Keeping your customers happy is key to repeat business and word-of-mouth marketing for eCommerce business. Here Pascal Podvin, chief executive of Compario explains how to do this without a major investment.
Manage your catalogue well
Firstly, you should use a software solution which allows business users to access your online catalogue and improve product data without heavy investment in people, IT or time and without having to compromise system performance.
Marketing messages and promotions should be published consistently across all channels. If done well, this can help to improve SEO and attract visitors more effectively.
Recognise your customers
Ensure that you have a system in place which allows you to recognise your visitors regardless of channel, but which also enables them to return to anonymity if they decide to opt out.
With this in mind, retain a history of the customer’s navigation, filters and choices, so they can pick up where they left off at a later time.
Give them what they want
After recognising your visitors, the next step is to give them a personalised selection of services and offers, so that product recommendations, navigation and filters are consistent with the visitor profile. In the same vein, make sure that your site is as user friendly as possible.
This should extend to all features, such as logging in, registering, searching or filtering, recalling and obviously, making payment.
This last step is particularly important – many retailers find that customers go through the payment process, only to give up at the final hurdle simply because it becomes too difficult.
Minimise the risk of abandonment by memorising the customer’s preferred payment method, or offering one click payment.
Make it easy to share, and measure results
Help your customers to share information about their purchases by adding buttons to connect with social networking platforms.
This not only makes the shopping experience more fun for the customer, but will also attract more visitors to your store.
Finally, measure the effectiveness of your marketing activities using integrated analytics software, so that you can continually refine personalisation and offers.
Pascal Podvin is CEO of Compario. He has more than 25 years’ experience in global software management both as an investor in start-ups and as a senior executive of market-leading software brands.
His previous roles have included president of PeopleSoft France and VP of worldwide sales operations for software vendors Blue Martini and i2 Technologies.
Compario is a vendor of connected commerce solutions focused on improving the customer shopping experience through enhanced catalogue management, dynamic E-Merchandising and personalised search and navigation.
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