The economic decline is top-of-mind for everyone – especially retailers – as consumers place an even stronger hold on their wallets. In such a volatile marketplace, retailers must employ creative tactics to gain a competitive edge and remain profitable. With escalating gas prices, now more than ever, shoppers are going online which puts multichannel retailers at an advantage. That considered, simply having an online channel is not enough – it’s how you market your site and engage customers that makes the difference.
Here are 10 tips and tricks you can apply to your e-commerce site to survive the recession and boost website sales.
1. Smart Merchandising - Promote Groups of Low-Cost Offers: Find inexpensive, appealing items and bundle them in a creative way as a special promotion that gives shoppers an incentive to fill their carts with many low-cost items.
2. Instant Couponing for Multiple-Category Purchasing: Drive shoppers to buy more by offering them a reasonable discount on items from other categories if they buy immediately.
3. Minimum Purchase Free Shipping: Look at your margins and offer free shipping at a purchase threshold where it makes financial sense. Shoppers will fill the cart for the reward.
4. Personalized Recommendations on the Shopping Cart Page: Personalized product recommendations (PPRs) are a recession hit: they’re important on the category page, on the product detail page and everywhere else on the site you can afford the real estate. Putting them at the point of purchase—on the shopping cart page—is a highly strategic placement that moves shoppers to buy. PPRs are recession-proof because leading vendors like MyBuys offer them on a pay-for-performance basis.
5. Value Exchange (Gift with Purchase): Offer a small gift with a minimum price purchase to help move more product, increase customer loyalty and motivate customers to sample other products to increase cart size.
6. Use E-mail Creatively: Use e-mail alerts to recommend products that shoppers want and while you’re at it, remind them of abandoned shopping cart items, which have high conversion rates.
7. Ratings and Reviews: Create a sense of community and loyalty by adding ratings and reviews to your site. Shoppers trust one another and this functionality is not expensive to implement. Also, highly rated products tend to convert at better rates.
8. Creative Use of Widgets: Make widgets highly accessible from your webpage and your Facebook page. Offer different size choices and make them easy to download. Turn your fans into advertising affiliates by having them add these widgets to their social networking pages or blogs and give them points toward purchase for click-throughs or conversions.
9. Create Special Membership Clubs: Companies like SKECHERS, Clinique and many others have successful clubs for building loyalty and growing their lists. Get shoppers to sign up, become part of your community and give you permission to market to them. Reward them with free shipping, special coupons and discounts.
10. New Customer Programs: Coupons or other incentives to turn people into first-time buyers aren’t expensive to create or manage and once you bring shoppers to your site, you can employ the rest of the tactics mentioned above to bring them back for more.
Robert E. Cell is CEO of MyBuys.
Tags: coupons, customer reviews, down economy, e-commerce, e-mail, Electronic Retailer, facebook, mybuys, promotions, retailers, robert cell, shopping cart, skechers, widgets
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Top Applications for Latin American Corporations
Great Post! I am planning to write sometihng like this on my blog! I want emphatize this to Latin American Market! Keep it up! PS: Already Bookmarked!
Handy tips. Will make use of them and share them with friends and co-bloggers. Nice of you to share.
Thomas.
Hi,
Shopper Discounts & Rewards is an online shopping and discount programme. Webloyalty’s clients, e-commerce sites, benefit from the potential to generate additional online revenue and increase site traffic. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks
Sofia.
Wonderful post! We just recently e-mailed our customers with a great sale by bundling some products It was a big winner for them and us. It surprised us to see how many are out there still spending money when the right product and deal comes there way:-)
If you ever want to see a reader’s feedback :) , I rate this article for 4/5. Decent info, but I have to go to that damn msn to find the missed bits. Thank you, anyway!
the Economic Recession has been pretty hard on us. some of my friends lost their job because of the massive job cuts. i just hope that our economy becomes better in the following years.
the economic recession has been pretty hard on us. there is some good progress on the economy this year. i just hope that the economy will continue to recover in the following months and years.
i am hoping that the global economy would recover from this economic recession. life has been very hard with these massive job cuts.
Economic recession created huge unemployment rates around the world. I think the world economy is already on the road to recovery.
the economic recession made a lot of workers jobless. my best friend and me lost our jobs because of job cuts. i hope that our economy would recover soon.
the Economic recession made a lot of jobless people in my own country. We could only hope that our economy becomes strong again.
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Our country was also hit hard by the Economic Recession. At least we are seeing some signs of economic recovery now. I hope that we could recover soon from this recession.
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Our country had been so much affected by this Economic Recession. there are lots of job cuts and company shutdowns. We are seeing some signs of economic recovery right now and we hope that it would continue.
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I think we are also seeing some signs of recovery from the Economic Recession. Of course, we have no idea of how long it will take to completely recover, but some say it’s going to be longer than for the other recessions in decades. I also scanned an article yesterday that said business owners need a new set of tactics to do well during recovery.