Six Simple Steps for Developing Marketing Plan (part 2)

Categorized as : Ecommerce

By Kirill Samartsev
Oct 11, 2012
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As I promised last week, we’ll go through the last three simple steps that act as a framework for developing your sales and marketing process.

Convert sales

Let’s pretend you’ve got enough traffic to your site. Another step is to convert visitors into paying customers, as you won’t get any profit from watchers. There are some tricks you can use to increase transaction amounts and reduce the number of abandoned carts.

Shopping carts.Shopping cart gives you the ability to use upsell strategy to increase transaction amounts. Upsell offers are most effective when they are closely related to the current order. You can also use targeted campaigns. Segment customers into groups and prepare campaign for each of it. One of the most effective campaign is to offer a discount on the products that customer was viewing.

Checkout process. To make the buying process as quick and easy as possible is a fundamental rule in e-commerce is.
The more stages there are for the checkout, the longer it takes to fill in all the forms with additional information, the more likely the customers are to be frustrated and leave your store. In order to avoid this situation, customize the checkout process or install the turnkey solution.

Satisfy

Disappointing customer service usually leads to the fact that companies spend more on acquiring new customers.

It’s definitely not the easiest way of developing your business, as acquiring new customer costs 5 to 7 times more than retaining an existing customer. Besides, happy customers become advocates for your brand. They are driving referrals by sharing their experiences with friends, colleagues and social networks.

Service as a marketing strategy.
According to the recent research, 55% of customers purchased from a company because of their reputation for great customer service while 70% of consumers ended a relationship due to poor customer service.

Great customer service is a colossal competitive advantage. Positive experiences lead to repeat purchases and referrals. Service as a strategy has to be truly ingrained in your company’s core values. Every process, every decision, and every employee should act in alignment with this strategy in order to be successful.

Customer support.
You can use the following information to decide in which way to provide customer support. According to statistics, 54% of customers prefer to solve their issues via phone. The second most popular way of getting customer support is e-mail (23%). Take it in account, as customer convenience is important for resolving customer service problems

Affiliate

An affiliate program is one of the most powerful ways to market your products online. With well-organized affiliate program, you can gain increased traffic and sales, generate qualified leads, extend your brand awareness, and get better search engine rankings.

Get referrals.
Mutual acquaintance is the best way of attracting new people to your business. If you want to generate highly qualified leads, use customer referral programs! Your happy customer is the key to success. And don’t forget to reward for referrals with a gift or account credit.

Use affiliate programs.
Affiliates are an excellent way to drive traffic to your website and generate leads. Another great thing about affiliate programs is the ROI — you pay only for performance. You make a small investment in marketing and then pay affiliates for any leads or sales they generate. Your investment is minimal, so that’s the reason these programs can yield amazing returns.

I wish you well in all your beginnings! Keep on reading our blog to find some more interesting and useful information.