How Independent Retail Can Own The Next Decade of E-commerce

We sit at the crossroads of a major shift in retail.  The long rise of mass-market offline stores has stopped, and the only unstoppable force is E-commerce.  While the first decade was the Amazon-decade, it is the unfolding E-commerce fragmentation that will be the story of the next ten years.  Amazon will always get theirs, but the emerging winners will be the smaller brands and retailers who best adapt to the unique retailing experience that E-commerce allows.

The rise of mass-market retail has been about convenience, broad selection, and price. But online shoppers can open five browsers and shop just as broadly and easily as they would in a large department store.  Sites with broad selection remain discovery engines for shoppers, but their Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are more powerful discovery vehicles because they tap into word-of-mouth marketing, and, as Seth Godin likes to say, “The Internet takes word-of-mouth and leverages it by a factor of 1,000…every single day.”

Independent retailers, well before the recent maker/artisan/crafted movement, were already the brands with unique products, stories and a special touch.  But this growing movement, especially among 20-40 year old consumers, is giving them an even bigger opportunity.

These trends result in a “bubbling cocktail” that will dramatically change the retail landscape.  In this world, retailers should focus on consistent communication with customers, fans and followers to build a vibrant advocacy network.  And below are a few best practices to follow.

1.Tell Your Customer’s Story

In a recent interview with Venture Capitalist Hunter Walk, Lee Zalben of Peanut Butter & Co. discussed his formula for growing from one retail location into an E-commerce powerhouse.  The cornerstone of his two-way communication with customers is recipes.  His company creates its own content to market their peanut butter products, but it is the multiplication of these efforts through the creative recipes of customers that is the gas on the fire.  Now, what’s so revolutionary about that – food + recipes?

Nothing, but the broader lesson is that any brand, in any industry is just an ingredient in their customers’ lives.  Your product is an ingredient in the outfit recipe, the room recipe, or the morning routine recipe. Simply ask customers what “recipe” they are creating with your product.  ”Show us the room where you put our table,”  or “Show us what you’re wearing our tie with.”  People like to share, but they need a little encouragement.
 
2.Thank You’s and Check In’s

The “thank you” adds a personal touch to your brand to separate you from everyone else who is not doing it (especially mass-merchants).  The “check-in”, however, can lead in many beneficial directions including by opening up a conversation with customers.  Benefits include: a) heading off a complaint, b) getting specific product feedback, and c) facilitating sharing and referrals.
 
3.Take the Long View (by focusing on “microconversions”)

What does the long view mean in eCommerce? It means micro-conversions.
You certainly hope new visitors simply click-through on a product right away and become a customer. However, that only happens a few percent of the time. So rather than view shopping visits as 95% bad and 5% good, use micro-conversions to change your positive outcomes to 25% or maybe even 50%.

Your goal is to get permission from these new shoppers to talk to them in the future. The most common way is through email signups.   Another popular way is to get visitors to follow you on social media. So make those things easy for them as they browse across your site. Also, make it easy for them to pin and share product images, your logo and your story. Lastly, let visitors create wishlists and make it really easy to give feedback or ask a question – more micro-conversions.
 
4. Segment and Experiment

Now that you have a growing audience who has granted you permission, it’s time to learn how to convert them into big buyers. The first thing to recognize is they are not a monolithic group. They are lots of mini-segments of tastes and styles and behavior. The trick is to split them up based on the behavior you’ve noticed from them into segments (there are tools for this).  Then, it’s time to craft different communications for each one and test and measure, test more and measure more until you’ve found the secret sauce for each segment.

It takes a lot of work to get found in the crowded world of E-commerce, so once you get shoppers to your store, it’s critical to nurture them. Make efforts to invite them into your brand world in lighter ways rather than just trying to shove them down the purchase funnel.  And once they become customers, engage with them regularly and mix their stories into your brand marketing.

By Charles Valentine, Co-Founder, Lumiary.com
About Lumiary
Lumiary helps independent retailers connect all of their sales and marketing channels, and generate insights based on best practices through an elegant, easy-to-use Software-as-a-Service platform.


To view the original article please visit: http://insider.asdonline.com/2015/02/how-independent-retail-can-own-the-next-decade-of-e-commerce/

5 Customer Engagement Best Practices That Will Dramatically Boost Your Business

by: Kathy Caprino

We can find a hundred articles a day online today about “customer engagement” but to me, a good deal of it sounds like lip service – slick advice about how to appear deeply interested in and connected to your customer, and how to “convince” (dare I say “trick”) customers into thinking you really care. “In reality, says Zendesk’s Founder and CEO Mikkel Svane, “many organizations still view customer service as a cost center that is an unfortunate necessity.”

