In part one (Wrong Business Decisions) and part two (Poor Website Implementation) we discussed the ins and out of the commercial and software decisions to make with your e-commerce operation. So now you’ve made the sale, hooray pat yourself on the back, and your e-commerce operation is ready to boom right?
Wrong.
Post sale care equals repeat custom.
To be truly successful in online e-commerce you have to think further ahead than “just making a sale.” Every customer that visits your website is an asset that should be tapped for as much information as possible, and targetted down the line for repeat business.There are a number of ways you can ensure that you continue to be successful. Here’s a handful.
1). Customer Profiling & Targeted Marketing.
As you have already collected quite a bit of data on your customers through the checkout process, I’m not going to harp on about collecting e-mail addresses etc. Your shopping cart software should be doing that already.
The real beauty of e-commerce is that its smarter than a traditional bricks and mortar operation, and the data you now have can be mined to provide targetted marketing. Both traditional offline direct marketing and email marketing can work wonders here. Many larger etailers such as Amazon actively predict visitor patterns, and send customers *personalised* mail messages. You don’t want to be matching products with the wrong target market, as shown right ;o).
Remember the golden rule that response rates increase the more connected your customers feel with the message, personalised and customised direct mail response rates can be as high as 30-40%. So start collecting as much data as you can, and keep analysing it.
2) Delivery Presentation.
You’d be surprised at how many retailers forget the attention to detail you should show at your Warehouse. Customers appreciate that their goods have been lovingly cared for right from purchase to delivery. Make sure that items are packed carefully, wrapped with plenty of bubblewrap (if breakable), and generally well handled by your warehouse staff. Adding value is also well worthwhile to turn a customer into a repeat one. You may want to include some merchandising, mouse mats, mice, mugs printed with your web address, as hopefully these will be in close proximity to your customers computer. And you are rewarding repeat customers aren’t you?
3) Rewarding Top Performers
Remember its easy to see with an e-commerce platform who your top performing customers are. In the corporate world, these people would be wined and dined on cheap plonk and brought to corporate events every turn around. In the retail world you need to build the same sort of relatioship to keep them happy happy happy. Some ideas you might want to implement cost effectively are a special newsletter for top customers that gives access to the newest released products on your site, or a protected part of your site which gives them exclusive access to new content, provided of course, they meet certain targets.
4) Chasing up failed purchases.
Some people simply wont get through your checkout process, even with the best intentions. You should be finding out why people didn’t finish purchase, and drop them an email (with an incentive) to determine why this happened. You may find that not enough payment options are being offered, or that your customers got errors, or that they didn’t feel your site was secure. Finding out these things are gold.
5). Allowing customers to give feedback upon despatch.
When you alert your customers that an item has been despatched to them, somewhere in your email, allow them to provide feedback on how happy with the purchase they were. This will do a few things. It gives them the opportunity to make a complaint easily, it lets them know that they are important, and it gives your bricks and mortar shop an easy point of reference on whats hot and whats not – and makes your buyers jobs easier.
Overall. E-commerce should be simple, fast, safe and honest, and your webshop should be an integral part of your marketing and sales strategy.
