The key to building a strong customer relationship is to view your marketing through the lens of the customer lifecycle. Every message is a touchpoint in building a strong relationship. Just like a relationship with a friend, establishing, building and maintaining that relationship takes time and attention. And just like a real friendship, communications will be different in different circumstances. Customers moving through the acquisition stage, the retention stage and the building stage respond to different types of interactions. Making the investment in your customer relationships can seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be.

Below are ten simple, but important tips for all stages of customer lifecycle campaigns, beginning with the best ways to leverage email marketing for new customer acquisition.

Customer Acquisition

Tip one: List signups on your website

Don’t wait for a customer to complete a purchase before adding them to your database. Email signup should be as easy as possible for visitors when they arrive at your site. Add a link or signup form on the right hand side or bottom of every page. If possible, enable a popup to trigger after landing on your page with a form for the potential customer to quickly enter their email address.

Tip two: Newsletters

Use your monthly newsletter to promote new products, capabilities and features. Be sure to include a link directly to a shopping cart or signup page. In the ecommerce platform, create a coupon code specific for the newsletter. This enables accurate tracking of conversions attributable to your monthly communications.

Tip three: Trial campaigns

When a potential customer downloads the trial version of your product, require them to enter their email address to receive the download link. You can then initiate a free trial campaign with several email cadences. In the first email immediately after download, note product benefits the subscriber will receive during the trial period. Throughout the life of a drip campaign, increase the urgency of your messages. Combine your email campaign with revenue tracking parameters to see which email cadence coverts the best among your new customers.

Tip four: Cart abandonment campaigns

When a customer begins a checkout, but does not complete it, it might seem like a total loss. But since the subscriber started filling out the shopping cart, you can capture and use this information to create a truly dynamic email for that potential customer. Tailor the message from the product they selected in the cart and send one or two emails with a level of urgency or coupon code to facilitate the sale.

Download our complimentary e-book, Attracting & Acquiring New Subscribers

Customer Retention

Once a customer is acquired, you only have a short window of time to impress and retain them. Customer retention begins with a positive product experience. Below are some steps you can take to turn new buyers into loyal customers who continue to repurchase your product.

Tip five: Welcome emails

Immediately after a customer purchases your software, send a triggered email thanking them for their order. Include product information, activation instructions and links to technical support should they encounter issues. While often overlooked, a welcome email series is an opportune time to establish a relationship with your new customer so they stick around.

Tip six: More newsletters

Tip two notes that newsletters are great way to notify potential customers of new product offerings and capabilities. But don’t leave your current customers out of the loop. Share these updates with them as an opportunity to continue nurturing your relationship. Be sure to create a coupon code to accurately track sales stemming from your newsletters.

Tip seven: Renewal emails

As a customer approaches their product renewal date, send personalized emails reminding them of their subscription expiration. Include pertinent order information and, if possible, how much they’ve used the software and how the program will continue to assist them in the future. If one email isn’t enough, build a drip campaign with product benefits ending with a coupon code to retain the customer.

Learn more in our e-book, Retaining Subscribers and Optimizing the Renewal Process

Build the Relationship

Never rest on your laurels. Just because a customer sticks around for now doesn’t mean the work of nurturing the customer relationship is over. More seasoned customers require a different tone in their messaging — one that’s more collaborative. In fact, these customers can provide important feedback that only those who truly know your brand can offer. With a longer track record and more data in tow, your company also knows these customers better, and can send them more highly targeted and relevant offers.

Tip eight: Product surveys

Send surveys to your customers asking for their input on your product and how you can help to improve their experience. Listening to feedback from your most loyal customers will support a long-standing relationship. Mention the customer feedback and product updates in your newsletters to let your subscribers know you’ve heard their suggestions.

Tip nine: Brand loyalty

Subscribers who have positive experiences with your company become loyal to your brand. Those who are faithful to your brand are more likely to be repeat customers. They’re also more likely to recommend your products to other potential customers who either do not know about you yet or have not had positive experiences in the past. Customer testimonials in trial emails may provide some insight, but genuine online or word-of-mouth reviews have a greater impact.

Tip ten: Special offers

Send an email campaign specifically for your repeat customers. Provide a dynamic coupon code in a special promotional campaign for your subscribers who opened your last six newsletters or have been returning customers for the last three years. If they don’t immediately act on this offer, send reminder emails noting their importance as a customer, and prompt them to complete their purchase.