I was intrigued to learn about Svane’s new book, Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business that shares the real-life story of how he and two thirty-something Danish friends started a company in the kitchen of a Copenhagen loft. It’s a modern “making it in Silicon Valley story” that will resonate with founders just getting started to serial entrepreneurs with similar battle scars. It’s a story of people who pursued their dream—and who against a lot of odds had a chance to live it. It’s also a story about growing up—and how balancing vulnerability and curiosity isn’t always easy. Now, Zendesk is an 800-person company based in San Francisco that has made a significant impact on the customer service industry in just seven years, with over 45,000 clients in 140 countries.

Mikkel Svane Photo Courtesy of Zendesk

Svane shares this:
“You often hear this advice heading into marriage: don’t stop working at making the relationship better, and don’t ever take the other person for granted. Learning how to build a great customer relationship is not that different from learning how to build meaningful relationships in our personal lives. The sooner we are able to understand that we are not the center of the universe, and that it is a privilege for us to be in the lives of our customers, the better our company will do.

In my new book Startupland, I chronicle our entrepreneurial journey from three guys in a Copenhagen loft to launching and building Zendesk, a global cloud-based customer service platform. It’s a very personal story about how we started in the early days, but most importantly, it’s about all the relationships that shaped us along the way. These experiences have deeply impacted our company culture and values and how we interact with our customers on a daily basis.

Along this journey, we learned some great tips on how to build better relationships with customers. Here are five of my own customer engagement secrets to help improve your business.”

Svane’s five customer engagement best practices are:

Consider the entire customer experience.

Customers have a much better memory than companies do. The better you are at putting yourself in their shoes and having empathy to see what the entire customer journey looked like for them, the more successful you will be. The customer who was extremely excited and waited in line for hours to buy the new iPhone is the same person who tweets and blogs about it when it breaks. Those two moments are connected, and you must connect the dots.

 

Tip: Did you get an angry email with a customer wanting a return on something? Have your customer service team browse the customer’s public social channels back a few weeks or months to get an idea for their “entire experience.” Maybe they were a brand evangelist just three months ago, or the purchase was a birthday present for their child. It is important to know the context outside of the initial complaint and to understand the entire relationship of a customer to your company.

Recognize the right relationships and adapt.
Not every relationship is created equal. Some friends are great to meet up with at the bars, others are lifelong friends you keep in touch with despite differing geographies, and others simply wave when you pass by. The goal is to have the right relationship with each individual – and being able to speak to each person in a language that resonates with them. This requires becoming skilled at reading people. Figure out how to accept and improve the relationships you have, and say “no” when a customer relationship is unhealthy.

Tip: Ever heard of the book, The 5 Love Languages? The New York Times bestseller posited that people give and receive love in different languages, and that it’s all about making sure two people are speaking the right languages to each other. Although the book is meant for personal relationships, it’s a great concept you can apply to customer relationship building. Each customer is unique and can feel “loved” in different ways. Does one customer care more about the tone to which they are spoken? Or another care less about tone and more about a quick solution? Think about what these categories are and how you can speak the right language to the right person.

Be something actual humans can relate to.
People like talking to humans, not robots. Back in the day, when we were first starting out with the company, we tried making fancy emails that were perfect and without typos. No one responded. Then we decided we would change it up a bit. We’d craft more personal and unique opening sentences. We added spelling errors. Soon, we realized that we were getting a higher response rate. Once our customers saw that there was a human being (and not a robot) writing all these responses, they were more willing to write us back and interact with us.

If you asked any customer to choose between a “bot” that worked behind some virtual customer service desk versus a real, smiling, human being, of course they would choose the latter. It is not just a “nice to have” when it comes to having a personality as a company, it is vital, when customers have so many other choices in the marketplace. Many companies don’t succeed because they forget to be human.

Tip: In every message that you send to customers, leave one line where you add in something unique and personal. Is your customer back in the east coast going through the worst storm of the year? Include a line wishing that they are staying safe and warm this week. Talk to them like you would talk to your friend.

Empower people to do what’s best.

