2010 Holiday E-commerce Solution #1: Always know your visitors and welcome them!

DoublePlus is pleased to present this highly informative series of the 10 BEST solutions to put in place with your e-commerce store for the holiday season. Click here to see the entire series.

Many sites have bounce rates approaching or surpassing 50%, meaning that 1 in 2 visitors leave the site after viewing the first page they land on. To be certain, some of these visitors may not be qualified potential customers and have no real interest in making a purchase. But the reality is that having one website page that isn’t at all personalized or engaging based on what the visitor searched on to come to the site, or where they were referred from, or whether this is their first or fifth visit to the site is just one problem with online commerce today.

There’s no excuse not to take advantage of every shred of information you have available to you from the second a visitor comes to your site. Personalization is key to engaging a website’s visitors. Knowing that your visitor comes from a search engine and what search terms they used are key bits of information about their interests. If this were a brick-and-mortar store, your sales reps wouldn’t hesitate to walk over and ask the visitor if they needed assistance, and if they mentioned that they wanted some candlesticks, to quickly direct them to the appropriate aisle in your store.

How do we recreate the helpful sales associate online?

For far too long, the problem in the e-commerce world has been no discernible way to repeat this type of customer service without being intrusive. Moreover, shoppers online have tended to prefer the no hassle visits because they can “walk out” any time they wish, but that cuts both ways, because we don’t want them to leave the site just because they didn’t find what they were looking for. We need to be more knowledgeable about what our visitors are looking for and rapidly acknowledge that we understand their needs and stand ready to meet them.

So, let’s focus on a cross-section of the different types of visitors you might have visit your store and how each of them may have different desires and interests that need to be met as they visit your online store.

1. First-time visitors: The first time visitor is getting the full effect of your site. Whether they realize it or not, they are judging your site’s aesthetics and overall usability, they are looking for the design elements that make them comfortable on a store. This may include professional graphics, intuitive navigational elements, well-written text, and a trustworthy checkout process. The first time visitor may not know art…they do know what they like! And if your store doesn’t quickly grab them, they’ll bounce.
2. Repeat visitor who has yet to make a purchase: This is the visitor who has been to the site multiple times, perhaps looking at the same product lines, perhaps not. They may have added items to their basket previously. At any rate, the intervals between visits, the time on site and the products they have looked at and/or placed in the basket are all items you need to pay attention to.
3. Customer who has placed a single order in the past: When a customer who has purchased before returns, you want to let them know that you appreciate them and are ready to assist them however possible. This is someone who has already made the “emotional investment” of purchasing from you, you’ve engendered trust with them, and clearly they have some interest in continuing a relationship with you, as indicated by their return.
4. Repeat customer with high average order value (AOV): The Very Important Person (VIP) visitor is someone with whom you know you have a solid relationship that you want to continue cultivating. You’d like to sell to this person on a regular basis and even convince this customer to become a recommender of your store to their friends.

Experience Personalization

Even though we outlined four customer segments above, many retailers could come up with a host of others that would suit their business needs and market segment. However, while this list isn’t all-inclusive, it does capture a nice representation of visitor types that you will want to effectively segment and target for personalization. The point of experience personalization is that it makes your site sticky – and the stickier the site is, the more likely you are to see a repeat visit.

Melton Tackle sees that I'm from Florida and welcomes me accordingly.

Conceptually, experience personalization is the idea of effectively targeting the visitor based on everything that we can know about them from their first visit. There are a number of ways you can do this:

• Show a welcome messages acknowledging that this is the first visit, or welcoming them back if its a return visit
• Present special offers if they are repeat customers or VIPs
• Keep track of items they have viewed with a Recently Viewed Products display
• Offer the convenience of a Perpetual Cart display that retains the items they had placed in their shopping cart on a previous visit

These are just a few areas you can focus on, and they are all features of our Click2Customer solution. The C2C product suite, which integrates directly with your shopping cart, can provide the features we are discussing here. With C2C you can track how many times someone visits, the type of pages they view, and products they add to their cart. You can determine what offers have been provided to the visitor in the past, and the effectiveness of each one.

The point is that you need to make an effort to know your customers, keep your site offers and information fresh based on their needs and what they are looking for, and remember that each visit has the potential to affect YOUR bottom line. In the end, if you create a personalized experience that satisfies their needs, then a purchase is all but guaranteed.

In our next installment, we’ll focus on creating Targeted Recommendations and how analyzing what a visitor does on your site can affect their personalized product recommendations for the better.