How Retailers Can Optimize UX/UI Enhancements to Deliver the Best ROI This Holiday Season

When it comes to driving digital return on investment from the holiday shopping season, there are things you can’t control, and things you can. One of the things you can’t control is the shorter season this year, which will deprive retailers of six days to capitalize on the gift-giving mood.

Another thing that’s out of your control is that most holiday shopping decisions will have a digital component to them. Mobile devices, despite their lower conversion rates, continue to drive the lion’s share of digital activity (in the fashion sector, 65 percent of all traffic today is mobile).

With a shorter window to make (and exceed) their numbers, brands will need to make sure they're making every second count this holiday season. That means not losing revenue to avoidable friction during the customer journey — i.e., keeping customers happy and engaged all the way to conversion. The good news is that’s the part you can control.

Optimizing Your Holiday Content

Monitoring how customers behave on your digital properties will tell you all you need to know about your customer experience, and will help your team simultaneously fix user experience issues and maximize revenue opportunities. Behavioral analytics are the interpretation of your customers’ digital feedback. Taps, clicks, hovers and swipes help paint the full picture of their journey through your site or app, flagging obstacles along the way, but also shining a light on ROI hotspots.

If you have a high-engagement, high-converting offer below the fold, but only a handful of shoppers are seeing it, that’s not good for business. At the same time, if you’re losing store traffic (and offline conversions!) to a poorly conceived store locator, that’s no good either.

Understanding the moving parts of the holiday shopper journey is key to delivering meaningful and effective content at every step, and delivering a great experience across channels. And don’t forget: make sure the content your visitors see when they first land on your site is relevant to where they’re coming from.

Striking Gold From Voice-of-Customer Data

Even the best laid plans can sometimes go wrong, so now would also be the season to graduate to a winning voice-of-customer strategy. This type of feedback isn't silent, but there’s quite often a lot that remains unsaid in a negative customer review. Your checkout may be driving a visitor crazy, but do you understand which step of the checkout process is causing the frustration? Do you know which form field or call to action is slowing the customer journey?

With behavioral analytics, businesses can quantify this feedback and match it to the correct customer experience decision. And the best thing is that today, AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you — e.g., alerting you to off-trend behaviors and patterns, and accelerating your team’s response to an underperforming CX.

The Customer is Always Right

Controlling the success of your CX is in a way empowering customers to guide optimization efforts. A customer-driven experience — one driven by what your customers are trying to achieve and how they want to go about achieving it — beats intuition every time. And when the season is six days shorter, leaving experience decisions to guesswork is a risky strategy.

The other thing to keep in mind is that customers today already expect brands to bend over backwards to deliver great CX. Meeting consumers’ omnichannel expectations and understanding how their needs and browsing preferences evolve throughout the season should be part of the basic checklist.

Visitors may start off on your site, but prefer to convert in-store. They may be browsing for inspiration or in a rush to grab a deal. You won’t want to force a digital purchase onto someone who is interacting heavily with your store locator, and it may not be a winning approach to push product alternatives on someone who knows exactly what they want.

Seamlessness is de rigueur (especially when it comes to shrinking the mobile conversion gap), but it’s not enough. With so many options to choose from to fulfill their holiday shopping list, consumers will be particularly receptive to brands that go above and beyond to understand their objectives and innovate the experience to deliver the most value.

Analyzing behavioral patterns will help your team a.) learn where your greatest opportunities to stand out lie by following your customers’ lead, and b.) innovate confidently, knowing you can measure the impact of decisions in real time.

Jonathan Cherki is the CEO and founder of ContentSquare, an experience optimization platform for online and mobile businesses that uniquely captures visitor behavior insights to measure user experience, increase engagement and improve conversion rates.