A lot of businesses are solely focusing on awareness and traffic acquisition. Only a few brands are investing more money to improve customer experience and fix their leaky sales funnel.
Well, I have bad news, you can’t succeed online by only focusing on driving visitors to your website.
Especially in such a tiny country as New Zealand with growing competition.
Here are 2 things every e-commerce business should be doing
- Measuring the right KPIs
- Focusing on your customers
1. Measure the right KPIs
As an online business owner, forget the advertising metrics.
Focus on the e-commerce metrics that matter to ultimately improve your turnover YoY.
Here are the most important business KPIs:
- Customer Lifetime Value :
Probably the most important metric for every business.
Historic CLTV : It’s the sum of the gross profit from all historic purchases for an individual customer
Predictive CLTV : is the projected revenue that a customer will generate during their lifetime. - Repeat Purchase Rate :
This metric shows the portion of repeat customers from your overall customer base. It’s useful to measure the efficiency of your retention strategy. Adobe found that in overall, 8% of repeat visitors account for as much as 41% of revenue. - Churn Rate :
As opposed to the RPR, Churn rate defines the number of customers that buy once and never return. A low churn rate relates to a healthy business. - Average Order Value :
This one is quite straightforward - Purchase Frequency :
Number of transactions made by a customer over a defined period
Here are some vanity metrics I like to keep an eye on:
- Opt-in subscription rate :
Useful to grow your Email or Web Push Notification lists to be able to contact users with your inbound channels. - Add to Cart Rate :
This metric measure the number of sessions where items have been placed in a cart. - Cart abandonment rate :
Measure the number of sessions that had items in a cart but didn’t complete their purchase. - Order Gap Analysis :
Useful with your marketing automation strategy, it allows you to calculate the time between 2 purchases. - Net Promoter Score :
It consists of asking the question “on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [your brand] to a friend?”
We then segment customers into three different categories: Promoters, Passives & Detractors.
And finally make a little calculation: Promoters – %Detractors = NPS - CTR to search / category / product / blog :
Let you know if and what the user was looking to buy. - Bounce rate :
Often use in digital marketing, the bounce rate helps you to understand if your page is relevant and match user expectations.
2. Focus on your customers
It is 5 times cheaper to keep a customer than trying to acquire a new one.
Unfortunately, a lot of businesses (online or not) only think about increasing their traffic rather than focusing on what matters the most in business: CUSTOMERS SATISFACTION.
In a recent article, Google even talked about loyalty as the new North star.
From my experience, the problem is not about being “being digital”. The online world expose customers to high standards that global businesses settle.
Once you are online, your customers are only one click away from your competitors – so you need to cherish them.
Amazon, Uber, AirBnB have been so successful because they always put the customers at the center of their strategy.
Here’s Amazon’s mission:
Our vision is to be Earth’s most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.
They are all about customer experience and work every day at reducing frictions both at a micro and macro level.
Ok you are going to tell me that you don’t have the financial power than Amazon have to disrupt your industry. Fair enough. But remember that 20 years ago, Amazon was nothing…
Anyway, here are a few tips to work on now to improve your customers satisfaction and retention 🙂
Focus your marketing dollars on the right customers
Running an RFM analysis (Recency Frequency Monetary) will help you to understand which of your customers are the most valuable for your company and focus your marketing $ on the right target.
Once you know who are your most valuable customers, create a loyalty program that rewards and empowers them.
Engage conversations with your customers
Customers often talk about a product online. They leave reviews, they ask for help on forums and much more.
These are great opportunities for brands to connect with them. Surprisingly, a lot of them remain unanswered.
According to Vendesta, 92% of consumers now read online reviews and 40% of them form an opinion by reading just one to three reviews.
So as reviews matter, your customer service rep should not only be on the phone, they should be online.
Whether people are leaving negative or positive comments, your brand should engage with them.
If this is a positive comment, saying thank you is a great start.
If the comment is negative, you should ask for more information and try to fix the situation.
Improve your website experience
When it comes to optimizing their site, most companies turn to their design agency.
The problem is that a beautiful website doesn’t necessarily mean that it offers a good experience and is optimized for conversion.
This is how you end up with a website that poorly converts.
Micro-friction impact directly your conversion rate.
Let’s take for example an online store with an E-commerce conversion rate of 0.20% with 100,000 visits per month.
It means that you are converting only 200 users over a 100 000 visitors every month.
By doubling it, you’ll get 2x more revenue without having invested more in advertising. Fantastic!
The Age Of Assistance
Google talks a lot about what they call “The Age Of Assistance“.
Well, this is SEO.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the process of improving websites usability and relevancy to make their more appealing both for search engines and users.
The purpose of SEO is to remove frictions by making sure you have the right content and offer a great user experience.
SEO can help you to reduce your customer acquisition cost by getting more value from the visitors you already have.
In 2018, SEO focus on improving mobile experience, and getting your website ready for Voice Search.
Build Marketing automation and an Opt-In list
You need a way to continue the conversation with your customers once they’ve left your website.
For years, this has been the job of eDM.
But good news, there’s a new way to engage with your audience.
Google wanted to make the web more mobile and recently came up with a great feature, the Web Push Notifications.
Web Push Notifications are supported by Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook so they are not a fad, they are here to stay.
What are the Web Push Notifications?
Web push notifications allow users to opt-in to timely updates from sites they love and allow you to effectively re-engage them with customized, relevant content. GOOGLE
I couldn’t explain it better than Google but I’m sure you’re already familiar with them as Facebook use them.
You know this little popup showing up on your desktop and mobile?
Well, this is what we mean when we talk about Web Push Notifications.
Why are Web Push Notifications a must have?
You are probably already familiar with App Push Notifications.
However, we know for fact that it’s way easier to drive someone on a website than getting them to set up an App.
The good news is that Web Push gives businesses the ability to send notifications without making a big investment in an app.
Plus, it works across desktop and mobile.
In a world where reaching a user is becoming more difficult every day, creating an opt-in list is precious. Especially with GDPR in sight.
You can use them for automation and campaign based messages.
There are a lot of reasons to start using Web Push but here are a few of them :
- If you don’t use it you will fall behind the competition
- Best channel for time-sensitive messages
- No email address required
- High opt-in rate
- No app needed
- Quicker and cheaper to set up than creating an email
- Less Crowded = Higher Click-Through Rates
- Reduce customer acquisition spend
- No fake contact info to deal with
- Notifications are hard for users to miss
How to add Web Push Notifications to your website?
First, you need to choose a provider among the several ones on the market:
- Accengage
- Moengage
- One Signal
- Pushcrew
- and way more…
The second things to do is to analyse your customer journey and understand when you should use a Web Push.
For Google, a good notification should be :
- Timely
- Relevant
- Precise
And to be all of that, it must be personalized!
If your digital agency hasn’t talked to you about it then, it’s time to start the conversation. They will be able to help you with the implementation and how to use it.
Otherwise, my team and I would be more than happy to assist you in this process.
Test, Test, Test!
CRO use AB Testing to avoid doing any subjective choice.
We formulate a testable hypothesis for each factor and use data to confirm if it’s worth to be implemented.
Most of the website elements can be AB tested to ensure it’s converting the best.
From a simple button to a headline, to the product copy itself or even more sophisticated features to play with consumers psychology like adding a timer to play with scarcity.