How To Optimise Your Food & Drink Website Design

How do you get from one location to another? If you know where you’re going and you know how to get there, then you might want to take the quickest way? Or perhaps you like to take the more scenic route – stopping off at a couple of coffee shops along the way. Both ways (and all the others not mentioned!) are valid choices – and wholly personal to what you want to do. And funnily enough, a customer’s journey on your website is exactly the same. Food and drink websites should be designed to create a simple path for customers towards conversion, whilst still ensuring that your product is accessible, the customer has all the right information and your business is easy to purchase from online.

Simply put, a customer journey on your food and drink website will make or break customer experiences, satisfaction, and retention rates. If you provide a seamless experience that leaves no questions unanswered, customers are likely to complete a transaction and feel satisfied, as opposed to a poor customer journey that is slow, clunky, long, or inaccessible.

So how do you optimise your food and drink website design to improve your customer journey? Sit right down and we’ll tell you. Read on!

What is a Customer Journey?

A customer journey is the path a customer takes from their initial interaction with your food and drink brand to the end of their relationship with you (hopefully it’s not the complete end though!). This can include everything from researching your products or services, making a purchase, receiving support, and even leaving customer feedback or writing a review.

Understanding and optimising the customer journey is essential for any food and drink brand that wants to provide a positive customer experience and that prioritises customer success. A well-designed customer journey can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately lead to more sales and revenue. On the other hand, a poorly designed customer journey can result in frustration, confusion, and even lost customers and revenue.

For example, if you deliver meal boxes (think the Hello Fresh and Mindful Chefs of the world) and have an online preference process, you need to make sure customers are answering every question at every stage of the process as well as providing all the information that they may need. If they want specific information broken down in more detail or explained more clearly, there should be the functionality to allow for that as soon as the customer needs it, e.g. delivery explained. If they have to click back or leave where they are during the process to find additional information, they may abandon the ordering altogether.

Customer journey mapping is not just about providing an ideal route to transaction, it’s about making sure customers have a seamless experience from start to finish and have all the information they need to make informed decisions. It also ensures existing customers are able to navigate your food and drink products with ease should there be an update at any stage.

What Are The Benefits Of Improving Your Customer Journey?

It’s super simple- the customer journey impacts every aspect of your customer’s experience with you. If the user journey is poor, your customer service team will have to pick up the pieces, therefore increasing their workload, elongating wait times for customers, and resulting in inefficiencies, additional costs, and lost revenue. It’s in your best interests to make sure every customer journey is optimised, because doing so will give way to a myriad of cross-business benefits, including:

One of the most significant benefits of improving your customer journey is increased conversion rates. A smooth and seamless customer journey helps to build trust with your customers, which can lead to higher conversion rates. According to a report by eduMe, brands with outstanding customer experience generate 5.7 times more revenue than competitors who fall behind. Customer satisfaction leads to increased customer retention and longer life cycles – the ultimate goal.

Reduced costs

Improving your customer journey can also result in reduced costs for your business. By identifying customer pain points and areas where they may experience friction or frustration, you can streamline your processes, reduce wait times, and eliminate unnecessary steps. This can result in a more efficient and cost-effective customer journey.

Faster transaction times

A smooth customer journey can also lead to faster transaction times, which can benefit both your business and your customers. Customers want a seamless and fast experience when transacting or engaging with a business, and delays or complications can lead to frustration and abandonment. By simplifying the process and eliminating any unnecessary steps, you can speed up transaction times and improve the overall customer experience. One way you might do this is to offer multiple payment options to allow for faster checkouts, or the option to checkout as a guest.

Improved customer satisfaction

Improving your customer journey can have a significant impact on customer satisfaction. A smooth and seamless customer journey can build trust and loyalty, leading to increased customer satisfaction and retention. According to a study by PwC, 73% of customers point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions. Improving the customer journey can also lead to positive word-of-mouth recommendations and reviews, which can attract new customers to your business.

How Can I Improve My Customer Journey?

Some of the ways you can begin to improve your customer journey and refine your customer experience strategy and exceed your customer’s expectations include:

Use tools and technology

Chatbots can assist customers with simple queries and provide instant support, reducing the workload of customer service agents. It’s a win-win for your brand; quick response to your customer’s query and then

Increase speed and load times

Slow website speed and long load times can be frustrating for customers, leading to a negative customer experience. It’s essential to invest in website optimisation to improve website speed and load times. Use Google PageSpeed Insights for a free way to take a deeper dive into your website speed and load times.

Simplify website navigation

Customers should be able to find what they’re looking for on your food and drink website quickly and easily. Therefore, it’s crucial to simplify website navigation and customer journey maps. This can be achieved by organising your website into clear categories and subcategories. Additionally, you can use website analytics tools such as Google Analytics to identify which pages customers visit most frequently and optimise those pages for a better user experience.

Focus on design aspects

Design aspects such as colour scheme, font, and layout can have a significant impact on the customer experience. It’s necessary for you to focus on the core design aspects of your website so as not to turn potential customers away. Use a colour scheme that aligns with your brand, and choose a font that’s easy to read. Additionally, ensure that the layout is clean and easy to navigate. One of our favourite food and drink websites, Riverford, has such a recognisable colour scheme and brand design – it’d be hard to miss!

Improve available customer support

Providing excellent customer support is crucial for enhancing the customer experience. Customers should be able to contact your business easily and receive a timely response. Investing in customer support tools such as live chat and email support is a good way to achieve this. Additionally, look at using customer service metrics such as first call resolution and average time per success to track the effectiveness of your customer support.

Quick fixes that you can make to your food and drink website today!

A common mistake at the start of a customer journey is inadequate signposting. We’ve seen it time and time again – many websites don’t have the shop button clearly visible on the main navigation bar: it’s lost in the drop-down navigation or it’s placed within the footer of the page where visitors won’t naturally look.

