17


“Compare your own offer to your best competitors and be brutally honest. Ask yourself what they’re doing that’s better than you...”


6


Increase lifetime customer value


Lifetime customer value is a core performance metric and many ecommerce owners


don’t even understand how to calculate it, let alone track it. Simply Life Time Customer Value =


Revenue per customer per year You can use longer time periods


if you wish but a year is a good yardstick. Given this metric the following stats build up to create this figure Average order value x Number of


purchases per year per customer = Lifetime Customer Value You’ll want to monitor whether


lifetime value is decreasing or increasing and then map this back to key marketing or pricing decisions to ACTUALLY find out what’s going on in your business. Next you will want to find out


which marketing channels deliver the biggest customer lifetime values. Even break down Adwords campaign by lifetime value – i.e. don’t just look at the first sale, its customers that keep buying over and over that you want to recruit. Use your past sales data to look


for trends, by matching your highest valued customers against the first products they bought, along with the marketing channel they discovered your site with. Is there a product which when bought massively increases the chance of a repeat purchase? If so then it makes sense to push this product as a recruitment device over other ranges.


7 8


Use behavior to customise your site experience


At the moment, most ecommerce sites use behavioral email as an abandoned cart email. Whilst this is a great tool it only scratches the


surface of what you should and could be doing. Consider the following: 1. Follow up with existing customers and prospects who abandon the basket, product page or even category page (we’ve all seen Amazon do this well)


2. Customise newsletter emails with the last three products that customer viewed on the website to make emails relevant to them.


3. Add to the home page of the site products from the last category viewed, or the last three products viewed but not bought. Or even products often bought after the product they last bought.


You don’t have to have a ‘one size’ fits all site


– today your site can adapt on the fly and be so much more relevant to the customer.


Learn why your customers are unhappy


Your analytical tools give excellent insight as to why sales aren’t being made. Look into the details


surrounding internal searches followed by an exit, as this captures visitors who were looking for a product, but decided they didn’t like your offer. Compare your own offer to your best competitors and be brutally honest. Ask yourself what they’re doing that’s better than you, and put in place an improvement plan. High bounce rates are another cause of concern, especially on large category pages within your site. Experiment with different ordering of your products until you find the assortment which works best. Your most popular products should be prominently displayed.


9


Breathe life into your products


Every component of an ecommerce site needs to be enticing customers to buy.


A popular trend is to showcase “Best Seller,” and “Staff Pick” tags which help individual products stand out among hundreds in your product library. Look into your data, and set up similar tags for your key products, leveraging this best practice to help guide your customers in what they should be buying.


10


Never stop testing


Sign up for a tool like Optimizely (http://www.


optimizely.com) and start split testing different aspects of your site. Keep track of your most important metrics as you do this, and evaluate how alternate product pages, different layouts, a new checkout or revised sales copy affects performance. You can use tools like Qualaroo (https:// qualaroo.com/) and Whatusersdo (http:// whatusersdo.com/) to better understand what troubles people on your site and therefore what to test, so you can build an action plan to combat any red flags. When it comes to ecommerce,


performance is an ideal you always need to strive towards. A store customers love today will not remain competitive if you get complacent, so take time out of every day to improve one small aspect of your business. It takes effort and commitment to do it well, but the best part is you now have 10 areas to begin with, to start making a difference right now.


Direct Commerce | www.directcommercemagazine.com


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