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.
A fact of selling products online is that your target customer is savvy about the Internet. As such, your customers are well informed about discussion forums and ratings sites, and they are posting their opinions about your company to those sites. Prospective customers are also using the Internet to research your company’s reputation. Therein lies the big question: How can you put your best foot forward, and ensure that prospective customers are reading positive opinions, reviews and ratings when making purchase decisions?
