Thursday , 10 October 2024

The Secret Of Online eCommerce Success – Respect For The Visitor

83%. Exactly that many people of the 5,000 surveyed called lack of respect towards them the main reason for going somewhere else to shop. Out of 5,000 customers, 4,150 are not likely to make a purchase or come back to you for a new purchase if they feel unappreciated.

We’ve watched for over 6 years over 700 million eCommerce transactions between stores and customers on our platform. With all of this data, trends of what stores need to increase conversion have emerged over the years. Average stores conversions range between 1-3%, and typically never get up to 7-10%.

We conducted this survey of visitors to find out the exact details of what we’d known for years. eCommerce stores didn’t surprise us at all. A lack of respect from the store to the visitor, leaving the visitor feeling that his interests aren’t important. It’s one of the main factors in why visitors don’t purchase from a site or switch to a competitor.

What Makes People Decide Not To Buy?

Slow working site 2%
Hard to find stores contact info on the site 3%
Bad UI (aesthetically & function), bad mobile experience 5%
Bad customer service 7%
A complicated checkout process, lack of product recommendations or irrelevant product recommendation 10%
Annoying popups (bad timing, bad context, too many) 16%
Email follow offer irrelevant 28%
Too many emails from store 29%

The last two reasons for folks leaving a store without buying are the most interesting. Both involved direct communication with the client and are simple to fix.

It’s rare that we get a helpful email from an online store, mainly because they don’t use data when they email their visitors. Normally, the store includes everyone as part of their bulk emailing campaign with “updates” and “suggested items”. These emails are often more colorful than they are beautiful, and rarely tailored to our shopping needs.

We get these general emails because most stores aren’t able to identify and predict the specific product interests of each visitor on the site. Most sites have the business data but don’t know how to analyze it and use it to create custom offers. The email marketing software that dominate the industry (MailChimp, HubSpot, etc.) do a disservice to the customer by not being intuitive enough with data collection or analysis. In their defense, they aren’t built to serve a customer offer to each store visitor. They are good at what they were built for, sending bulk email.

The problem with these emails, is that at some point, the recipients stop noticing them. In fact, Gmail developed sorting technology that automatically puts them into an “offers” folder so you never have to look at them.

A store that truly cared about your buying needs would act as an in-person shopping assistant might, taking into account everything you’ve looked at, and recommending you something specific to your tastes. If online stores identified and analyzed your behavior to create a unique offer, you’d probably look at it at least, right?

And imagine the long term benefit of a site that custom made an email offer based on your tastes or specific previously viewed items.

Leads Base Burning Rate

We can measure the failure of good marketing practice by this over a period of time. This parameter shows how fast visitors ready to make a purchase decreases with each new email offer. This metric depends on the number of emails sent and relevancy of the content.

The less your level or respect is for the visitor, the higher this parameter is. We have seen a lot of cases that when followed, account for 13% – 15% more sales monthly with LBBR. This means, when these principles are not followed, your lead base can reduce to half it’s size in less than 6 months.

The Sloppy Pop-up

Anyone that’s putting up a 10% off coupon to anyone that lands on their site should automatically get a poor marketing grade. Why do online stores think entering into the site or staying on a page longer than 10 seconds means “serve them a pop-up”? With data collection and analysis a store can serve a custom CTA based on the visitors actual actions.

Respecting a visitor is simple and has been around for centuries in the offline marketplace. Show the visitor how important he is to you. Know his name, respect his time and understand his needs. Not only will he buy, he’ll be an advocate and tell his friends.

Everyone is busy. Standing out isn’t difficult, especially if you can do something a little better than everyone else a visitor comes in contact with. This is especially important when showing respect to your visitors. Here’s how to stand out and massively increase customer loyalty at the same time.

Creating A Custom Offer For Site Visitors

  • Determine exactly which products your visitor is interested in
  • Motivate the visitor to leave his contact info with you (at the right time)
  • Use the right tools to collect data or motivate a visitor
  • Don’t bombard the visitor with product offers all the time
  • Only offer them something that meets their needs

Data collection and analysis increases sales in a consistent way through custom offers based on what the site visitors want. No better form of respect than that.

About The Author: Sergey Sitnikov

Sergey is the co-founder and CEO of LeadHit, an ecommerce marketing platform. He’s tracked over $1 Billion Dollars in sales through the platform and has helped ecommerce stores all over the world increase sales through respectful marketing practices.

Image from https://www.codifyd.com/blog/microvation-may-companys-next-secret-weapon-b2b-ecommerce-success/

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