If someone asks you to “make the customer experience better,” it’s totally reasonable to follow up with, “What, specifically, are you even talking about?”
The customer experience, or CX, is kinda tough to pin down. Unlike other go-to ecommerce strategies like email marketing or web design, the customer experience is pretty amorphous. You simply can’t point to one thing and say, “That’s the customer experience,” because the truth is that it’s a concept that lives in every nook and cranny of your company.
The customer experience is “everything a business does to put customers first, managing their journeys and serving their needs.”
If you’re in ecommerce, you know that managing customer journeys and serving ever-changing needs encompasses every sales channel, every marketing move, every product image, every line of copy, every support chat — everything.
One of the worst customer experiences in ecommerce today? Gifting.
DTC consumers trying to send a handful of gifts to friends. Busy HR professionals scouring your site for your corporate gifting form. A stressed couple trying to order hundreds of party favors for their big day. These are high-paying customers enduring (most likely) your store’s worst customer experience.
Let’s fix the vibes. Read on to see how you can clean up gifting and make it the most lucrative CX on your site.
Online Stores Live or Die By Their Customer Experience
Making it big in ecommerce is hard work.
On top of mounting competition from other DTC stores and marketplaces, you have to keep up with emerging tech, shifting economies, and a diverse consumer base with higher standards than ever. If it feels like one slip-up could cause your customer to click over to a competitor, well, you’re not wrong.
- A confusing checkout flow makes roughly 20% of shoppers abandon their cart.
- Eight in 10 shoppers won’t come back to your brand if their post-purchase experience was subpar (and they’ll go right to your competitors).
- More than half of shoppers will dump a purchase if the website is too hard to navigate, and 57% will leave if a page takes three seconds or longer to load.
- A simple error on your website, like a wonky page that crashes or a coupon code with a typo, makes 13% of shoppers go bye-bye.
And that’s just the tip of the CX iceberg. On top of all the variables that can make your experience go awry, it’s also important to keep in mind that it takes about 12 positive experiences with a shopper before they forgive and forget just one negative experience with your brand.
The average shopper is willing to bounce from brand to brand until they find one that gives them a shopping experience that can’t be beat. It’s no wonder that 9 in 10 companies compete on customer experience, and nearly half say that CX is their top priority over the next 5 years, beating out pricing and products.
Today’s consumers are finicky. Thanks to standards set by behemoths like Amazon, Zappos, and Walmart, people expect hyper-personalized messaging, super slick websites, free two-day shipping, several payment options at checkout, easy returns, and so much more.
If your store isn’t up to snuff on these factors, heaps of revenue could be leaking out of your ecommerce funnel day in and day out. When too many CX missteps add up, the loss could be more than a store can handle.
In a nutshell, the customer experience you provide is potentially your most proprietary asset, and the better yours is, the more people will come flocking your way.
The Average Online Gifting CX Doesn’t Cut It
Seamless checkout flow, easy navigation, dialed-in post-purchase emails, personalized marketing — all of these are CX table stakes for online brands that want to stick around for the foreseeable future.
Keeping those essentials in mind, let’s walk through the typical customer experience when a shopper wants to buy and send a gift from the average online store.
For DTC consumers, sending gifts to a few friends looks like going through the checkout once per recipient, bypassing the desire for any type of gift note (because it’s simply not an available option), and settling for the fact that the packing slip and fully exposed price will be waiting in the box when the recipient opens it.
For corporate customers ordering for their whole team or company, the experience becomes even more clunky and time-consuming. First, they have to hunt down the teensy “Corporate Gifting” link often buried in the footer or hidden on some other landing page. Once they find it, they have to conduct a series of steps including downloading a PDF catalog, uploading desired SKUs and quantities, filling out a form, submitting the CSV, and waiting hours or days to hear back from a brand rep to learn if their gift is feasible or not.
Both journeys are rife with friction and hurdles that send gift-buying customers off your site and to Amazon to settle for another ho-hum digital gift card.
While losing any order stings, losing customers who were ambling to buy a bunch of gifts is a little extra painful. After all, consider what’s being lost when a gifter abandons ship:
- An order with a lot of products.
- An order with a much higher price tag.
- Priceless brand awareness with every gift recipient.
