You have finally launched your eCommerce store or listed your products on the likes of Amazon / Flipkart of this world, then this blog is for you.
The above is the first step in this adventurous journey of scaling your business.
After readying the Physical Dukaan, you invite visitors to it to generate sales, interact with them, pitch them the products, and convert them into prospects and further into clients.
Similarly, once you are ready with your Digital Dukaan (i.e. an eCommerce store of yours + listing of your products on at least 2 of the leading eCommerce stores), you have to do the same process.
Let us convert those steps into bullet points:
Inviting Visitors
Interact with them
Pitch them the products
Convert them into prospects
Further into clients
Up-sell and Cross-sell
Inviting Visitors
Just like we need to do Marketing in the Physical world to bring visitors, we need to do Digital Marketing for the Digital Dukaan.
What all can be done as a part of this is described in detail at this blog of ours:
Interact with them
Interacting with the visitors once they arrive in your Digital Dukaan is extremely crucial.
It is recommended to use a Chatbox application to chat with your visitors. There are plugins and third party applications available for this. You can directly chat like you are chatting on a messenger with the visitor. Platforms like WooCommerce / Shopify support the Facebook Messenger plugin.
Often a lot of visits will come in night hours when you may be offline. Save some default answers which can be automatically submitted to the visitors. This will also help when the number is too high and it becomes difficult to manually respond to everyone.
Apart from this, enlist Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on your website. Cover maximum possible questions which your customer may have for your products and answer them. This will benefit you from the SEO perspective as well.
How will you know when someone is on your website?
Google Analytics will help you to know that. In order to use it you will need to synchronize your website with your Google Analytics account. Let this be done by your web developer or IT team. For WordPress websites, you can refer the below video or click here to read on Google's support literature.
Coming back to interacting with the visitors, we can know in real-time how many visitors are there on our website using Google Analytics. There are lot of micro-details available here. The main parameters which you need to keep a constant eye on are:
Users: Indicates the number of visitors in a given period of time
Revenue: Indicated the sales generated in a given period of time
Conversion Rate: Ratio of transactions to sessions
Sessions:The period of time a user is active on your website
A more detailed explanation on Google Analytics will be shared in a separate blog.
Ensure that the above figures are constantly improving. If you find that there is no significant increase in these figures or you see a decrease in them, then you can bring to the notice of your digital marketing consultant so that they can check the ongoing campaigns and do the needful updates if required.
Pitch them the products
When someone visits your physical dukaan, you will take them through your showroom and show them the relevant products.
In a Digital Dukaan, this is done by:
Providing relevant menu tabs on the home page.
Highlighting top selling products in the Featured section on the home page.
Highlighting Offers and combos on the banners on the home page.
and so on.
Apart from this, if you can also have this coded in your Chatbox application, then it will be as good as a personal interaction. For an instance, to see this refer to your bank's website. You will see "Ask Eva" on HDFC Bank. This is an automated chatbot providing answers to the customer. This will need a skilled developer to work at. We will discuss more on this in a separate blog.
Keep adding more products on regular basis if your business allows. If your business is such that the number of products are not going to be frequently changed or added, then you can work more rigorously on testimonials and reviews which we will cover in the later part of this blog.
Convert them into prospects
In the physical dukaan, when a customer visits us and inquires about various products but does not buy because of some or the other reason, we ask them to give their contact details so that we can send them updates / offers in future.
Getting contact details is the first step of converting the visitors into prospect. We must provide such attractive call-to-action buttons at relevant positions on our website from where we can prompt the customer to either buy or at least provide us with their contact details.
Once they sign-up, we can have them in our funnel.
As you can see here, there are multiple options for automation in email communication. Ensure to have them enabled and keep checking whether they are working smooth by regularly placing trial orders.
Apart from the above, you will find a lot of prospects on your social media. People messaging you in your inbox, commenting on your posts asking for price or more details across various social media handles and so on. Using a tool like Zoho Social will make your life easy.
You can refer this link to know more about the features of Zoho Social.