You should always encourage your employees to act like people.  This means giving them the freedom and room to be who they are – listen how they would listen to a friend – or solve a problem creatively, with their special touch. Did you really screw up on an order? Send them a pizza with the words “I’m Sorry” spelled out in pepperoni. I am sure your customer would appreciate this much more than a canned “I’m Sorry” email. Little mistakes or inefficiencies will inevitably occur when you allow people to make their own decisions, but the business can embrace these as the very things that make the business easier for customers to relate to – and ultimately, more human.

Tip: Encourage each member of your customer service team to come up with one thing that is their “personal signature.” Do they love inserting funny GIFs into messages to get a smile from a customer? Do they have one “grand gesture” they can offer if there is a key customer you’re trying to make happy or win back (i.e. spontaneous pizza delivery)? Empower them to bring to the table how they can best help customers in their own personal, unique voices.

Be truly transparent.
Once you lift the veil between you and your customer and they see that you are being real with them, you’d be surprised how much more empathy you will get from their end. People relate to and appreciate organizations that are open and honest. It’s not a perfect world, and sometimes you will not be able to serve up a solution on a silver platter in exactly the way they would want. Give them all the information you have – good or bad – and in a timely manner. We are up against years of people feeling like companies are not on their side and that they are out to get them with hidden fees and confusing return policies. The only way to build the kind of trust that lasts is to show your cards.

Tip: Don’t be afraid to share reasons for a delay in response. Are you understaffed because a team member had a personal family emergency? Share that. Once you show that behind your brand is a team of real, breathing people, just like them, it becomes easier to build a mutual understanding of trust and empathy.
Finally, remember there has never been a more important time for a company to focus on building authentic, real, relationships with their customers than now. For a lot of businesses, building customer loyalty means rewarding repeat behavior. You buy a sandwich five times and you get the fifth one free – but are they coming back because they love your sandwiches and the interactions they have with your employees, or are they coming back for a free meal? Customers are people who have a very tangible experience with your product and brand, and it should be the mission of your company to make sure it is an authentic and meaningful one. The customer voice has never been louder.

To view the original article please visit: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathycaprino/2015/01/19/5-customer-engagement-best-practices-that-will-dramatically-boost-your-business/3/

15 Customer Retention Strategies that Work

About the author: Gregory Ciotti

Customer retention is incredibly important for growing a sustainable business, but before we look at some strategies for improving it, let's put an important data point front and center:

 

According to the Harvard Business School, increasing customer retention rates by 5 percent increases profits by 25 percent to 95 percent.

This is important to consider when evaluating your own customer loyalty strategies because in the customer service echo-chamber there is a lot of "hoo rah" about taking care of customers, but little discussion on the business side of things.

At Help Scout, we do things differently; we're all about loving customers, but we also aim to prove that great service is more than just the right thing to do—it's also good business sense.

In order to help you increase your own retention rates, we've compiled a list of our 15 favorite tips (backed by academic research and case studies) on increasing customer loyalty, divided into five easy-to-browse sections.

Let's begin!

Communication

It's hard to create loyal customers if they aren't paying attention to you. Given this fact, below are our favorite bits of research on clear communication with customers.

 

1. Stand for something.

The quickest way to get customers to ignore you is to not stand for anything. A study by the Corporate Executive Board that included 7,000 consumers from across the U.S. found that of those consumers who said they had a strong relationship with a brand, 64 percent cited shared values as the primary reason. If you want loyal customers, you need them to care about you ... so what do YOU stand for? 

2. Utilize positive social proof.

While negative social proof ("Nearly 90 percent of websites don't use heat mapping software!") has been proven to dissuade customers rather than encourage them, numerous studies on customer motivation have shown that positive social proof ("Join 20,000 of your peers!") is often the most effective strategy for getting people to listen.

 

3. Invoke the inner ego.

Despite what we often say, most people like things that resemble them in some way. This cognitive bias is called implicit egotism, and is an important thing to keep in mind when communicating with customers. In order to attract the sort of customers you want, you need to identify your target customers down to the last detail and then craft a brand message that perfectly matches their pains, goals and aspirations. It's easier to fill this existing demand than to create one.

Selling

If customers don't enjoy your selling process, they'll likely never do business with you again. Thus, selling to customers the "correct" way is an integral part of creating customer loyalty. Below are a few studies to help you improve the process.

4. Use the words they love to hear.

Not all words are created equal. Certain persuasive words encourage customers to buy more than others, in particular: free, new and instantly. When customers hear these words (and the promises they imply are backed up), they'll enjoy their purchases more than they would have otherwise.