Keystone — Relationships Drive Revenue

Put simply, supporting the customer lifecycle means nurturing strong customer relationships. Make it easy for customers to sign up. Work to keep their business. Be sure to solicit feedback from your customers and communicate back to them the value of their comments. Use positive customer experiences to strengthen your brand. Finally, reward your loyal customers with special offers and discounts. Taking these simple steps can enhance your relationship with your customers, leading to greater customer lifetime value and increased recurring revenue.

Understand essential subscription KPIs in our e-book, Mapping & Measuring the Subscriber Journey

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Take today’s inforgraphic from BargainFox. Though they use the language of transaction-centered ecommerce, these lessons apply equally to a subscription business. Many of the facts presented below have a direct impact on subscribers. Since in a subscriber model, building positive experiences for a long-term customer relationship is key, consumer psychology has an even deeper impact on a subscription business than it does in a purely transactional business model.

Consumer Psychology & Your Site

In the areas of website design, video displays, site usability and loading speed, we find that 93 percent of consumers consider visual appearance to be the key deciding factor in whether or not to make a purchase. Further, 76 percent of people say the most important characteristic of a website is ease of use. Having a well designed site that is easy to use is just as important to subscription consumer psychology as it is in ecommerce. Here your company is building trust for many future transactions, not just this one.

Consumer Psychology & Your Customers

No matter the nature of a customer’s relationship with a brand, monetizing that relationship depends on a customer’s ability to make payment easily and in a trustworthy way. Providing a payment experience that bolsters customer trust is essential no matter what the customer is purchasing. In fact, 61 percent of online shoppers decide not to complete a purchase because the site did not have a trust seal on their cart. Customers will abandon a cart that doesn’t appear trustworthy, and customers abandoned nearly $4 trillion worth of merchandise in online shopping carts in 2014.

Consumer Psychology & Your Brand

Another important factor in consumer psychology has to do with how customers perceive your brand. Being mobile friendly, providing meaningful customer loyalty programs, having a presence on social media and promoting your company’s social responsibility all contribute to a positive brand image in the mind of customers. Doing so not only deepens the customer relationship, it increases the perceived value of your brand. 66 percent of global respondents were willing to pay more for products and services from companies dedicated to social and environmental change.

Explore the rest of these 65 proven statistics about ecommerce consumer psychology in the infographic below.

Want to dive deeper into consumer psychology? Download Attracting & Acquiring New Subscribers today

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You might think our shop keeper friend is putting himself at a disadvantage with his blindfold. Yet this same scenario plays out every day in countless online stores. The standard set of analytic tools most websites use provide only part of the picture.

Website Analytics: The Blindfold Basics

Most websites employ analytics to track activity on their site. The basic analytics toolbox allows you to see which pages customers visit on your site. Additional features allow site owners to use pageview data to optimize their site, which we discuss below. In each of these cases, however, the site owner remains blindfolded to whatever user activity happens while a customer is on a webpage.

Pageviews

Tracking pageviews is the most basic way to analyze your site. Connecting a tool like Google Analytics to your site allows you to see what pages your users are landing on and viewing. You can also see additional demographic information based on user location, web browser and device information.

Goals

Analytics tools also allow you to track goals by defining desired outcomes and tracking your achievement. You have a goal of signing up customers for a newsletter. In the registration process, you display a confirmation page after a customer signs up. When the user views the confirmation page, your analytics will show a goal completion. Combining goal tracking with pageviews shows the visitor flow across different pages on your site: where they land, where they go next and where they drop off. A well designed set of goals optimizes customer engagement on your site.

Ecommerce

If you sell online, your ecommerce data show how many sales you have made, what your revenue is, etc. Including ecommerce in your goal tracking ties pageviews to revenue. Like our shop keep in his blindfold, you can hear the customer enter your store and you can hear the cash register ring them up. But you are still oblivious to customer behavior inside the store — data which can be used to optimize customer engagement and revenue even more.