Refer this video to see how you can respond the queries and comments on various social media handles. The scheduling part is being handled by the digital marketing team. You can use the Commenting / Responding feature for converting prospects into clients.
Convert them further into clients
As your eCommerce store will start getting visitors, there will be some visitors who will directly place an order and get themselves converted into clients. The volume of such visitors depends on various factors like your brand value, how smooth your website is, your social media presence and so on.
Apart from these, there will be a huge number of prospects who will reach to the Checkout page but will not make the purchase.
This is like a customer visiting your Physical dukaan, checking out your products, choosing some from them, putting in the cart to come to the billing counter for billing but then suddenly changing his mind and leaving your showroom without making the purchase. Usually such instances are very few in case of a physical dukaan as compared to digital dukaan.
Below is the excellent feature which will help you to followup with these prospects and convert them into clients.
"Daily check the Cart Abandonment / Abandoned Checkouts section"
You can see Email Status column in the above screenshot of Abandoned Checkouts.
The next image shows how an email reminding the customer regarding his pending purchase is sent automatically.
Some of the hotter prospects will get converted by this step. But some warmer prospects will require a round of personalized communication may be via call, video call, email, WhatsApp, social media or SMS. They may even expect additional discount. Just like you do it in case of a physical dukaan, you will have to followup and convert these prospects.
You will have to have a discussion with them and understand what stopped them from the purchase.
Price is high
Looking for additional discount
I am looking for something else
I was just checking out
and so on.
You will get similar responses from them when you will have a word with them. You will find that by convincing them with a satisfying response, you can probably convert them into customer.
You can help them to find the right product which matches their requirement or give them a limited period window to apply a special promo code with an additional discount which you can immediately create for them having a limited usage criterion.
Along with the same, keep an eye on the percentage of conversion from Abandonment Checkouts to converted customers. Make it your goal to continuously improve this.
Up-sell and Cross-sell
In the world of eCommerce, it takes time to build trust. Often customers will try with a small order first to see the quality of your products.
Keep an eye on the "per order value / average revenue per order" parameter and make it an aim to grow this amount.
In order to do this, you can do some or all of the following:
You can use Call + Video call + Email + WhatsApp + Social Media to communicate with the customers
Interact with your converted customers
Build a rapport with them, share success stories with them
Ask for their feedback, if they are satisfied ask for a video testimonial or a review on the eCommerce marketplaces + Google + Social Media
If they are not satisfied, then be genuine and ask for the suggestions to improve. If possible, give them a free replacement.
Offer them a special promo code to bring them back for a second purchase
You can even give them a referral code for inviting their friends / family to your eCommerce store to purchase
and so on.
You may feel by reading above points that how is it possible to call and / or interact with so many customers personally. Or you may not have had any such communication from the eCommerce company from where you recently bought something.
Yes it is a very big task to be able to interact with all, so prioritize. Observe the order value and you can start with those who have made a purchase of bigger amounts from your eCommerce store.
At the same time, I will like to reiterate that in the initial days of the eCommerce journey, try and interact with maximum customers.
In order to up-sell / cross-sell, you can understand how your products are being consumed by them, at what frequency they will need it back and ensure to hit them back on the right time.
Apart from this, you can build email automation to bring back the customers. Remember, a customer will treat your email much better as compared to a prospect who in turn will treat it better than a visitor.
You must use Instagram Reels / YouTube Shorts to build a very close interaction with your customers. Read this blog of ours to know more on the same.
Are you using Reels on Instagram to connect with your audience? Stories, Status - Facebook, WhatsApp
You must use Business WhatsApp to build a personal closed chat interaction with your customers. Read this blog of ours to know more on the same.
Re-marketing / Re-targeting is a great way to keep on reminding our existing customers and also to push the prospects to customers. This part is handled under the Digital Marketing umbrella.
The above is a lengthy exhaustive process but if you plan out dedicated time slots of doing each task, you will be able to convert maximum sales.
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Courtesy:
Zoho Social
WordPress - WooCommerce
Shopify
Wix
Unsplash