 

5. Reduce pain points and friction.

All businesses, no matter the industry, are going to have to sell to the three types of buyers that are out there. According to neuroeconomics experts, nearly a quarter of these buyers will be conservative spenders, or "tightwad" customers. George Lowenstein of Carnegie Mellon University recommends using bundles, reassuring words (e.g., change "a $5 fee" to "a small $5 fee") and reframing as strategies to better sell to these conservative buyers. Read more about his advice here.

Reciprocity

Reciprocity is the social construct that makes the world go 'round ... or in your case, keeps your customers coming back. The premise is simple: Go above and beyond for customers and get rewarded with repeat business. The execution, however, can be trickier, so below is a compilation of interesting research on how to improve reciprocity with your customers.

 

6. Realize that budget is negligible.

Giving back to customers can appear incredibly costly, but it doesn't have to be. Instead, embrace the art of the frugal wow by understanding that reciprocity is built even with small gestures. In fact, psychologist Norbert Schwarz found that as little as 10 cents can create reciprocity between two individuals (it really is the thought that counts!).

7. Utilize surprise reciprocity.

Although reciprocity works incredibly well on it's own, research shows that it is even *more* powerful when started by surprise. For a simple example, recall a time that someone did something nice for you unexpectedly; the gesture probably wasn't all that unusual, but the fact that it came out of nowhere left a strong impression on you.

8. Make it personal.

In a study from the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, researchers found that waiters could increase their tips by 23 percent by the simple act of returning to tables with a second set of mints. So do mints have magic powers? Apparently not: The researchers concluded that the mints created the feeling of a personalized experience among the customers who received them. So it was the personalized service received that made them enjoy their experience so much more.

Support

This one is a no-brainer: You can't create a tribe of loyal customers without an exceptional customer service experience that keeps them coming back. In this section, we're going to bust a few customer service myths wide open, as well as tackle some important things you need to keep in mind when offering support online.

 

9. Speed is secondary to quality.

When it comes to customer service that keeps people coming back, the research shows that quality matters more than speed. According to a study by the Gallup Group, customers were nine times more likely to be engaged with a brand when they evaluated the service as "courteous, willing, and helpful," versus the "speedy" evaluation, which only made customers six times more likely to be engaged.

10. Customers enjoy businesses who know them.

Telling your employees to spend more time with customers might seem like folly, but smart entrepreneurs know that isn't the case. Numerous behavioral psychology studies have shown that everybody views their service experience as more positive when they don't feel rushed or ignored. Don't spend time idly, though; have employees attempt to find out key customer traits, just like Derek Sivers did with his employees at CD Baby.

 

11. Choose the right platform.

The best way to improve your online customer service efforts is to utilize the channel your customers most prefer. Although recent research has shown that a majority of people still prefer and use email more than other services (including social networking), you need to pick the channel that makes the most sense for your business. Hosting companies know that online chats are critical when their customers’ sites go down, but other businesses may have customers who are just fine using email as their primary method of contact.

 

12. Make it a communal effort.

Countless case studies have made one thing clear when it comes to creating an efficient support system: You need to keep everybody in the loop. At Help Scout, we use tools like Campfire to access real-time notifications of what's happening on the customer end; we were able to improve our response time by 340 percent by enabling a support room that all employees can access. Read more about how we did it.

Loyalty Programs

The key to creating customer loyalty programs that work is to know why customers use them and what gets customers to keep using them. Below you'll find consumer research that answers these questions.

 

13. Get people started.

Consumer researchers Joseph Nunes and Xavier Dreze are known for their studies on The Endowed Progress Effect. Their results have conclusively shown that the biggest wall that prevents customer loyalty programs from sticking is getting people started. They've shown through their notorious "car wash study" that people are twice as likely to finish loyalty cards if they are automatically started (or rewarded) as soon as they sign up. Read more about this process here.

14. Get ideal customers to be VIPs.

Additional research by Nunes on loyalty programs has shown that people just love being VIPs or gold members of programs. There is one caveat, though. This only works when people know there is a class below them on the totem pole. Speaking to human nature, Nunes saw a notable increase in gold members’ participation as soon as he implemented a lesser silver class.

 

15. Label your customers.

A research study on voting patterns conducted by Stanford University conclusively showed that people are more likely to participate in something if they are labeled with a positive trait. Our friends at Buffer refer to their premium customers as "awesome" members, and even label their upgraded payment plan as the "Awesome Plan"—a much easier phrase to embrace than "paid member."

To view the original article visit: http://www.helpscout.net/blog/customer-retention-strategies-that-work/