In the first two installments, we outlined the concept of experience personalization on your site, knowing your visitors, where they come from, and what they are looking at on your site, and also creating targeted recommendations for your visitors based on what they are interested in.
In this post, we’re going to start taking those concepts and wrapping them in the idea that we need to communicate early and often with visitors to keep your brand fresh in their minds. With that in mind, let’s do a little Internet 101 on what communicating in today’s online world looks like.
Communicating in an Online World
Most retailers today understand and appreciate the value of email marketing solutions. Whether you’re using them simply for newsletter management and list sends, or for targeted one-to-one emails with valued recommendations, one thing is certain: Customers can be fickle. This isn’t as simple as they visit your site, and then always buy somewhere else. More likely, life gets in the way of their visit to your store and they simply don’t remember that they came to the site, what they searched on specifically that got them there, and eventually they end up on Amazon looking for the same item.
I don’t hate Amazon; far from it, they are a trend-setter and industry-maker when it comes to e-commerce. But the scenario I just mentioned is not only likely, it’s probable in many cases. So, one solution is to sell on Amazon, and if you can, and the margins make sense to do so, then by all means. But the old adage, “it’s easier to keep a current customer than gain a new one” fits here and you should be considering what you are doing to keep your current visitors and customers engaged with your store, before worrying so much about how to gain more customers.
Of course, new customer acquisition is a necessity, but remember someone who has already purchased from your store has already gone through the entire buying process, searching for things they want, finding valuable products, coming to trust your site and sharing their personal information to finalize their purchase. Since you already have a relationship with this person, continuing that relationship is not only smart, it’s easier than finding a brand new person and convincing them all over again that you’re a trustworthy retailer.
Types of Communications
Email Marketing
Email marketing is dead…long live Email Marketing. If I had a nickel for every time I heard some e-commerce pundit standing at a keynote podium talking about the demise of email marketing….well, let’s just say, I’d have a lot of nickels. The point is that email has been in the process of dying for years now and yet, it still remains a mainstay for customer communications. Twenty years ago, I can’t believe it’s been that long, you had to work in the technology field to have an email address, ten years ago, most folks had 1 or 2 email addresses, some business some personal…today, children are seemingly born with an email address picked out for them. Like most things that remain constants in technology, it moves from being a wow item, to being widely adopted to being ubiquitously available.
So, email marketing is NOT dead – but the question remains…how can a retailer effectively use email to market to their customers without becoming a SPAMMER in the eyes of the very people you seek to engender trust with. There are some primary DOs and DONTs that we will focus on here.
No means No, so take them seriously.
No one wants their email server to be black listed, the process of getting off a black list is next to impossible and frankly it’s not worth the hassle. So, always include an unsubscribe link in your emails, and IF the user selects it, remove them from your list for that type of email. The key point here is that type of email. If you have order follow-up and order status emails, as well as newsletters, you will want to give the customer the option of unsubscribing from either; however, a customer may want to be removed form your newsletter list, but still receive their order status emails, so it’s very important to explain on your unsubscribe linked pages what they are unsubscribing from. Additionally, and perhaps more obviously, as a retailer you will want to track the types of emails you send and ensure that you are only giving your customers what they want.
Explicitly Ask them.
A key aspect of the Click2Customer solution is something we call the Customer Care Center (CCC) page. The CCC page is a one-stop location for providing your customers with all the valuable and pertinent information you have about them. We use this concept to allow them to review order history, view and edit wishlists and saved baskets, edit account information and in this case, set up the items that they are interested in and the frequency with which they’d like you to remain in contact with them via email.
If a customer tells you they are ok getting monthly newsletters, send them monthly newsletters, not WEEKLY newsletters. If you ask them if they’d like to be informed of New Products that you are bringing to market, send them those emails, but be smart…don’t send me one email for every new product you bring to the store. Schedule these notifications to go out once or twice a month at most, and always include a note that says “You are receiving this email as requested”. Sometimes customers truly cannot remember signing up for something, and begin looking for the unsubscribe link before even trying to discern what’s in the email, so making the upfront comment that the customer is getting what they asked for is very important to making sure they understand you aren’t spamming them.
Clear Titles with Stated Purposes
Lots of Email Spammers these days use seemingly valid and pertinent titles to try and convince email readers to open their messages, so don’t take for granted that your visitors, who signed up for your emails will instantly remember your email address or a generic title as something they want to read. An email delivered and unread really doesn’t help at all, so the title needs to be something that will catch their attention.
Personal Recommendations in Order Follow-up/Status Emails
Customers do not want to be inundated with marketing emails, but they do want to get the status of orders they have made with you. With C2C, you can combine the two and use your order status emails as yet another opportunity to market to those customers who may be interested in follow-on sales with you.
Some examples might include providing a list of related products and accessories for some of the items in an order, or using your site analytics to make recommendations based on other shoppers’ purchases. You may also just want to introduce new product lines based on their past purchase history. C2C provides you the most flexible solution to date for creating unique emails for each and every customer based on their relationship with your store.
