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Marketing 2: keeping customers

For too long, on-line businesses have focused on acquiring customers through advertising, public relations, viral marketing and anything else they could dream up. But

a customer who has bought from you in the past, and was happy with the experience is more likely to buy again than a customer who has just been brought in via a marketing ploy
Over 50% of e-commerce transactions are abandoned for reasons which include slow to download web pages, confusing usability, crashing browsers, etc (see explanations below).

There are four areas on which you must focus to encourage customers to stay on your web site, buy from you and come back again.

1. Usability

A lot of e-commerce web sites seem to be designed to confuse customers:

It's difficult to know which button to click to enter the shop
It's hard find the product you want
The shopping cart system is incomprehensible
Web pages take forever to download
Customers must sit through absurd animations before entering the e-shop.

These are known as usability problems - because they make web sites more difficult to use. Part of the problem is that designers get more excited about cool technology and sophisticated designs than usability. In fact, simply structured web sites - like mine (most designers would tell you my site is very boring!) - which follow some basic usability guidelines, are far easier for customers to use than cutting edge ones. To make matters worse, web designers often have fast Internet connections and don't realise that sophisticated graphics, animations or java can take a long, long time to download on a computer with a dial-up connection. The kind of system many consumer customers will have

In any event, the result is the same. Users get confused, can't find what they want or their web browser crashes: and they look for a new on-line shop to serve their needs.

www.useit.com and www.uie.com are two good resources for usability information.

2. Content

Some e-commerce web sites have poor quality content that doesn't give customers enough information about their products, their company or their service. If people can't get sufficient information about products (remember: on the web, customers can't ask a sales clerk as they might in a shop), they will neither buy the products nor come back again. Likewise, if the web site does not provide complete information about shipping times, shipping costs, returns policy, contact info, etc, visitors will neither buy nor visit again. Worse, without this information, visitors are unlikely to trust the e-shop, making it even more unlikely they will buy or come back again.

3. Fun Content

In addition to descriptive content, consider putting fun content on your web site. Many on-line book, video and other merchants invite customers to review their products. Other web shops have developed games, discussion boards and articles that aim to make the web site more fun. Such content - particularly if updated regularly - can be tremendously effective. It not only encourages visitors to return often, but it also leads to people recommending your web site to others. Once you've got your on-line shop up and running, brainstorm for fun content.

4. Customer service

Unfortunately, many companies are focusing on Customer Relation Management (CRM) tools to deeply analyse their customers. Instead, these companies should be focusing on serving their customers. One big reason why Amazon has become the most famous name in business to consumer (B2C) e-commerce is because they have focused on customer service and providing a positive customer experience from the beginning.

In short, do to your customers as you would have other merchants do to you.

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