The secret to increasing sales in an online store
Certainly "loyalty" is not the first thing that comes to your mind when you are considering e-commerce or an online store. What place can an old-fashioned concept have in a modern world where customers click with their mouse and Google bots are looking for the best deals? What good can a virtue, that has value in a small town, offer to the anonymous and impersonal market of the worldwide web? Loyalty should logically be moving towards extinction, right?
And yet that is not the case, as global companies, operating in e-commerce, point out. Among these, the people of DELL and eBay, are particularly concerned about retaining their customers as they consider them to be crucial to the success of online sales, according to Harvard Business Review.
These people know that loyalty is financially necessary, as acquiring new customers online is extremely costly and that customers gained online will have to remain loyal to the company to ultimately deliver financial benefits.
They also know that loyalty is competitively necessary, as in any industry a company will understand how to take advantage of the capabilities of the Internet and create exceptional value for its customers at the expense of its competitors.
It is often heard that the internet has overturned all the old rules of business. But when it comes to customer loyalty, the rules remain the same. Loyalty is still about gaining the trust of the right customers, customers who you will provide with a consistently superior experience so that they want to work with you again.
These rules remain the same, whether it's about an online store or any business that is active on the internet.
The financial benefits of loyalty to an online store
In the Harvard Business Review's "Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services" survey, customer service costs and revenue were analyzed throughout their purchasing lives. The results have shown that due to the high cost of acquiring new customers, new relationships with customers usually do not have financial benefits during the first few years. Only in the following years, when the cost of servicing loyal customers is reduced, will these relationships yield significant profits. Specifically, it was found that a 5% increase in returning customers resulted in a 25% to 95% increase in revenue.
The same methodology was developed in e-commerce and in particular in an online bookstore, an online clothing store, an online grocery store, and an online electronics store. Findings showed that loyalty rules remain the same, and because of the higher cost of acquiring new customers in online stores than in physical stores, customer loyalty is even more necessary. Research also showed that the money spent by returning customers is increasing over time. Specifically, in the online clothing store, customers who returned spent almost twice as much in the second year of the collaboration as they did in the first six months of the collaboration with the online store.
Increase trust in an online store
Surveys of users who shop online often in online stores have shown that internet users shop from stores that they know and trust.
Price is not dominant on the internet, trust is
It is certainly difficult to gain customer trust in your online store. Customers cannot look in your eyes, nor check the physical space of your store to see how warm it is. In addition, customers cannot see or touch your products.
The high degree of difficulty does not mean that trust has ceased to apply to e-commerce. On the contrary, for this very reason, it is more imperative than ever! If you fail to gain the trust of internet users, someone else will.
But why is trust so important? Customers should trust you to hold their personal information as well as their credit card details and should know that it will be safe. They should also know that the product they receive will be exactly what they paid for and what you are describing to your online store, that it will not be damaged or broken, and that it will be shipped as soon as possible.
Attracting the right customers to an online store
Surely, there are internet users who buy only based on the price of the product. You may, accidentally, attract these users to your eCommerce. If you are sure you have the best price on the market, you may find that this is not a problem. But you will lose the right customers, that is, customers who do not just order based on price.
Why the customers who trust you are the "right" customers? The customers who will trust you are more likely to become loyal customers, that is customers who will shop over and over again from your online store. They are also likely to recommend your online store to their relatives and friends. It has been found by research that loyal customers can even provide technical support, e.g. to a friend of theirs who bought a product they recommended. Think for a minute what you have just read: Proper, loyal customers can play vendor or tech support roles, for free!
How to attract the right customers to an online store
Since online stores do not have the element of personal contact with customers, internet users can only decide whether to trust you from the image presented by your eCommerce.
THE FIRST IMPRESSION THAT THE ONLINE STORE CREATES
The first impression is extremely important and is capable of judging the staying and the loyalty of the customers in your online store. As we explain in our article "Website design to making the first impression", the first impression has been used in various areas such as medicine, psychology, marketing, etc. The first impression and the knowledge created during it, subconsciously remain and evolve over time and also affect user behavior.
ECOMMERCE DESIGN
Your website, or your online store, is the mirror of your business. The attention to the details, speed, and service you pay to your physical store, you should also pay to your online store. We have spent countless hours reading studies and searching for web design research. You can see the results of our research in our article "What is the correct website design?" The same rules apply to your online store.
ELECTRONIC STORE CONTENT
Online store content and the creation of new content are extremely important to your visitors, SEO, and search engines. When we say content, we mean the texts of your online store.
First of all, the texts of your online store are these that will drive organic traffic to your online store. Texts can also increase the length of time visitors are staying in your online store and subsequently increase your ranking. With the right texts and the right keywords, you can rank high in search engines. Content is the best way to attract the right customers. Customers who are not looking for just the product price.
You can create content either by creating articles or pages or by describing your products.
Articles will allow you to gain the most organic visitors when users are looking for information on the internet. Through articles, you can answer users' questions before they ask them. Articles will show that you know your job, love and care about what you do, so you can gain the loyalty and trust of your online store visitors.
Products descriptions can help you in two ways. First of all the description is text, so it has all the positive results we mentioned above. Also, a detailed product description can make you stand out from the competition when you are marketing products that hundreds or even thousands of others are also selling. A unique product description can have better results in the search engines as well as in the loyalty and trust of users in your online store.
There are other ways to increase online store sales that we will expand in our next articles.
If you would like to see how much a modern website can cost, which will help you achieve all of the above, you can check out our eCommerce products, hotel website development and web development. If you need more information, you can contact us.
