(Checkout six immersive eCommerce design trends for 2023 to get ahead of your competition)
For every eCommerce brand out there, delivering a seamless user experience is on top of their wishlist for 2023. Even though buyers are transacting offline, brands are trying to offer them a similar experience to what they would get if they were shopping in-store. While immersive experiences are not new for the eCommerce space, there are specific tweaks they may consider through website redesign services and provide a more personalized experience for the customer.
In simple words, an immersive experience can be defined as the personalization of content for your target audience to engage them at an emotional level. This can be done by using various modes and tools of multimedia. The more memorable and satisfying the experience is, the better the chances of boosting your eCommerce sales.
Before you approach a web design company to overhaul your eCommerce website to deliver an immersive experience to your customers, it is a good idea to be well-versed with the upcoming trends.
1 – Mapping the customer journey is critical
Understanding the customer journey is critical if you want to implement immersive experiences for your eCommerce website. After all, it is a customer-driven business, and delivering based on the unique needs of your customers can be the differentiator between your competitors and you.
There are several critical stages of the customer journey. These include:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Evaluating a product
- Making a decision
It is possible to introduce an element of immersion at every stage to make it a memorable experience for your customers. For example, adding a powerful slogan or video to create awareness about your product can go a long way in ensuring personalized messaging.
The next step can be creating an immersive experience based on the identity and demographics of your customer. Understanding what the requirements of your customers are, what they like to see, and what they avoid seeing can be an excellent way to develop immersive solutions and provide meaningful experiences.
This exercise is critical as it helps eCommerce platforms to understand whether they are in a position to offer something in line with the requirements of their customers. Since the ultimate goal is to deliver a memorable experience that hits the customers at the right place, businesses should focus on working out how best to do it consistently.
2 – Add animated navigation on your website
Browsing through your eCommerce website shouldn’t be boring for your customers. The idea should excite them and get them to check out the website without feeling like it is a humungous task they are undertaking. And what better than animation to achieve this goal? Overstimulating the audience by using clever visuals and animated elements can create a lasting impact, enhancing product recall.
Instead of relying on regular animation, it is time to embrace animated navigation. It allows you to guide the user through the entire website as if you are giving them a personal tour of the storefront. You can think of it as a perfect combination between animation and gamification. You can tweak the UX of your website to give the impression that the users are playing a game while they try to navigate. This can make the experience more memorable and entertaining.
3 – Opt for curved frames whenever possible
A curved frame is every designer’s favorite as it allows seamless display without the image breaking or tearing at any point. It automatically evokes calmness and warmth, which are essential for delivering an immersive experience to the audience.
The easier you make it for the audience to scroll through your website, the better the chances of them remembering what they saw. These frames also add a cleaner and minimalist appeal to the website, increasing the chances of connecting to the viewer at a deeper level. Take inspiration from Soft Services, dedicated to offering products and guides to those with various skin concerns.
Looking at their website, you find no harsh edges in the framing. Instead, the flowing curves add more authenticity and a softer touch to the overall brand personality. This is critical for displaying the human side of your brand and delivering an immersive experience. Since the website aims to empower those who struggle with image issues and look beyond cultural taboos, it is important to showcase a pleasant digital experience through its website.
4 – Don’t shy away from using saturated colors
A quick way to create a pleasant vibe and inject positivity into your website is by using the correct color palette. Colors can have a huge impact on the psyche of your audience and can help you give them a more enjoyable experience.
Superior visual quality is a critical aspect of creating an immersive experience. Studies have also shown that depending on the context within which various colors are used can generate different psychological and physiological reactions from the audience. For a superior viewing experience, don’t shy away from using a saturated color palette on your website. They can help your brand appear more friendly, optimistic, and approachable.
Moreover, adding different pops of colors throughout your website can do an excellent job of capturing the visitor’s attention and also nudge them to engage with your website more. In particular, you can use accent colors for interactive buttons on your website to draw the audience’s attention quickly.
5 – Introduce virtual shopping assistants on your website
Virtual shopping assistants can be a great way to take your customer service initiatives to a notch higher. Round-the-clock assistance provided on your website can generate an immersive experience and also make shopping a more personalized activity. These assistants can substitute the sales staff you would usually consult when shopping in person at a physical storefront.
Virtual assistants can offer recommendations based on the tastes and preferences questionnaire filled up by a potential customer. Using the results, they can suggest product recommendations from the website. For instance, if you sell smartphone cases or laptop sleeves, you can get the customer to fill up a quick questionnaire about the type of product they intend to purchase. You can then use the AI bot to show the available options and take it one step further by also showing them a comparison between the different models of the same product available on your website.
6 – Create a virtual reality environment
Immersive eCommerce can reach greater heights by incorporating elements from Virtual Reality.
For instance, you can play around with the idea of offering NFTs to your customers for the products they wish to choose. If you sell hoodies on your website, you can have a virtual tryout option for your customers to get a feel of the real product. You can have a virtual assistant provide recommendations about different options for the hoodie. You can allow your customers to purchase the hoodie as NFT to get a digital copy of them wearing a hoodie and also sell them the physical hoodie.
7 – Creating content that boosts your SEO is still relevant
Content will continue to reign supreme in 2023. It is important that you have content that is valuable and unique to make a better impression on your target audience. In particular, paying attention to SEO remains a key area that businesses can’t ignore.
There is a greater need for semantically related keywords and cluster-related keywords to be included in e-commerce content. After all, Google is a sophisticated search engine — not only does it crawl websites based on keywords and phrases, but it also emphasizes similar relevant keywords in search queries.
For locally operating businesses, this can be a goldmine – say, if you are a Los Angeles-based eCommerce brand, hiring a web design company in Los Angeles to design your content and optimize local search phrases that are most likely to resonate with your local audience can help you achieve top ranking web page for your website.
Conclusion
The upcoming trends discussed above indicate that it is imperative to hop onto the bandwagon to make the browsing experience of your audience smoother.
If you are unsure where to begin, get in touch with a web development agency that can revamp your eCommerce website to provide an immersive experience to your target audience.