Targeted Emails versus Drip Emails
One-off marketing emails may seem unnecessary or difficult to manage, but the more personal a message is, email or otherwise, the more likely your visitor is going to feel they are a part of a one-to-one relationship. A retailer sending emails to customers should always realize that there is a goal. The goal may not necessarily be to generate a sale, although that is a likely plus for any message received by a customer. No, in fact, the most basic measure of success in any email campaign is to keep your brand fresh in the customer’s mind. The best mechanisms for this will obviously differ based on your industry, customer types and the type of information you may have to support an email campaign. With C2C, you can customize an email template to be sent out for a given reason, say Order Follow-ups and include some number of variable content items that would be applicable based only on whether the customer purchased certain items, or visited certain pages, had a certain dollar amount in the order, etc. This is all part of the Rules Engine capability and truly allows you, the retailer, to create one-off emails that are unique without having to sit down and create them one at a time.
Another area to focus on is the drip campaign. The term drip marketing campaigns (email or otherwise) refers to a marketing strategy in which you send, or “drip” some number of messages to customers over a predetermined period of time. These messages often take the form of E-mail marketing, although other media can also be used. The purpose of the drip campaign is to drive interest over a period of time, but the underlying desire is to, of course, keep your company’s name in front of the customer. A retailer using C2C can set up one or more drip campaigns, manage how they interact with one another and how often a message should be sent to the customer. Requests for Product Reviews, Follow-up emails to ensure that the items were received and to the customer’s liking, Re-Activation Emails after long period of inactivity or no visits to the site are just a few areas you can focus on. The point here is that email is STILL a great tool for keeping your brand fresh, don’t take it for granted and don’t expect people to remember you just because you think your store is memorable. It rarely works that way.
Social Media Marketing
So after we’ve beaten the “old email horse” to death, we come to the next newest thing in E-commerce: Social Media marketing for e-commerce purposes. This is a new area of focus for some e-commerce consultancies and as with most things, the shiniest, new toy in the online world typically ends up going through some process of rapid integration with the old ways of doing business to see what potential doors may be opened in helping retailers find new customers or keep in touch with current ones.
Social Commerce (S-Commerce) is going to take reputation management and product reviews into a completely new world in the coming months/years. (You heard it here first…unless you saw it on Facebook somewhere 
.) The point is that early on, companies like eBay saw that reputation was a big deal for many buyers in the online world. Social networks, therefore, have become a natural utility for leveraging reputation across a network of like-minded “friends”. The idea that people who like your social network page, or who follow you online to see what you have going on is not just a nice-to-have concept any longer, but the latest MUST! I cannot stress this enough, that your largest new set of visitors and customers may very well be sitting on Facebook right now talking about how their 2-year old just said the darnedest thing. In reality, your market and industry will ultimately dictate how successful a social media campaign will be, but this is not something that you want to wait on.
The type of unfettered and unmanaged access this type of marketing model provides to the end users might seem scary to a retailer. You cannot control the message of online social commentary about your store’s operations, the products you sell or the service you’ve provided in the past, but it’s this very element that makes the strongest argument for getting into social media and doing it right, because the trust it will ultimately engender will speak more loudly than any marketing campaign you could create elsewhere.
C2C Communications Solutions
With C2C, integrated email and social media marketing is a cornerstone, not an after-thought.
Much like email, or web templates, social media templates are available and can be used on the fly based on the rules being executed in the Rules Engine. So, for example, if your visitors are clicking on a lot of products in your Category X and you want to share a tweet or facebook post about the hot items on your site, it would be nice to know that these messages could be automated with links tracking back to the site to gauge their effectiveness. Additionally, as people like your site, you can make special offers available to them, or share with them new products even before your emails are sent out. Sharing a site is also available with C2C, the process of having someone post a Facebook message about a product they like, or something on the site that interests them is just free marketing. This type of recommendation is worth more than its weight in gold to your bottom line, especially if this individual has tons of FB friends.
As such, the TRUE power of social media marketing is not in the comments YOU make about your store and products, but rather what visitors say about them. With C2C social bookmark campaigns, you can readily select the social media sites you want to target and allow your visitors to post their own comments about interesting items that they have found on your site. Offering visitors the opportunity to earn reward points, or discounts if a certain number of their friends visit the site is an added incentive for them to spread the word and as I said earlier, the best part is that this is FREE marketing and it’s recommendations from visitors to THEIR friends which is much more likely to generate a unique visit than unsolicited comments from the store’s owner would.
In the end, C2C is a unique system that allows you to decide how you want YOUR store’s operations to work. It is not limited by the extend of the shopping cart itself, or the add-on modules themselves, but is purely based on what you want to accomplish as unique as that may be.
Next week we’ll take a look at Shopping Cart Abandonment and some mechanisms you can use to help rescue a sale both before and after they leave your site.