Removing the Blindfold With Event Tracking

Event tracking codes can be embedded into almost any element on a webpage. This includes, but is certainly not limited to:

• Clicking on page elements (e.g., buttons)
• Adding or removing products from the shopping cart
• Viewing recommendations, user reviews or additional information in the cart
• Downloading free trials
• Opening invoice files
• Entering coupon codes
• Viewing specific elements (e.g., a don’t-leave-layer)
• And more …

Keystone

Basic analytics provide you only so much data. Including event tracking codes on your site is like removing the blindfold from the shop keeper’s eyes. You no longer have to rely on a turnstile tally of how many users landed on your pages, because you can observe every action your customers take inside the page.

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This infographic, courtesy of vouchercloud, highlights some of the reasons customers abandon carts, and shows how you can influence visitors to convert at a higher rate. It makes the case that merchants should pay special attention to things like site speed, web design, product video and customer reviews to facilitate conversions.

Other abandonment issues include length of checkout process, fees and charges tacked on to the end of the checkout process and registration requirements. Additionally, make sure things like newsletter or email signups are double-opt-in instead of pre-checking them.

For more information on reducing cart abandonment, facilitating conversions and raising average order values, check out our guides to ecommerce essentials.

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy – The Psychology of Online Checkout [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

• Fast load times
• Ease of use
• Accurate product descriptions
• Seamless checkout experience
• Clear policies

“A two second delay in load time during a transaction results in abandonment rates of up to 87 percent. This is significantly higher than the average aban-donment rate of 70 percent.” – Radware

Fast Load Times

Convenience is one of the primary benefits of ecommerce.

According to statistics compiled by Radware, more than half of customers say that a slow load time is the primary reason they’ll abandon a site. Not only that, but, “A two second delay in load time during a transaction results in abandonment rates of up to 87 percent. This is significantly higher than the average abandonment rate of 70 percent.”

Successful ecommerce merchants know the devices and most popular browsers that their customers use to shop, and design sites with those parameters in mind.

Ease of Use

An ecommerce site’s design and architecture must be aligned with how its target audience searches for product information.

The Baymard Institute studied how consumers navigate the ecommerce sites of several major retail brands. Specifically, they looked at “home page, category navigation, subcategories, and product lists.” They discovered that product categories should be clickable, and named in a way that reflects the search terms its customers use to find items. New merchandise should be given prime site real estate to encourage return visits. Ecommerce sites should also include a history of recently viewed items — so customers needn’t navigate using the back button.

Accurate Product Descriptions

Remember #thedress controversy that took hold of the Internet this past winter? It was essentially fueled by the fact that some online viewers saw a blue dress, while others saw one that was white and gold.

Though the event generated publicity for that merchant, your typical ecommerce site must strive to eliminate any discrepancies between site information and the reality of the product. When a product description does not match the reality of a product’s features, it creates a costly business problem. Not only is the customer less likely to purchase in the future, but there are operational costs associated with returns.

Every good ecommerce site should ensure that product descriptions are clear, and that product specifications are accurately represented.

Seamless Checkout Experience

Ecommerce shopping cart abandonment is a challenge for all online sellers, but the more seamless a checkout experience is for the customer, the less likely it is to occur.

Effective ecommerce sites make it as easy as possible for customers to complete transactions by eliminating potential hurdles in the ordering and payment process. They offer customers the ability to log in, using social media credentials, to account information they’ve created in the past to retrieve stored information. They also offer an option to checkout as a “guest.”

They test form fields to ensure that a variety of scenarios (like a hyphenated name or an address that contains a ½ number) are accommodated. Information like city and state based on the user’s zip code is pre-filled and includes a checkmark that pre-fills the billing address when it’s the same as the shipping location.

Recognizable credit card logos and site security symbols are included in the checkout process to assure customers that their payment transaction is secure.

Customers are notified by email as soon as the transaction is processed, and they are provided with contact information to a customer service representative who can assist them with live help, online or by phone, if needed.

Clear Policies

Buying from an online merchant often requires that the customer makes a leap of faith in regards to the product quality, service and satisfaction guarantees a merchant may offer.

Effective ecommerce sites are forthcoming about policies regarding product returns, exchanges and warranties. They dedicate space on the website where customers can easily find such information, along with the processes customers should follow if they have to make a refund request.

