Writen by: Suong Tran, Xiaoqing Yang-Pyydysmäki

The customer is always a center for all marketing and sales activities of a company. More and more companies are investing more resources or paying more focus on enhancing the customer acquisition to the company brands. All the efforts of the marketing, sales team, and the whole company are to create for the customers better experiences day by day and from that making more satisfaction to the products, service or company brand. The purpose is to help the customer experience journey happen in an easy-going, satisfying, and memorable way. 

It is quite an outdated approach when a salesman needs to knock on the door or stops people on the road to present their products or services. Consumers nowadays are harder to be approached. They don’t want to be passive but take an active role in deciding whether to shop or not any product or service. They also require the sellers to understand them, know their feelings, listen to their pain and even bring some solutions when they are in need. There are more specialists proposing the brands to build engaging stories to attract the customers to their brand. Branding is actually to draw out touching stories which have the power to shake the heart or to connect to the belief of customers, therefore the content creators need to really understand their target customers. It is not only to create something cool or something interesting, but by the stories, the content creators should make a powerful effect and make the customers see themselves in the told brand stories.

Collecting the consumer data which has demographic information about the customers cannot support the marketers to understand their customers optimally, not to mention that some customers may input faked information which can drive the marketing activities based on the customer’s data to wrong directions. Therefore, in order to understand the customers better, most of the big brands like Netflix, Amazon, and Google must try to figure out what their customers are doing on the sites. Customer behavior analysis is a more optimal tool to discover and understand how and why the customers act the way they did during the shopping process. Data collected from this analysis will help the marketers know better what they need to do to satisfy their ‘gods’ as well as to choose the better ways to approach them.

Figure 1. Research by McKinsey has proved that the more effective customers’ insight analysis is, the more sales grow.

Customers hold the key to their heart

If art is all the different creative activities aimed at stimulating people’s thinking, emotions, beliefs, or ideas, then the way to approach and understand the customer of marketing and sale activities in order to stimulate the customers’ emotions and help them make their decision to buy the products that they feel most convinced or connected is also an art. When the customer is the key, they take the active role to decide their shopping. Nowadays, marketers and salesmen need to be able to read the needs of their target customers using the modern analyzing technology which supports to understand wholly the customers’ behaviors during their shopping journey. This is a challenge, but also a business opportunity for active enterprises that can manage to acquire the new changes in the customer-focused marketing and technology trend.

A customer data centralized storage will help companies visualize the customers’ journey and understand them in a comprehensive way. In addition, it makes cross-reference easier and helps marketers optimize their whole process again and again. The outcome of all these activities is proven by the ability to convert the customer data into sales generation.

How are herbal tea online shops designed to optimize the customers’ experience?

For the early birds on the online shop business, benchmarking the competitors’ or other companies’ online shops to learn about in which way they can manage to understand their customers’ behaviors or psychological traits during the shopping journeys is a wise thing to do. Hekumu herbal tea online shop therefore will learn to adopt some good strategies of successful brand cases into the practice of Hekumu. 

There are several factors to be considered in benchmarking the competitors’ online shops, like website layout, visual images, and videos, content, marketing message, promotional pop-up, customer service including the offering of friendly experiences, feedback tool (chatbot, contact options, product rating), how fast and easy to make a deal and what is the reason for the customers to believe.

Hekumu has chosen to benchmark https://take-t.fi/ and https://poikainparhaat.fi because their websites create the modern look, intriguing visuals, smooth surfing feeling, capability to access them directly and fast product and efficient support for shopping. In the comparison of other websites like https://www.ruohonjuuri.fi/ or https://www.ecoteekki.fi, the website of Take-T and Poikain Parhaat seem to optimize functions of an online shop better.

The position of the company introduction page is arranged differently on the online shops of Take-T and Poikain Parhaat. When Take-T arranges the company page in 5th place and the product page at the 1st one, Poikain Parhaat puts it in the 2nd position, just after the product page. Because Take-T has offline tea shops all over Finland while Poikain Parhaat is distributing products in supermarkets and distributing channels, that tells somehow the strategy of each shop to the arrangement of the website is different from another. Take-T is targeting B2C, but Poikain Parhaat is communicating mainly to B2B. B2C customers of Poikain Parhaat also can shop online, but the online shop button is arranged separately out of the category pages. This could be the added button of the website just lately to make it possible for customers to shop online the Poikain Parhaat products in corona pandemic time. Moreover, the layout of the Take-T website is aligned according to the center pillar, but the Poinkain Parhaat website gathers the contents on the left side. Poinkain Parhaat seems to follow the layout of other corporate websites, like the one of Raisio which functioned mainly for giving the information to B2B customers. With this layout structure, the content is distributed clearly and approachable. However, to the online shops targeting B2C customers, the website structure aligned in the center like the Take-T website seems to catch the B2C customers faster and more directly.

