The Easiest Way To Increase Sales...
Written by Benjamin Dyer
Tuesday, 06 December 2011 13:38
We’re all looking for a silver bullet to transform our online business, but experience has taught most of us it doesn’t exist. That’s why I want to make a special plea – read this article. I can’t guarantee a silver bullet result, but I do think there is a genuine chance that it could make a very significant difference to sales and profitability.
From experience I know that the majority of eCommerce merchants are always looking at ways to beat the competition, these are often much bigger online enterprises with infinitely more resource. A few months ago I had a conversation with a merchant who was utterly focused on beating a well known high street brand, but is this even possible?
In the past I’ve written about the advantages of going niche with your ecommerce store. This has its advantages, the most obvious of which is focus. I can absolutely assure you that focus will reduce your Adwords bill, often enabling you to spend wiser and be more targeted than the monsters of the ecommerce world. However while niche works for some it’s not appropriate for everyone, so what else is possible?
An alternative idea to niche is to employ the network effect. The network effect is what happens when a product or service becomes more valuable the more people use it. An example of this is Facebook. Facebook works best when you have spent time building your social map, connecting to your friends, family or work colleagues. The more connections you have, the richer the experience becomes. We can apply similar principles to your customers. Used correctly, the more customers you are engaged with, the richer ecommerce experience you are going to have.
One way of doing this is to empower your customers as advocates for your online store. The quickest and easiest way to do this is through customer feedback and reviews. At Actinic we have been working with a key innovator in this arena, Feefo. The goal of Feefo is to collect accurate reviews on behalf of both the customer and the business owner. Not only does this provide a rich source of information by allowing the customer to talk directly to the business owner; it can also publicise their opinion of your product or service on your website, their Facebook page, and now within Google search results and Adwords. It all sounds pretty scary, but if you are doing a good job then the more people that know about this the better. Also, who’s better to sell the benefits of your business than a satisfied customer? We all know that word of mouth recommendation is very powerful. With good feedback technology, this can be amplified many times over.
What’s more, it works. One customer carried out some detailed A/B testing. For a period of time they ran a copy of their website with and without FeeFo enabled, this was delivered to the same number of customers. The FeeFo powered site saw a 17% uplift in sales.
FeeFo can also be used as a cost saving tool. One major high street sports retailer used FeeFo to reduce the load on their customer service team by 25%.
However while these numbers are staggering, I still speak to merchants who have objections to the service.
One of these objections is the fear of a negative review and the impact it might have on your business. But negative reviews should be seen as an opportunity to demonstrate your customer service skills. With FeeFo you have the ability to openly reply and put things right. Even if you are a successful merchant a 100% positive rating is impossible, and it’s frankly unbelievable. So this leads to trust issues. I think I’m far from alone in preferring to shop with a merchant that has a high proportion of positive reviews and can also demonstrate a track record of resolving problems. The ability to turn a negative into a positive builds credibility. This cannot be emphasized enough and is actually the prime reason why results from feedback can be so staggering.
Another objection I come across from time to time is the in house review systems vs the independent. In this argument, independent reviews win every time. The first issue is trust; why would I trust a review posted on a site that isn’t independent? They can easily be manipulated and do nothing for real credibility. Secondly, for an in house system to work effectively the customer has to return to the site. With FeeFo the request for feedback is automatically triggered by the sales process. This leads to a much higher response rate, often up to 20%, which in turn leads to a drastic reduction in customer service demands.
One Actinic customer stated on the Actinic Community that they had more reviews with Feefo in the first two days then they did in two years with an in-house system.
FeeFo are winning the review space, customers of theirs include TK Maxx, Lands End, M and M Direct, Joe Browns and many others. With Actinic Desktop we have automated the whole process, making it quick and easy to implement and start using FeeFo immediately.
Using your customers as advocates for your online store makes complete sense, if you are a reputable merchant your customers could be that competitive advantage that enables you to beat the competition.