need to ensure that the technology supporting their website is up to scratch, for example having an auto-complete function which tolerates typing errors and includes pictures, helping to orientated visitors around a site from the beginning.

Multichannel messaging

With retailers and brands selling across so many different channels – including websites, mobile and apps – brands need to ensure that their messaging is consistent across all of them. Ideally, some sort of flexible campaign management should be built into the homepage of the site so that it can easily be changed to reflect what is going on in store.

Getting your content right

Content is a key way of creating a point of difference for a brand online and an excellent way of engaging customers. At a basic level, brands must ensure they have the right – in depth – product descriptions in place and that they have the highest resolution pictures (including functionality such as zoom, and 360-degree view etc.) possible to reflect the quality of their products. Beyond that tailored magazine-style content can keep people coming back for more and also help reaffirm brand values.

Building a community

Social media can also offer brands and retailers an opportunity to enhance their online experience, creating areas where customers can share their experiences with others as well as rating products. These communities can also be vital for the brands themselves as they give a direct line to the thoughts and feelings of a brand’s key audience. However, it’s vital that brands and retailers maintain consistent messaging across these channels as well as keeping them active.

More than just design

Online experience is not just about design; while a site may look great, if it lacks functionality and is hard to get around then this is going to reflect negatively on the brand’s online experience. You need to ensure that your on-site navigation is intuitive, and offers people the ability to narrow down what they are looking for in order to be guided quickly and comfortably to exactly the right products.

Helping customers find what they want

The website’s search function also plays a key role in customer experience, particularly if the retailer stocks a lot of different products. You need to ask yourself if your on-site search understand customer needs like a sales person. Error tolerance within the search function can be crucial if you want to serve the customer needs. For example, our research shows that there are around 80 common misspellings of the word Birkenstock so any search program needs to be able to handle these types of errors while still generating the correct results.

Get your presentation right

We have done extensive research into how search results are presented. The two most popular are in a list view or in a grid view. The grid view works best with products that require big picture displays, such as fashion, jewellery or luxury items. List view on the other hand, is best used to focus more on technical products that need more data and specification detail such as consumer electronics. Also, if a retailer is using grid view then they need to have an odd number of items, five for example, and the most popular, or most relevant, result should be placed in the middle as the eye will automatically be drawn here.

Make recommendations

With product recommendations, retailers will already know, for example, when previous customers bought a specific pair of trouser and then went on to buy a particular belt, and this can then be presented as a recommendation to future customers buying the same trousers. They can also show other items in ranges that go together, which can help to get shoppers more involved with the brand.

Service levels

It can be too often glossed over be online stores, but the various “soft” functions such as customer service and delivery play a key role in the overall experience of a brand online. Etailers need to invest as much time into ensuring that their service levels are up to the required standard as they do into planning the design and functionality of their web store.

About the author and the company

Albert Pusch is head of marketing at FACT-Finder, an European leader for e-commerce search and navigation solutions, with clients including Kurt Geiger, Mexx, Harvey Nichols and MyProtein.