A visitor to your website should know who you are, what you do, and how they can get involved within 3 seconds of seeing the front page, without even scrolling down. In the digital marketing industry we call this ‘above the fold’. If your goal for a visitor is to buy a ticket, donate, shop, or sign up, it’s important to make it clear at the top of your site.

Using Google Analytics, you will be able to assess whether visitors are failing to connect with your homepage goals. Google Analytics can monitor factors like visitor behaviour, bounce rates (exits), and time spent on selected pages. Always look to improve these stats and use the data to better understand visitor journeys. By engineering clear paths for visitors to follow, you are more likely to gain extra sign-ups, sales, and donations.

Optimise your online shop across devices

There are now over 7.2 billion mobile devices worldwide. Now is the time to ensure your organisation is mobile-ready – a whopping 60.28% of all website traffic originates from mobile devices.

Choosing not to optimise content for mobile and tablet and focusing only on desktop browsers could mean you are missing out on an opportunity to engage with your current mobile users. Many will discover your organisation using a mobile-first approach, and some may never even see your desktop version at all. It’s important to make sure all content is formatted correctly, otherwise users are more likely to exit and possibly not return.

A seamless mobile experience can have a significant positive impact on your organisation. If customers are reassured that time and effort has been invested in a seamless customer journey, they are more likely to book or repeat-purchase from you in the future without hesitation.

Choose a clean design

A well-designed eCommerce site should focus on the value to customers rather than distracting them away from it.

Simplifying the design also sharpens the message to consumers for greater impact and conversion.

But how does this look in real life? A white background tends to be the most popular for a clean design.

Here are just a few food and drink examples that use white backgrounds for their online shops:

Curate your shop homepage

The homepage sets the tone for the whole store, so it’s key to make sure consumers know what you sell and how they can navigate around the shop.

Visitors may want to know what your best sellers are, see your newest products, items by price, colour, or subject, and others may want to go straight to the latest curated collection.

Whatever the purpose of their visit, making a consumer’s search fast and efficient is key to generating more sales. Below are some good examples of curated homepages that incentivise their online consumers.

If you know that a category or product is selling well, highlight this on your homepage. Don’t be afraid to trial several curated strategies on your homepage: it should evolve as your business does and reflect your consumers’ behaviour.

Larger retailers are constantly testing new ways to increase sales on their homepage, whether they are trialing new banners, limited-time offers, or curating new content segments. It’s important to analyse behaviour when you make changes to your site and react to what resonates best for consumers in your next campaign.

Some of our favourite homepages are:

Optimise your product pages

What do we mean by optimising product pages? Why is this important and how can it help increase sales? Strap in and we’ll tell you…

A well-curated product page that engages with your target customers is a simple change to your process, but a very effective one. Encouraging interest in your online shop takes a lot of effort in the first place, so when potential customers make it to the product pages it’s important to make the images, copy, and call-to-actions compelling enough to motivate a purchase.

An effective product page should include the following:

High-quality product images

  1. Customers are unable to see your products in real life, so make sure your images are available in the best quality resolution and customers can zoom in for closer inspection.
  2. Make sure to use a variety of product images. Up to 5 images is considered best practice and using different angles and lifestyle shots is also effective. We love using Unsplash and Pexel.
  3. Make sure your images are compressed when you upload them to your online shop, as large, high-res images can slow down the speed of your store.
  4. Make sure you include alt text for accessibility!

Engaging product descriptions

  1. A high-converting product page will have a detailed product description and be presented in a digestible format, which triggers your customers’ needs and motivations to buy. Paragraphs of prose and bulleted lists of specs and features can both be used to create an engaging product description.
  2. Don’t just rely on product copy that is sent by the manufacturer: duplicating this content can negatively impact your search engine optimisation (SEO). Use the tone of voice of your organisations to connect with your target audience.
  3. Review customer enquiries relating to products and think about answering them in the product copy: if one customer has asked this question there may be more.
  4. Always include product dimensions and weight where relevant: this will result in a lower returns rate.
  5. Make sure all costs are transparent. Always outline postage costs and delivery times on your product pages to avoid high levels of bounce rates (exits) at the checkout page.
  6. Customer reviews are highly effective when looking to increase product page conversion and store performance. A recent study found that almost 94% of shoppers consult reviews before making a purchase. Using plug-in platforms LoyaltyLion or Trustpilot here.

Optimise keywords to help with search

  1. For product titles, try to think in terms of what customers would be searching. Foreground the expected terms: for example, anyone looking to purchase a purple t-shirt is less likely to click on a product described as ‘mauve’ or ‘violet’.
  2. If you are unsure how to arrange your product titles, a good rule of thumb is to use the ‘brand-model-item-type’ format.
  3. Use keyword research tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner or Keywordtool to get an idea of what terms people are using when they’re researching products.

What metrics can measure success?

To finish things off, we’ve put together some helpful metrics to help gauge how well your website is performing and help you measure your success to any given product page:

  • Daily, weekly, and monthly unique visitors
  • Active users for the same amount of time
  • Average session time, or how long customers are on a particular page
  • Bounce rate (exits)
  • Daily, weekly, and monthly retention rate
  • Average customer spend
  • Customer acquisition cost
  • Customer lifetime value

Keep these metrics in mind and you’ll be able to perfect your website design and customer journey in no time.

Phew! We’ve been on a journey together – and you must be ready to map out your perfect customer journey. We certainly are! With the steps above and the help of a digital marketing agency such as KW Marketing UK, you’ll be well on your way to customer journey success.

Get in touch today with our expert team for strategic direction on your website design and development or visit our website to learn more about us and how we can help you to GET RESULTS.

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