Keystone

Though the ecommerce space offers significant revenue opportunity and a captive marketplace, merchants must meet and exceed customer expectations on all fronts, including site functionality, product quality and convenience. By combining customer insights with the best practices established by ecommerce leaders, businesses of all sizes have the potential to succeed in an online selling capacity.

Kristen Gramigna is Chief Marketing Officer for BluePay, a credit card processing firm. She has over 20 years experience in the bankcard industry in sales management, direct sales and marketing.

The post Five Features of Effective Ecommerce Sites appeared first on cleverbridge.

Interestingly, it begins by stressing images over copy: No matter how much effort you devote to crafting the perfect message, visitors are more likely to remember what they see rather than what they read.

Site navigation is also important to your business. If users can’t find what they’re looking for, how effective can you really be at selling? A great idea here is to have a section of your site devoted to featuring your newest products. This practice ensures that visitors are only looking at the latest and greatest things that you offer.

Regarding the content on your site, the infographic wisely advocates that businesses start blogging if they haven’t already. It’s an excellent way to increase your traffic flow and keep visitors informed. Another interesting point about content is in reference to your About Us page. According to this infographic, visitors who click on this page will convert at higher rates and spend more money than those who don’t.

Point number 12 touches upon a subject quite dear to us, and details some of the reasons for the average high cart abandonment rate on ecommerce sites. Ascertain that you are doing everything you can to optimize your shopping cart and bring those numbers down.

Additionally, the infographic makes a strong case for promoting site security, enhancing your web presence through social media, and implementing an affiliate program to increase sales.

In the comment section below, tell us what you think are the most important features of creating a successful online business.

Infographic by Ecommerce-Platforms

The post Ecommerce Eye Candy – Creating a Successful Online Business [Infographic] appeared first on cleverbridge.

Just in time for the holiday season of November and December, when you know store visits are going to increase with gift seeking consumers, we’re offering you a few good guides on ecommerce essentials. These short guides will assist you in improving both your mundane and exciting ecommerce needs.

For those of you with freemium and free trials products we have a guide on generating revenue from free users, and another that teaches you how to effectively convert users in-app.

One of these guides comes along with 13 pro tips on reducing cart abandonment and there is one with advice about increasing your carts’ average order value.

In harmony with the market for this time of year, we have a guide for holiday season ecommerce. And, as VAT laws update next year, we’ve got a guide for that too.

We know you’re really busy, that’s why we wrote these short guides for ecommerce essentials. Check them out to learn practical tips for livening up your ecommerce performance.

Download your guides now!

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This month’s ecommerce digest begins with a number of suggestion for approaching holiday season ecommerce, and continues with general business advice that helps you drive revenue and puts your overall business performance in perspective.

Holiday Season Ecommerce

5 Ideas to Make This Your Most Profitable Holiday Season Yet | ConstantContact
According to the National Retail Federation, online sales for November and December this year are expected to grow 8-11 percent. eMarketer places this number for U.S. retail holiday season ecommerce at $72 billion. Software manufacturers can position themselves as a great option for last minute gifts since digital distribution bypasses the wait for shipping.

Reducing Cart Abandonment

Reducing Abandoned Shopping Carts In Ecommerce | Smashing Magazine
If the goal of your online store is to increase customer acquisition and customer lifetime value then cart abandonment is one of your biggest obstacles. Still, more than two out of every three of the visitors to your site who populate a shopping cart will not complete the order or submit payment. This post from Smashing Magazine offers excellent suggestions for keeping the customer in the cart in the first place, and for getting them back to the cart once they have left it.

Software Piracy and Infringing Use

Who Knew? MPAA Concerned Online Pirates are Exposed to Malware | Ars Technica
Anyone who sells digitally distributed software tends to hate pirates. But, as we’ve stated time and again, software piracy is also a useful form of marketing. Creative messaging is all about educating infringing users about the benefits and drawbacks of using pirated software. Read this piece from Ars Technica and think about how you might utilize the danger of malware to persuade infringing users to become paying customers.

B2B Lead Generation

Why Email is no Longer the Workhorse of Lead Nurturing | Bizo
Without paying customers you have no business and without leads you have no paying customers. Though email is the tried and true method of communicating real time and personalized messages for B2C buyers, the path toward B2B transactions is longer and more circuitous. This post from Bizo stresses the need for B2B companies to understand that you don’t, and never will, have the vast majority of your potential leads’ email addresses. It behooves B2B software marketers to consider how they can use multichannel engagement to nurture propects into leads and leads into sales.