In other words, the stakes are high (no pressure). Ecommerce as a whole has been honing the buying-for-myself experience since the dawn of online shopping. However, as more shoppers turn to their favorite online brands for gift-buying, now is the time to invest in this often overlooked experience.
Must-haves for the Best Gifting Customer Experience
There have been hundreds, nay thousands, of apps built over the past couple decades to help ecommerce stores thrive.
From essential store builders like Squarespace and Shopify to email marketing tools to social posting platforms to chat bot widgets to popups and announcement banners…we could go on for a while. The point is, odds are good every part of your store is made better with the help of a specific tool.
But how many of those tools are purpose-built for the (extremely lucrative) gifting experience?
For too long, internal teams have been cobbling together their own ad hoc solutions to intake, process, and track gift orders. Every single brand that Zest partners with brings up the litany of spreadsheets and email threads gumming up the whole process.
Even the best homemade gifting systems miss critical components, like sending events to the rest of your tech stack, collecting reporting info and insights, and offering a CX that looks and feels like the rest of a store’s shopping journey.
Without the right tools, gifting is a chore for both customers and in-house teams. Tools like Zest are finally fixing the gifting experience.
Zest Gives Giftable Online Brands the Right Tools for Better Experiences
The best time to invest in your gifting experience and conversion rate is right now.
Ecommerce continues to account for more retail sales year over year, the North American gifting market is the biggest in the world and growing fast, people are going to their favorite dot-coms for thoughtful gifts, and consumer expectations couldn’t be higher.
Whether your store has prime presents for DTC shoppers or corporate gifters, both audiences anticipate a gifting experience as tailored and intuitive as if they were buying for themselves. Stores that aren’t prepared risk losing these customers to the growing number of competitors who are investing in their gifting channel.
Zest was made to give modern shoppers a modern gift-buying experience from their favorite online brands. That looks like:
- Full transparency around giftable products, pricing, and more. Shoppers can see exactly what they’re buying (instead of worrying if the SKUs on a spreadsheet are really what they wanted).
- Ability to send gifts to one or tons of gift recipients in one transaction.
- Features that make a gift purchase complete, like customizable gift notes and digital card designs.
- Functionality for the tech-savvy types, like the ability to send gifts via text, email, and link.
- A fast and intuitive self-service flow from selecting the gift through purchase, i.e., no more having to wait days for a brand to respond.
- The ability to send gifts instantly or choose a specific ship date in the future.
- Flexible purchase journeys that fit the gifters. Some folks prefer to get in and get gifting with a self-service gift experience, and others might still want to reach out and get some one-on-one time with a team member for an über customer request (or they’re just old school and prefer the white glove feel).
- Tracking updates automatically sent to the gifter and their recipients so there’s no more guessing where these critical packages are in their journey to making someone’s day.
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And for today’s ecommerce teams, a platform made specifically for the online gift channel couldn’t be more of a godsend. With Zest, in-house teams can ditch their mountain of spreadsheets, open up the gifting bottlenecks, and count on this gifting platform to:
- House every gifting transaction in one easy-to-navigate place.
- Automatically process gift orders, enabling shoppers to buy gifts 24/7/365.
- Send gift event info to tools like Klaviyo and Attentive for smarter marketing and long-term engagement with gifters and their recipients who opt in (whoa, did someone say smokin’ hot leads?).
- Send transactional emails and tracking updates to gifting customers and their recipients automatically.
- Create one process that’s easy to share with team members and train new folks, especially useful during seasonal surges.
Zest brushes the dust off outdated gifting channels and helps brands scale this side of the business. It’s the gifting platform that powers the experience modern consumers expect (and ecom teams deeply appreciate).
Pump up the Vibes and Put Your Customers First With Your Store’s Gifting Experience
You’ve been absolutely crushing your DTC customer experience, and now it’s time to turn your attention to the most overlooked and fastest-growing channel: gifting.
When you leverage online gifting platforms like Zest, you create a customer-first journey that meets their needs head-on.
Whether someone is a regular DTC shopper or a B2B client, shopping for a few friends or a few hundred teammates, craving a fast self-service checkout or a concierge service, brands don’t have to stress about someone slipping through the cracks and losing a big sale.
Time to flip online gifting’s reputation from tedious and outdated to one that customers seek out any time they need to grab a gift.
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