Analyzing visual images and video on the sites, both shops are using sliding images on the top banner position. That can help increase the liveliness of the website, making it look modern and catchy. The strong point of the Take-T website is using the catchy green colors when Poikain Parhaat focuses on creating emotional feelings by the familiar images of Finland, like nature, sauna, etc. In the meanwhile, the product images of both brands are presented in big sizes, lively and catchy, integrating the image of humans to create engagement to their customers too.

Content and marketing messages are presented straightly on the top banners.  If the Take-T tries to arouse the curiosity of their customer to click for more information, Poikain Parhaat moves people’s heart by their quality affirmation and engages people to choose the products of their familiarity, offering the reason to believe in their brand. There is a truth that the national pride and the belief in the domestic products of Finnish people are very strong. These content strategies of both brands show that they understand very well their target customers and could make a very suitable strategy to approach their customers. 

Which strategy Hekumu online shop can adopt after this benchmarking?

Hekumu is a herbal tea brand imported from Vietnam to Finland. It contains mainly dried tropical ingredients which include dragon fruit, ginger, orange, lemongrass, longan, and a variety of many other ingredients. This herbal tea is a trendy drink nowadays in Vietnam because it can bring some health benefits for customers, like detoxing the body, improving sleep quality, fitness, or beauty care. In Vietnam or in Asian countries in general, people believe that nature-originated products will bring many benefits for health, even more than medicines, or extracted vitamins. The cold air-drying technology helps keep almost all kinds of vitamins from the raw ingredients. Customers can be attracted by the beauty of those ingredients immediately and can smell or taste the harmonized mix of tropical flavors. 

Why is Navigation Flow necessary to strategize when building an online shop?

Hekumu‘s website is going to be the main channel to sell Hekumu herbal tea products to B2C customers. Therefore, it should be well-structured so that it meets all the basic functions as well as to be optimized and help the rank in Google search to attract the attention of customers more easily. At the same time, it can allow users to stay on our site as much as possible and engage better with the products and services.

Hekumu plans to make the navigation flow clear for customers that they can easily find. Navigation flow is a feature that allows users to navigate from one screen to another as per the business flow in the sequence specified after the transaction is done on each screen (see Navigation Flow). It is one of the cores of website design. It also has an important impact on website sales. If customers can’t find what they are looking for on a website, they’ll leave. An effective navigation flow can smooth website processes, improve user experience, and make users more trustworthy in our products or services.

•     Our team introduction
•     Our values, mission, and vision
•     Membership signup page
•     Our product listings
•     Product price
•     Purchasing methods
•     Delivery methods
•     Marketing messages
•     Blog posts
•     Links to other social media channels
•     Customer Services information
•     Contact information
•     Help documents
•     Search on site

Generally, the navigation flow is role-based (see Navigation Flow). We will draft up different personas with different routes of landing on the pages on our site. The ideal case would be that all the visitors will start from our homepage and follow the homepage – product – purchase – payment – delivery flow. But the reality is visitors will only navigate the places they feel interested in and leave if they cannot get the information they want within a short time. It’s not wise to assume that customers will be patient. Our initial idea is to design the structure that no matter which page they land on, they can get what they need within 3-4 clicks. Another important thing to solve is how to keep visitors on our site as long as possible. We need to figure out how to bring innovative ideas and curiosity to the site to keep visitors exploring further. 