Business Management

Google Aims for “Faster, Better Decisions” | Wall Street Journal
This Wall Street Journal blog post focuses on a memo issued by Larry Page to Google employees. It teaches an important lesson for all businesses, especially those in the tech and software space. Innovation and disruption spread like wildfire in these industries, and those who want to keep up will need to figure out how to avoid the decline of the product life-cycle. According to Page, allowing empowered employees to make faster and better decisions facilitates product innovation, which in turn allows companies to stay competitive in their market.

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For the July Ecommerce Digest, we explore how to test for SEO efforts, Visa’s attempt to facilitate mobile ecommerce, and Microsoft’s approach to subscription billing.

How to Test SEO

How Do I Successfully Run SEO Tests On My Website? | Moz Blog
Everyone knows that a successful sales cycle, or buyer’s journey, or whatever you want to call the process that converts curious humans into paying customers, relies heavily on search engine optimization. But SEO efforts are notoriously hard to measure and, therefore, to test. This degree of difficulty is compounded by the fact that other marketing channels like email and paid search are much easier to measure and test. So how do you gauge whether your SEO efforts are effective? This post examines the process for monitoring attempts to positively affect SEO.

Cart Conversion and Data Security

Visa Makes Big Move to Boost Online Spending | All Tech Considered
This engaging piece from National Public Radio addresses one of ecommerce’s biggest fears – cart abandonment. It notes that Visa, a company with a strong interest in lowering abandonment rates, is implementing a new way to faciliate cart conversions, especially for mobile transactions. Now, with Visa Checkout, online shoppers can more easily complete the checkout process. This service links billing information to a simple authentication process in the shopping cart, thus reducing the need to complete the usual number of form fields. This service also improves data security through a tokenization process. However, as one critic notes, this enhanced security could actually make protesting fraudulent charges more onerous for consumers.

Alternative Payment Methods

Cards Still Rule, But Alternative Payments are Catching Up | PaymentEye
The U.S. tends to generate the most ecommerce revenue out of any other country in the world, and U.S. customers tend to use credit cards to pay for online orders. But, as we have said many times in this blog, the beauty of ecommerce is the relative ease it brings when scaling operations into other countries. As you scale your online presence into new territories, make sure that your localization efforts involve an expanding pack of regionally preferred payment options for various European and APAC regions.

Subscription Billing Model

Microsoft slashes SMB Office 365 prices | Computerworld
Software and subscriptions – what a wonderful idea. And yet, earning predictable recurring revenue is not so easily pulled off. Not only do you have to convince customers to sign up initially for time or usage based billing, but you also have to consistently convert your customers over and over again. This article examines recent pricing and feature changes that Microsoft is implementing for its Office365 cloud product. My hunch is that Microsoft is being challenged by customer churn and competition from Google, and so Microsoft is updating its playbook to keep customers in their ecosystem.

Have you made the switch to subscription billing? What are the challenges you’ve encountered in reducing churn?

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Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment is a major concern for software merchants. Generally speaking, more people than not abandon their online shopping cart after choosing a product and putting it into the cart. In fact, according to the Baymard Institute, an independent web usability research institute, the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 67.91 percent – that’s more than two-thirds of visitors!

Conversion Rate Optimization

There are a number of ways to combat cart abandonment, also known as shopping cart and conversion rate optimization. Changing the parts of your shopping cart and seeing which configurations perform best through split tests can have an enormous impact on how much revenue your ecommerce generates.

Pricing Strategies and Profit Margins

One very important element in your shopping cart is the product price. The display of your price is very influential. Now, of course, you don’t want to drive down your cart abandonment rate by sacrificing your profit. That’s just foolish. But sometimes, lowering your prices for a limited time helps convert new customers, who eventually become long-term loyal customers. And sometimes, raising your prices makes your product more valuable in the eyes of some shoppers.

Check out this infographic which explains that improving profit margins is top of mind for pricing strategists and identifies the major challenges of pricing strategies. It concludes with five suggestions that businesses can use to increase their margins, including a dynamic pricing strategy.

Ever experienced pricing strategy challenges and worked to overcome them? Tell us about it in the comment section below.

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