4 Significant E-commerce Tips to Keep Your Customer’s Coming Back

Customer service can make or break your business. Business Insider reports that 60% of customers have decided not to make a purchase because of poor customer service, and another 66% are willing to pay more if it means they’ll get excellent customer service.

This is the most personal interaction you will get with your customer as an e-commerce business, so it needs to impress them. Ideally, if everything goes as planned, you’ll never have to speak with your customer, but this is e-commerce, and something is bound to go wrong. For that reason, it’s important that you handle the situation with grace when there’s a glitch on the website, a shipment is late, or someone just ordered the wrong product.

Customer service isn’t all about having a calm and cordial support staff; it’s about policy. To be fair, be generous and flexible when possible, and always keep your customers happiness at the forefront because if they’re not satisfied, a majority aren’t coming back.

Today than ever before, e-commerce has provided consumers the opportunity to surf among a large variety of markets online and choose among the best alternatives. Therefore, sellers must actively court and maintain existing customers while they stay in touch with potential future customers through several market touchpoints.

Here are four powerful e-commerce tips for keeping your customers satisfied and returning after every purchase.

1. Employ the Omni-Channel Customer Engagement System

Companies use this cross-channel business model to improve their customer experience applicable in several sectors such as healthcare, government, retail, telecommunications etc. As new technology unfolds, new marketing strategies are developed to meet the demand of customers via these platforms.

To think about it, human life today continues, but our customer experience is anything but that. Enhancement of the in-store shopping experience and engagement with the customer in real time. Repurchase Reminders, as often used by Sephora and Clinique, Warranty Expiration Notice, Demography Focused advertisements, and New Product Recommendations Based on Previous Purchases, can be conducted successfully via omnichannel customer engagement channels, the most prominent among which is Live Chat.

Companies that employ this channel, however, contend that customers value the ability to be in constant contact with a company through multiple avenues as this helps them to gain insights and be abreast of information concerning products and services of the company wherever and whenever.

2. Utilize Customer Accounts with a Customer Loyalty Package

Customer accounts can be a double-edged sword. It either makes repurchasing much easier by giving customers easy access to past orders or is seen as too big of a commitment for new customers to handle. The reason for which most people will choose to checkout as a mere guest (if given the option) is to check what the company has in stock or update themselves about needed products and services.

For any company that seeks to implement a customer account effectively without hindering the conversion tendency of first-time customers, the trick is to provide the option to create an account after the first order has been placed.

To further develop a customer account is to create a customer loyalty program which is another way to increase conversions from your current customers through a reward package for repeated purchases.

3. Check your Analytics

With advances in web analytics, site owners have many powerful tools to see what popular content or items cause users to bounce away from your site. Lim says heatmap software is a great way to see what parts of your website potential customers use the most. This is a feature available through both free and paid software.

Heatmaps software lets you see where visitors click, read, and drop off on your website. This allows you to discern which products attract customers' attention, which pisses them off, which should be given proper priority and which should be done away with.

4. Effective Delivery System

Today, effective product distribution and delivery system is a major key factor to the successful operation of e-commerce. Delivery is the most integral part of an online business transaction. This is because eCommerce is incomplete until the recipient of that information or product does receive its product or service.

A business is complete in either traditional or electronic form when the delivery of the product/service is felt, and there is a sense of satisfaction between the seller and the buyer. As improved team communication tools today allow immediate contact anywhere in the world, specialized programs can now convert sales into orders automatically in real time, moving them directly into the supply chain for fulfillment.

With modern technology and equipment, the product distribution process becomes a constantly moving mechanism of almost fully automated operation supported by human labor and management.

Final word:

In the case of an eCommerce purchase, it’s a common fact that it costs more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one. Bain & Company even believes it costs a company 6-7 times more. Aside from this, returning customers are also known and believed to spend more than first-time customers.

A report by Monetate, however, affirmed that returning visitor transactions made up 48 percent of e-commerce sessions and almost twice the dollar amount of new shoppers. Similarly, new shoppers have higher bounce rates than returning customers, suggesting they leave the site after visiting only one page without purchasing.

Have any eCommerce tips that have worked for you for better customer service? Share them with us and spread the love!

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