A frictionless sales experience, intuitive navigation and ease of use are top of mind for today’s customers, but is your current CMS and website up to the task? writes Kat Warboys, ANZ lead at HubSpot.
Your website is your digital shopfront. This is truer now than ever. According to HubSpot data, website traffic in Australia has risen by more than 20 per cent over the past few months as shoppers and businesses move online in the wake of COVID-19 and new social distancing requirements. Sendle, Australia’s small business parcel delivery service, reportedly delivered more parcels in May 2020 than in the lead up to Black Friday so while stores were closed, business certainly wasn’t.
In an online world, customers expect a top-notch experience, just as they would in-store. They want to be engaged from the moment they land on your site, held in rapture at each stage of the conversion funnel. Customers expect a frictionless, intuitive and delightful experience online, whether that’s for small everyday purchases or high value and more considered items. From navigation and ease of use, to up-to-date, relevant and helpful content — the experience on-site can mean a new customer, or a lost opportunity.
Think about a website you love — what is it that you love about it? Is it how intuitive the website is? The seamlessness of purchasing with the click of a button? Or being able to get an answer, be it from a bot or a real person, fast? More than 70% of marketers and CMS users surveyed in Australia believe that providing a personalised experience for customers is crucial to providing a great overall experience while on their website. That’s great in theory but, with the average CMS Net Promoter Score sitting at negative 65, marketers and CMS users are telling us that their tools of trade are falling short. It would appear we’ve got a problem on our hands.
Delivering an exceptional experience online and managing your website shouldn’t be all that hard, but unfortunately, a huge number of businesses fall down when it comes to finding the right tools for the job. In this case, their CMS is the most important tool in the box.
How did we get here?
Many of the problems businesses and marketers have with their website can be traced back to the CMS they use. CMSes haven’t been built for marketers or growing businesses. Those that are easy to use lack the flexibility and functionality that you need as you grow, and the ones that have the functionality that you need as you scale are challenging to use and generally require a level of IT knowledge and coding.
In the beginning, managing your website isn’t that complicated, and there are plenty of CMSes designed for what you need. But as you grow, the needs of your customer, and therefore your business, change. You launch new products, grow in new markets, and inevitably ask more from your website. You need a solution that keeps pace, providing you with the flexibility and usability you need to meet customer expectations.
The reliance on online channels over the past few months is the perfect example of how critical your website is. With activity shifting online, businesses have had to act fast to update their websites with important information for customers during COVID-19, this has been critical in helping shoppers know what’s safe, how to interact with your brand and what their options are. We’ve seen a number of instances where brands’ websites have little to no information shared, instead the updates are posted on social channels.
A recent study by HubSpot saw marketers and CMS users in Australia rate their website as the most difficult digital channel to manage, so it came as no surprise that numerous brand websites had infrequent updates on the rapidly changing COVID-19 situation, deferring instead to eas y-to-use social media channels for these important updates. With websites being critical to the customer experience, and a heightened need for content in uncertain times like these, this is a less than ideal situation for businesses and customers alike.
No more trade-offs
So often, businesses, and marketers, are making a trade-off. A CMS that’s easy to use, but lacks the technological capabilities that a growing business needs. Or one that possesses all the functionality, yet requires custom development that your average marketer isn’t equipped to deliver. Traditional CMSes often force you to cobble together 20 plugins, or more, just to build the functionality you need. More plugins, more problems – over time, your website is slow, clunky and you’re often wrestling with conflicts between plugins and the security issues they cause. This is not what you pictured.
We have to make difficult decisions every day about the best ways to engage with customers. We’re able to adapt to customers on almost every channel — email and social media have come a long way in enabling marketers to deliver personalised and meaningful experiences. A social post underperforming? You can do it differently tomorrow. An email send has lower-than-average open rates? Change your approach next week. But for many of us, this flexibility doesn’t exist when it comes to our websites, our single biggest interface with our customers, it’s as though they’ve been left behind.
If you’re banking your bets on riding out the COVID storm for when we can all return to the physical bricks and mortar stores, you might want to rethink your strategy. When restrictions initially eased across Australia in June, website traffic and onsite chat volume remained at all-time highs. Online shopping has been accelerated and could be here to stay.
To keep pace in a post-COVID world, you need a CMS that’s flexible enough to make changes to your website in real-time, powerful enough to support the wide array of functions our websites need to deliver a seamless end-to-end customer experience and, of course, secure.
Companies today win and lose because of the experience they provide and, moreso now than ever given the impacts of social distancing requirements on in-store and in-person interactions, your website and the experience it delivers is going through a unique stress test and is at the forefront of your brand’s experience. If your CMS isn’t equipping you with the tools you need to manage content, customise your site’s design, add functionality all while keeping your business and customers secure, you need to look at your options.
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