This trend will only continue as digital natives become the core consumer group. While 16 percent of customers will voice dissatisfaction with a company online through product review pages or social media, among 16 to 34-year-olds that number jumps to 53 percent.

Valuing Customer Realtionships

The companies that value their customer relationships are busy providing world class customer support. Companies with a bad reputation need to find those areas where they can improve, or they risk significant consequences from the market.

Providing inferior customer experiences means being left behind in the world of subscriptions. Since your company must maintain a positive relationship with customers over time, ensuring continued renewals and recurring revenue, neglecting excellent customer support will result in lower customer lifetime values and increased churn.

In addition to the negative impact on your company’s revenue, there’s an added incentive to keep customers happy: Their voices are getting louder. Because of social media, any negative feedback a customer wants to provide, either to your or with their network, is amplified and remains online forever. If the interaction is negative enough, it could even go viral, like this infamous Comcast customer support call. If your poor customer support is becoming a meme, your company is losing the battle for positive customer voices.

Check out the full infographic below.

Supporting customers means understanding their subscriber journey. Download our complimentary guide today.

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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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Buyer Journey Step 1: Identify the Buyer Type

What is your prospect’s role in their organization? Are they interested in your services because they need to lower costs and streamline purchasing? Perhaps they are looking to transform the entire way their company does business. The four buyer types highlighted in this infographic represent the breadth of roles you may encounter with prospects. Once you have identified the type, hone your marketing strategy to speak to them directly.

Buyer Journey Step 2: Consider the Buyer’s Business Challenge

With your marketing strategy in place, the next step on the buyer journey is addressing the specific business challenges they’re encountering. These could be as varied as expanding into global markets, fighting customer churn, launching new products, or reducing the company’s risk profile.

Buyer Journey Step 3: Invest in the Right Engagement Tools

Taking into account your customer, their roles and goals, and the specific challenges they need to surmount, you must invest in the right engagement tools. Mapping the buyer journey your customers travel puts you in their shoes. Understanding not only the business challenge, but your prospect’s role in addressing the challenge means presenting them the most persuasive and useful content. Some engagement tools take more effort, while others may be relatively simple to produce. With your prospect’s journey mapped, your team will be able to position your resources more efficiently, streamlining your marketing costs.

Repeat Steps 1-3

Of course, every buyer is different; no single buyer journey map will apply exactly to every prospect. The metaphor of the map, however, is powerful for understanding your customers’ orientation: where they start, where they’re facing, and how fast they’re moving. Repeating the mapping process will constantly improve your connection with your customers, leading to increased customer satisfaction and higher revenue.

Download our complimentary guide: Mapping & Measuring the Subscriber Journey.

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Lucky us! We get an extra 24 hours of bonus time each leap year! So when it comes to money, it’s an extra day to do business. It’s also an extra day of costs. Have you ever wondered how much one day really costs? At the end of this post, you can find this infographic from Bankrate for some interesting information about the real costs of an extra day, from how much money the average person makes to how much cash the government prints.

Beyond collecting another day of revenue, what are the other benefits of an extra day? Usually, Leap Day comes in and out of our lives unnoticed. However, the folks over at Forbes think the world needs more appreciation and that Leap Day is the perfect day to make that happen. They suggest taking advantage of your Leap Day by doing the “really important things you meant to do all year long, but could never find the time for.” For example, if you are a manager, make Leap Day special by investing those extra hours in your team’s success. They continue:

“Perhaps you’ve made excuses for why showing appreciation is not a top priority at work. The number one excuse we hear from leaders is, quite simply, lack of time. But what if we told you that lack of appreciation is one of the top reasons for employee turnover? And, that the self-reported number one way to inspire great work is to make employees feel appreciated? You’ve got an extra 24 hours on Leap Day. Imagine how good it would feel to make it count for the next four years.”

What will you do with your extra day?

Download one of our complimentary resources today.

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That means you have to include proof elements in your marketing. Proof elements are little marketing gems that give consumers real evidence that your product works, which is extremely persuasive.

Don’t bore potential customers with uninspiring platitudes; they are not falling for it. Don’t just say your product is the best, prove it! There are no sales without trust, and proof builds trust.

Today’s Ecommerce Eye Candy comes from Marketing Results and shows a checklist of 42 distinct proof elements you can use to make your marketing messages more convincing. They are even separated into “left brain” (logical) techniques and “right brain” (emotional) techniques. No matter what kind of customer you’re speaking to, one or more of these proof elements will resonate with them.

Say you have a prospect who is a stickler for the numbers. Be sure to target him with real test data from your company or industry analysts. Perhaps a collection of case studies, or before and after testimonials are best for him. A more qualitative prospect might want to see a celebrity endorsement, a team photo or a compelling company origin story.

