One of the most important things you can do with your ecommerce business is to focus on more than just the ecommerce features and make sure that one time customers turn into life time customers.
The good news here is that most of your competitors are not doing anything after the sale to WOW your customers after the sale so their one time customers can become your lifetime customers if you are the one to WOW them.
If you follow up using some of these tips you can guarantee few of your competitors are doing the same so you will take the lead.
1. Call your customers on the phone after you have shipped their order.
If you’re just starting out and you only have a trickle of orders this is fairly easy.
If you’re already established and you get many orders per day then hire someone or get someone in your customer service department to do this for you.
It’s just a one minute call. Thank your customer, check they received the order, make sure they are happy with it and tell them to have a great day.
It’s really simple and you don’t have to do anything fancy with it.
2. Upgrade their shipping to express or overnight for free.
This particular tip helped Zappos to grow to a billion dollar company.
What they did was randomly upgraded shipping from 2 or 3 day ground to overnight or express. This got customers telling their friends because nobody wants to pay shipping for online orders.
And it reduces the disadvantage an online store has over a bricks and mortar store with no shipping cost.
3. Include something for free in the order.
If you sell tea, include a sample sachet of another blend of tea with the order.
It creates good will and increases the chance they’ll come back and that they’ll order that product next time.
4. Include a hand written and signed thank you note.
Just say thanks for your order with us, we really appreciate your business and we hope you have a great day.
Sign it with your name and job title so they know it’s from the owner.
You might even say if you have any feedback I’d love to hear it.
If you do nothing else, do this!
People only buy from businesses they know, like and respect. This will help them to like you and respect you.
It’s so simple and affordable there’s just no excuse not to do it.
5. Include a printed coupon code for 5% or 20% off their next order.
If they like your service they’ll use it or even better share it around.
A sneaky little trick here is to ask them not to share it. In BigCommerce it’s easy to set up a coupon that can be used by multiple people.
Human nature is that if we’re told not to do something then we want to do it. So people are more likely to look for family and friends they can share the coupon with. 3 or 4 people may end up using your coupon.
6. Refund their shipping cost to store credit.
This is a very simple but powerful technique.
Think about paypal for a moment. If you have a balance in paypal you probably don’t think of it as real money – it’s just ‘virtual curreny’ and spending it does not change the balance of your credit card or bank account.
If your customer has a balance of $7 or $10 store credit from your shipping refund the urge to spend that is very high. Nobody wants to have money sitting in a virtual account unspent.
In most cases anything they want to buy will be of higher value than the shipping refund so they’ll still have to pay the difference. Never mind if they add something else to their order.
So your customer wins and you win.
So those are 6 tips to help you grow your ecommerce business.
If you are on a budget or don’t want to apply them all, my favourite is number 4 – the hand written note.
The main goal of these tips is to help your busienss grow through word of mouth. So you grow by turning your customers into a virtual sales team for you and you don’t have to rely soley on spending moeny to promote your business.
Each of these tips will increase your conversion rate. Talk to your provider of ecommerce web design Wellington if you need help to apply any of them.