Suitable strategies for Hekumu

Based on the above considerations, Hekumu current page navigation flow strategies are: firstly the website will be designed from the visitor’s perspective. For instance, let the visitors always know where they are. Users can browse the page by their will without obstacles. Secondly, it should keep consistency. Hekumu maintains the consistency of the website so that visitors can quickly observe the structure of the website and find the information they need. Thirdly, Hekumu creates a flat navigation flow structure. The flat structure can make the visitor’s operation more efficient and intuitive. Visitors are able to go back and forth to different pages in a short time without a sense of complexity. Fourthly, testing is applied. Test different types of website navigations to find the most suitable one for the Hekumu concept and products. The most popular type would be the navigation menu appearing in the header of the website. Sidebars are also one of the common ways of navigation in many websites. Fifthly, navigation flow for mobile users is a must. The growing number of mobile phone users makes it become compulsory. How to allow mobile users to browse our website and products quickly and conveniently will be one of the essential tasks in building a navigation flow. Finally, it should have a tool to always ask for feedback. Keep channel of maintaining the interaction with visitors. Pay attention to customer’s feedback and make changes to the structure to reasonable suggestions. 

Here is one example of the navigation flow of visitors of Hekumu. 

Figure 2. Draft of Hekumu Website Navigation Flow

Hekumu Website Plan

By the group discussion, Hekumu has made a plan for the website. It will be implemented in summer 2021. Hekumu objectives in designing the online shop are to focus on search engine optimization, well-organized content, user-friendly site, effective calls to action, increase conversion rate, E-mail marketing lists, online support (live chat), webinars, and content designed to give your visitor a reason to come back, webmasters– simplify and optimize content updates and website management, IT– integrate with other systems; meet security, performance, and scalability requirements. 

The website of Hekumu should be functioned as the Hekumu online shop to drive traffic from multi-social media channels and generate leads, building brand awareness to make customers remember the brand, building Hekumu reputation and generating leads in the herbal tea area, gaining a better understanding of customer behaviors. By data-driven marketing strategies, create a good customer experience on sites. Brand engagement and for the purpose of the sales helping the Hekumu team in sales and communications with customers as well as for customer database, customer support in order to improve customer satisfaction through better service. 

Audience Personas  

Hekumu age group is from 25 to 44 years old. They are people who like to drink tea, be able to shop online, care about their health, willing to try new products. Aiming to enjoy life and take care of their well-being. 

Hekumu web structure

Following is our initial web structure. 

Figure 3. Hekumu Web Structure

Design Hekumu web aiming to customers’ experience

Hekumu web design will focus on bringing a good user experience to the customers. It means to involve human factors and website usability tests in the design process. So far, what Hekumu agreed is that the brand wants to keep the simplicity for the website so that visitors wouldn’t get bored, complicated, or impatient while browsing on our pages. Some fun elements will be taken into account especially for the design. 

 Color and Fonts

One of Hekumu marketing messages is that all herbal tea products will bring a tropical feeling to the customers due to some of the ingredients being tropical fruits. Hence, by selecting fresh and vivid colors for our site, Hekumu wants to provide fresh, passionate, relaxing vibes while people visit the sites. We believe the power of communicating messages can engage and evoke more audiences with our products. Three colors and a specific font will be chosen for the final design.

Catchy visuality

Information visualization is a big trend now. Hekumu brand will combine the products and user interface design, using more concise and exquisite photos, video clips to show the audience our products and services.

Page loading time

“If your site takes more than three seconds to load, you lose almost half of your visitors before they even arrive on your site.” (see 20 Ways to Speed Up Your Website and Improve Conversion in 2020). This will be one of our concerns, we need to ensure that our web page opens within 1-2 seconds.

Positive attitude and responsibilities

Website is a media that Hekumu can communicate with the target customers and audiences. Hekumu wants to transfer the positive attitude and social responsibilities images to the visitors. It is not only for marketing but also to advocate a healthy and sustainable living concept.

By writing this essay, it helps make the Hekumu team have a clearer concept of how to build the Hekumu website more strategically. The website is also our online shop that will show Hekumu’s business image, brand, and credibility. It will be a very important platform for Hekumu to directly communicate with our customers. All we need to do is to create the reason to believe and offer a smooth and easy shopping experience for the target customers. Even though there is a big deal that building a professional website will lead to difficulty in controlling the cost, we will do our best to make the design and concept fit the original intention of Hekumu.

References

How to analyze user behavior data on your website

https://www.spiralytics.com/blog/how-to-analyze-user-behavior-data-on-your-website/

Navigation Flow

http://mqs.gtpl.net/mqsubscribe/Help/Navigation_Flow.htm 

20 Ways to Speed Up Your Website and Improve Conversion in 2020

https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/speed-up-your-website/