In our first Summer Series event, “How to build a stellar online shopping experience,” Klarna’s Senior Commercial Manager Hans Peter Godikson spoke with Tiffany Tibbot, Digital Marketing & E-commerce Manager at Maison Kitsuné, Christopher Scott, E-commerce Manager at Juiced Bikes, and Éva Goicochea, CEO of maude, about advice for growing and scaling a business. Read what they had to say below, and for additional tips on how to build a loyal customer base and more, get the full recording.
Klarna asked: what advice would you give a small business trying to build a stellar shopping experience?
Tiffany: Maison Kitsuné is all about expanding our brand awareness throughout the world. I think the one thing to think about, even if you’re starting from the ground up, is scalability; how are you going to grow and how are you going to function while being sustainable, effective, and efficient? I think always keeping that in mind is really important, even from day one.
Also, I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is that once they sell [a product], they think they’re done. But the customer post-purchase journey is so important to create lifetime value. Sure, the product speaks for itself, but whether it’s customer service touch points or return touch points or even post-purchase customer flow emails that you can set up automatically, it’s so important to remember what happens after the customer has purchased. Understand who your customer is, how they’re reaching you, and make sure to build that lifetime value. Lifetime value is one of the most important things I think people don’t think about when they first start—especially on digital.
“Lifetime value is one of the most important things I think people don’t think about when they first start—especially on digital.”
From top left: Hans Peter Godikson, Senior Commercial Manager at Klarna, Tiffany Tibbot, Digital Marketing & E-commerce Manager at Maison Kitsuné, Christopher Scott, E-commerce Manager at Juiced Bikes, and Éva Goicochea, CEO of maude.
Chris (Juiced Bikes): When I think of what builds a stellar online shopping experience, I usually think of ease of access. When you have some pretty big players in the game, I think what sets them apart is how easy their website is to navigate. You’re browsing, not hunting an online store, so making things easy to access and understand is crucial. A few programs I would recommend include:
- A heat mapping or visitor tracking program like Lucky Orange or Hot Jar, where you can actually watch people view your website.
- Something like Google Optimize, which is free. You can begin testing things on your website to see what people resonate with and what they don’t. Those two experiences together can really help show what your customers react to.
- There’s also a pretty good program I would recommend called Shogun, which is a page builder. If you’re a smaller business, it’s a really good program to help with developer costs because you can do it all yourself. There’s also a/b testing included, so you can create different pages and see what’s converting and what isn’t.
Start testing and start tracking your visitors. Those two things combined can create an extremely powerful website—you can learn so much about your customers and really help boost your conversion.
“You’re browsing, not hunting an online store, so making things easy to access and understand is crucial.”
Éva (maude): I’ve been in branding for a long time, so one thing I would say that’s really important is—whether you’re going to do [branding] yourself or you’re going to have somebody do it for you—do it early; know who you are really early on. Even if you create a 10-page brand book, it’s really important to put it to paper and use it as your north star for everything you’re building. And don’t stray from it. Obviously you iterate, you evolve over time, and you improve—but I think many brands in the early days don’t think about how, even if you’re a team of one, you’re starting the business. You should know what it sounds like, looks like, feels like. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling e-bikes or a sweater, you should be able to take that brand and translate it across mediums. That is when you have something.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re selling e-bikes or a sweater, you should be able to take that brand and translate it across mediums.”
For more insights from the conversation, check out the full recording.