Just like customers, proof elements come in many shapes and forms. Explore this “Monster List of Marketing Proof Elements” for ideas on how you can get the greatest return for your marketing investment as possible.

Download one of our complimentary resources today.

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Companies are refining their self-service processes to provide a rich, effective experience. From utilizing new digital channels and employing CRM data to streamline interactions to improving the transfer from self-service to live agents, companies are looking for ways to ensure customers do not have to repeat themselves eternally to a recorded voice prompt.

These advancements in technology are making it easier (and cheaper) to solve customers’ problems with a personalized self-service environment. Companies that provide outstanding customer service will win customers for life. But do not take half-measures in your solution. Research shows users will quickly abandon a faulty customer self-service option. Succeeding with customer support, even with self-service options, means investing in a solution that works for every customer.

Take a look at this infographic from Aspect to get a better idea about what your customers really want from self-service.

Learn more about how to keep customers engaged in our complimentary guide, Attracting and Acquiring New Subscribers.

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In any case, the expanding use of cloud computing by businesses around the world is making Software as a Service (SaaS) a ubiquitous delivery model. SaaS and other delivery models that dovetail with subscriptions promise recurring revenue streams and maximized value from your customer relationships. But to measure those things, companies will need to establish new KPIs.

Subscription KPIs

Familiar KPIs like number of transactions or average cart value are no longer adequate. To assess the health of your business, KPIs like monthly and annual recurring revenue, customer acquisition costs and customer lifetime value must all be compared and measured on a regular basis.

Understanding how these new, more complex KPIs interact with each other is a challenge. The infographic below came from RJ Metrics’ attempt at creating a unified dashboard for the health of their entire enterprise. Tristand Handly of RJ Metrics explains, “Drawing up a conceptual model of how your business works and how all of your KPIs interact is a good way to make sure that everyone is looking at the business the same way.”

They created a flow chart to help keep track of the most important subscription metrics. Handly calls their approach Metric Decomposition, and explained their process further on the RJMetrics Blog.

Learn more about essential subscription KPIs for your business by downloading our complimentary white paper, Mapping and Measuring the Subscriber Journey.

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It’s easy to make decisions centered on these influences, however, it’s not smart because it’s not driven by real data. We know you are in a hurry, but if you take the time to do some A/B testing, you will end up with results that can put you on the road to increased revenue.

With testing you will gather actual real information about your specific issue/problem/change/design, and be able to use that data to make factually based decisions, just like the scientists do.

Be a scientist, not a follower. Check out this amusing infographic from Wingify that will help you determine in which scenarios you should A/B test instead of deciding by other methods.

Download our Six Guides on Ecommerce Essentials today.

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With all this effort and expense, and even with loyal customers who love your product, you can still lose customers in an instant with a negative customer support interaction. According to our friends at Zendesk, “When customers have a bad service experience, they don’t just get mad, most of the time they try to get even.”

“When customers have a bad service experience, they don’t just get mad, most of the time they try to get even.” — Zendesk

More than 50 percent of frustrated customers tell their friends, family and peers, spreading the word about their negative experience. A whopping 35 percent will stop doing business with the company. And 16 percent will post negative comments on social media and other review sites. This can really damage your company’s reputation considering 60 percent of consumers say they are influenced by others’ comments.

Take a look at the infographic Zendesk produced examining just how bad a reaction your customers may have if your customer support team is not up to the task. Even loyal customers may choose to share their poor experience with friends, broadcast it on social media or simply terminate their relationship with your business.

Overall, the findings point to the relationship between customer experience and revenue, highlighting a critical need for companies to ensure the highest level of customer support. Stop looking at service operations as cost centers, and instead view every interaction as an opportunity to increase satisfaction, build loyalty and grow revenue. While bad customer service hurts your reputation, in the age of social media, good customer service can be your best advertisement.

Want to learn more? Download our Six Guides on Ecommerce Essentials today.

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In the age of subscriptions and the emerging IoT sphere, your customer data is becoming more varied and complex. You are no longer simply maintaining a sales ledger. Customers are sharing preferences, areas of interest, and vast quantities of data generated from the use of your company’s services. Even moderately sized businesses can find the amount and complexity of their customer data driving them to seek outsourced solutions. The largest companies can afford to go the extra mile in-house.

This fascinating infographic comes by way of Hostwinds and was produced in the wake of the 2013 PRISM NSA data collection scandal and examines how major players in the game of big data are keeping it secure. These observations are still relevant today, especially for any business that deals in data. They looked at Google, Facebook and the NSA and the scale of their data center operations. Hostwinds also explores Bonhoff’s Pionen Data Center, located in Stockholm, Sweden — or rather, under Stockholm, Sweden.

Got your data security handled but want to be sure you’re ready to go global? Download our study of Eight Critical Capabilities for Global Ecommerce.

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