Stuart Haines
2020 was a year like no other for e-commerce. Manufacturers and retailers are selling products through digital channels more than ever. In some Australian industries, e-commerce growth has increased nearly 80% year over year. If you are looking for sustainable long-term growth, e-commerce must be part of your business strategy.
Von Haines Consulting Group founder and CEO Stuart Haines.
While many companies that had to adapt their business to online platforms saw tremendous sales growth, others lagged because they made a major mistake in their digital strategy – ignoring the customer experience.
The NAB Online Retail Sales Index 2020 report shows that online retail sales increased 62.6% year over year, led by an increase in online spending, meaning a drastic change in consumer behavior. NAB has estimated that Australians spent A $ 37.4 billion trading online in the 12 months prior to July. As the competition for customer attention continues to grow, customer experience management is becoming more and more important as part of the digital strategy.
Source: NAB Online Retail Sales Index 2020.
Key to Success: Customer Experience
A well-planned ecommerce strategy for your online business is critical to continued success. The right strategy can take your business to new heights as goals are exceeded by goals with higher goals. It can position you as a leader in your niche – one that your competitors look up to with envy.
The customer experience is critical to the success of e-commerce – 70% of people choose a product based on this experience. Businesses need to make a great first impression with bespoke branded packaging that improves customer experience and increases customer loyalty (repeat customers).
Customer experience management is the practice of designing and responding to customer interactions to meet or exceed their expectations, resulting in greater customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.
The customer experience includes how a customer interacts with a company's e-commerce website and what emotions it evokes. Just a few elements that can help you maximize the customer experience on your website are:
- Know your customer
- Make your products easy to find
- Make your website user friendly, clean and visually appealing
- Create great product pages
- Ensuring a simple and quick ordering process
- Identifying and removing weak points in the shopping experience
- Let your customer know
- Optimization for mobile devices
- Quick response to customer service inquiries
- Implementing competitive delivery costs and speed
- Design impressive product packaging along with a thank you card for each delivery.
Making the customer experience an important part of your strategy is the best way to build brand loyalty, increase customer loyalty, and also benefit from customer referrals. This is a great way to establish your ecommerce business as the leading brand in your niche.
Customer experience management is really about managing the end-to-end customer relationship throughout the journey with your brand – including all the different channels through which you want to reach them. The customer experience is a matter of course for many companies. You can use this to your advantage to dominate the competition by creating an amazing online shopping experience that people will not forget.
The customer experience is an integral part of your e-commerce strategy. Creating a positive customer experience is critical to any growth in the ecommerce business.
Customer loyalty
Exceptional experience is key to giving ecommerce retailers a competitive advantage as it is a differentiator that creates brand loyalty and reduces customer loss. A study conducted by Harvard Business School showed that increasing customer retention rates by as little as 5% can increase profits by up to 95%. Another study by Gartner estimated that 80% of a company's future revenue will come from just 20% of its existing customers
Creating an effective customer loyalty strategy offers measurable benefits:
- Acquisition cost: Acquiring a new customer can cost up to five times more than retaining a current customer.
- Lifetime value: When you connect emotionally with your customers, you can see customer lifetime values four times higher than without that personal touch.
- User experience: A solid customer experience can prevent up to 84% of customers from leaving something as simple as returning a product.
The success rate for sales to existing customers is 60–70% compared to a success rate of 5–20% for new customers. The main advantage of customer loyalty is that it is far more cost effective than acquiring it. It can be up to five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep the customers you already have.
You just don't have to invest as much money in promoting an existing customer base. Instead, you can connect with them organically through your social media channels and use email marketing for regular touchpoints
Use these simple yet effective tips to incorporate ecommerce loyalty strategies into your marketing plan:
- Use your customer data: Email personalization and list segmentation are effective tools for engaging your customers. You can use your customer data to find trends in your target audience and their actions.
- Evaluate your marketing tools: Optimizing airtime and automated email campaigns are crucial for effective customer loyalty. Determine how you can use your current marketing tools to grow your campaigns.
- Determine your sales goals: Performance metrics can help fuel future marketing efforts. Analyze your current sales goals and the performance of your current marketing plan before setting the goals for your loyalty efforts.
Two basic ingredients combine in a successful e-commerce business. a constant stream of new customers and a loyal core of regular customers. Companies that focus exclusively on customer acquisition lack the stability that a loyal customer base offers. Those who are completely focused on keeping their current customers happy lose business to competitors over time and eventually to customer churn.
The most successful companies find a balance between the two.
About Stuart Haines
Stuart Haines is the founder and CEO of Haines Consulting Group and Haines Media, companies specializing in business growth, marketing and advertising. Stuart's company was developed out of a passion for working with innovative local entrepreneurs and helping them grow their businesses both nationally and internationally.
