What a year it has been. We’ve seen China’s Singles Day catapult Alibaba into the ecommerce stratosphere. We weathered the storms in a world without Safe Harbor. More importantly, we covered the tips and tools you need to bring your business to the next level. Below, find important digital publications you might have missed, our most popular blog posts of the year and our contributions to the subscription commerce conversation across the Internet in our 2015 Year in Review.
Subscription Commerce Guides
We wanted to highlight three important subscription commerce guides we published in 2015. The first gives you a peek into the subscription commerce solutions landscape, while the second discusses the subscriber’s journey and its attendant KPIs.
Navigating the Subscription Solutions Landscape
What kinds of subscription billing platforms exist? What are the best ways for your company to establish a subscription model for your products or services? Let our guide orient you to the ever evolving subscription market in our complimentary Navigating the Subscription Solutions Landscape White Paper.
Mapping and Measuring the Subscriber Journey
Once you’ve implemented a subscription solution, how do you measure success? Are you thinking about your customers’ experiences? Seeing the subscriber journey through their eyes is the best way to begin building a profitable relationship with them. Download our complimentary guide, Mapping and Measuring the Subscriber Journey, to be sure you understand all the stages of the subscriber journey and subscription KPIs.
Attracting and Acquiring New Subscribers
Our third guide, Attracting and Acquiring New Subscribers, addresses a major challenge faced by all subscription businesses. This guide takes you through the basics of attracting new visitors to your website, acquiring free trial and freemium users, and converting free users to paying subscribers.
Popular 2015 Ecommerce Blog Posts
Customer Experience
Your customers’ experiences with your website, your service and with your customer support team are all opportunities for your business to increase customers satisfaction. Positive customer interactions burnish your brand and increase customers’ confidence in your ability to deliver on your promises. Three posts on this topic were very popular in 2015. They explore ways to improve your user experience, specific KPIs to reduce your customer contact rate, and confirmation pages that leave your customers satisfied.
- Fifteen Effortless Ways to Improve User Experience
- Customer Service KPIs: Reducing Contact Rates
- World Class Customer Service — Enhancing Your Confirmation Page
Popular Ecommerce Tips
Earning online revenue has become more complex than simply maintaining an online store (traditional ecommerce), so it’s no surprise that blog posts explaining the ins and outs of maximizing your online store continued to rank high with readers in 2015. Below are three important tips about encouraging timely payments by customers, maintaining an ecommerce site with effective features, and navigating Google policies that can potentially kill your business.
- Are Your Customers Missing Payments?
- Five Features of Effective Ecommerce Sites
- Beware Badware: Google’s Policy on Unwanted Software
Legal Compliance and Fraud Prevention
Common challenges surrounding credit card processing were also top of mind among ecommerce professionals. A popular post from June challenges the idea of friendly fraud. Tim Russo points out that the concept is not friendly at all and increases costs for all parties involved in credit card processing.
In addition to friendly fraud, retailers also take on considerable risks just taking credit card information from customers. Are the basic compliance standards enough? Should your operation consider PCI certification? What other measures can your team take to ensure you not only meet the minimum standards, but exceed them?
Ecommerce Eye Candy
Our weekly Ecommerce Eye Candy series also made it into the most popular posts. This one from March of 2015 explores the state of the Indian Ecommerce Market, its exponential growth and largely untapped potential.
No matter which market customers were in, though, retailers had to become more savvy in their metrics to accurately gauge Customer Acquisition Vs. Retention Costs. Careful measuring of your costs per customer acquisition compared to your customer retention costs help focus your customer communication efforts to increase revenue and reduce costs.
Check out all our Ecommerce Infographics.
“Don’t protect your cash cow if there’s a risk of being disrupted. You may as well disrupt yourself before somebody else does it to you.” — Craig Vodnik
Meanwhile, on the Internet
2015 was also an amazing year for cleverbridge across the Internet. What follows is a selection of popular articles and interviews that appeared here and there over the year.
This very blog was featured by Digital Marketer in their list of the Eight Best Conversion Rate Optimization Blogs. Experts at cleverbridge were also important contributors to other publications, including these two gems from CIO and CreditCards.com.
- CIO | 7 simple, low-cost ways to acquire new customers
- CreditCards.com | 8 steps to fighting chargeback fraud
cleverbridge co-founder Craig Vodnik was very busy this year. He was featured on the 2X Ecommerce Podcast in April of 2015, discussing the current state of subscription commerce, and he penned How to Select the Right Subscription Commerce Solution for Website Magazine. You can also watch him featured on Bootstrapping In America over at tastytrade.
Finally, The Paypers featured an interview with cleverbridge co-founder and CEO, Christian Blume: Subscription commerce is about understanding the customer life cycle value.
Keystone
Join us in raising a glass to the year that was, and have a happy New Year!
Start 2016 off right by downloading our Six Guides on Ecommerce Essentials today.
