We have reached a plateau of convenience. From one-click shopping to same day delivery, AI-powered personalization, to great user design, today’s brands have built some of the most convenient digital experiences ever created.
But what if convenience isn’t enough?
Digital happiness encompasses the core aspects to a great experience, including the convenience, satisfaction and even joy visitors experience when interacting with a website or app.
With convenience no longer providing a unique selling point, it’s the brands that focus on customer happiness who will have the greatest competitive edge — capturing new customers at lower costs, strengthening loyalty, and boosting customer advocacy.
At Contentsquare, we’re obsessed with understanding what it is that makes customers happy and finding out exactly where and why your digital experiences might be letting them down.
For this report, we surveyed 500 marketers and 4000 shoppers in 6 countries.
Online shopping is awesome. It’s cheap, it’s convenient — and you can do it on the move. Given all the benefits, you would’ve thought that consumers are happier than ever shopping online. But sadly, that’s not the case.
Only 15% of consumers say that shopping online makes them feel happy, while the majority agree that they have a happier experience in-store. For almost a third, online shopping is associated with boredom, frustration and even anxiety. While for the rest, they simply report feeling “content” with their digital shopping experience.
So how can brands go beyond contentment to ensure digital shoppers leave with a smile on their faces? Well, for those who do report feeling happy when they shop, there are four consistent factors that drive their positive moods:
If consumers choose to buy online rather than in store, it’s because they expect their needs to be met quickly. They have to be able to find what they’re looking for without any effort at all.
Often people will shop online because the product they’re looking for isn’t available in-store. 42% of consumers say they specifically shop online because of the greater product selection.
Low prices are a great way to make customers happy. But it’s not all about discounts. Sometimes it’s just about being transparent with your pricing, showing price comparisons as well as return policies. Online shoppers love to see this type of information, as it’s rarely provided in-store.
Without the limitations of physical shelf space, digital stores can offer a near endless selection of customized and personalized products and experiences. This customization is vital for digital shoppers, who look for goods and services tailored to their individual tastes, needs and past purchase behaviors.
When asked if they feel happy when shopping online, only 15% of consumers said yes.
Considering that a quarter (25%) of customers feel nervous about shopping in-store since COVID-19, now is the time for brands to get serious about making online experiences just as good as — or better than — those in-store.
So what elements of online shopping are making people unhappy, and where are digital experiences going wrong?
When asked about their top priorities for the year ahead, our marketers were focused on customer retention, brand awareness and increased market share.
These are all vital steps on the road to a better experience, but with customers having strong opinions about what brings — or fails to bring — them joy, these need to be viewed through the lens of digital happiness.
The end goal of any great digital experience should be to ensure customers leave your app, site or online store happier than when they arrived. This doesn’t mean losing focus on retention, market share or brand awareness, but rather thinking about those objectives in the context of satisfying customers and building experiences they’ll love.
How can brands embrace digital happiness?
If brands are going to understand and improve the happiness of their digital customers, they need to focus on three things:
Digital happiness isn’t like bounce rates or conversions, it’s an emotion. If brands are going to accurately measure and improve their customers’ happiness, they need insights into their moods and emotions online.
With the right experience analytics, brands can build an accurate profile of their customers’ mindsets. They can spot sources of satisfaction and frustration, identifying confusion, “rage clicks” and, yes, even happiness across their apps and sites.
When it comes to boosting digital happiness, the right technology is essential to understanding customer behaviors. But perhaps even more important, is the right combination of tech.
For years, brands have been using lots of different technologies to try and measure one thing — how customers really feel about their experiences. To refocus on digital happiness, marketers have to simplify, focusing on those tools that provide the clearest insights into their customers’ wants, needs and behaviours online.
What makes you happy? It’s a tough question to answer. The abstract nature of happiness makes it a hard thing for brands to measure. As such, we’d often rather focus on all those other metrics that are easier to log and understand.
But we should never give up on understanding what makes our customers happy. What brings customers joy can be measured — if only we have the right metrics in place.
At Contentsquare, we pride ourselves on looking beyond bounces, clicks and conversion rates. Our platform focuses on real customer behaviors — behaviors that provide a true insight into customers’ states of mind. It’s through these tools that we built the DHI, a 5 dimension score that benchmarks digital happiness:
