Partner Article

E-commerce success is relatively easy to achieve

It’s Online Marketing focus week on Bdaily. Here, Stephen Sullivan, founder and principal of Murphy Sullivan Associates, assesses the importance of digital commerce.

Whether you are looking to take your first steps in online marketing or building on an initial digital presence, the growth, scale and importance of digital commerce is compelling.

As other contributors to Bdaily’s Focus Week on Online Marketing explain, the barriers to entry have lowered and the required tools and technical expertise to allow companies to establish an ecommerce footprint can be relatively easily acquired.

That said, there are a few sample questions to consider.

1. What are you trying to achieve?

This may seem obvious, especially if you are selling your products or services online. However, how you design and deliver online ecommerce will vary considerably dependent on:

• whether you are seeking to attract new customers or allow existing ones to self-serve
• if you envisage utilising online marketing to deepen interaction and relationships with customers or instead to allow a lowered cost of service / sales across the board, or for a certain segment
• whether sales fulfilment and service will be delivered using your existing resources and techniques or via a new model.

Of course, you also need to be prepared to adjust your approach if your customers and prospects don’t behave in accordance with your expectations!

2. How’s your chatting?

Web and live chat can offer an immediate, accessible and relatively low cost new communication channels for your customers and prospects. You can control when chat or ‘call me back’ options are available, but will this work for your customers; what are their expectations? What’s your tone of voice when chatting to customers and prospects? Does it match your wider brand and style of communications – and if so, have you asked the same questions about how you handle inbound and outbound phone calls, emails, etc?

3. Is your customer management integrated?

You can add and exploit new online channels, but how readily will they be integrated to existing ones? Your customers – like the rest of us - are increasingly demanding and have little patience with, for instance, organisations which ‘know’ their history and references online, but are strangers to them on the phone.

4. Seduced and abandoned?

Abandoned shopping cart / basket rates average 67% according to the Baymard Institute. Obviously any successful approaches to reducing abandonment rates will be multi-faceted, starting with understanding the customer’s online journey.

However, there are considerable unexploited opportunities to combat abandonment through using a traditional technology to ‘cut through’ to your online prospects – by using the phone. Timely, near-real time outbound calling of customers can deliver greatly improved sales conversions and increased cross-and up-sell rates.

Inevitably, the more you explore online marketing and the more your customers and prospects interact with you across communications channels, the greater the number of challenges and opportunities you will face. Above I have just looked at a few of them.

Experience suggests that while developing an integrated, effective online presence will require both i) careful planning, and ii) a commitment to test, learn and develop continuously, the benefits to your business and your customers will be considerable.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Murphy Sullivan Associates .