Your loyal customers can be a critical channel of revenue for your store. Auctiva Commerce can help you retain customers by helping indentify the most valuable customers and encouraging them to continue shopping on your store.
Why Promote Loyalty?
Just because you have repeat customers does not mean that you necessarily need a customer loyalty program. Some stores may get repeat business because they offer hard to find products, or shipping to a region that no other store can provide. Before you start cutting your customers a deal, understand the risk and opportunities that are associated with promoting customer loyalty with coupons and other savings.
As a general rule, customer loyalty programs are focused on retaining customers who might otherwise do business with a competitor. The sole purpose is to help a business keep its current customers. Are you doing business in a competitive market? If so, you should strongly consider investing some time and money into developing a customer loyalty program that will help keep your customers coming back to you.
Even if you don’t have a lot of competition, you can always consider giving loyal customers something in return to show your appreciation. Just make sure that your promotion is in line with your business goals. If there is really no risk in losing a particular customer, you probably should not consider giving them a deep discount. That will eat up your profit margins. In this case, you may want to consider a customer loyalty program that simply adds value using means other than discounting prices with coupons. A simple Thank You email message is a great way to show your appreciation and it won’t take anything out of your profit margins.
What Customers Should I Target?
The important customers to target for loyalty programs are the most valuable customers that are at the highest risk of shopping somewhere else. Valuable customers can be shoppers who frequently make purchases or shoppers that have only visited once, but made a large purchase. Sales volume is usually the metric you’ll use to determine the customer’s value. In Auctiva Commerce, you can view a customer’s shopping history and see just how much that person has spent on your store. We’ll show you how to do that later in this post.
Read more…
It’s not uncommon that a web visitor will want to take a closer look at who they’re buying from before purchasing something from your store. That’s why a well written About Us page is an important part of your storefront. After all, you are the heart and soul of your business. Let’s take a closer look at how you can create the best About Us page for your store and make shoppers feel right at home.
Creating a New WebPage
Let’s create a new page for the About Us information. Most web visitors look for this information when they want to learn about who they’re buying from. We’ve got a step-by-step tutorial for creating a new WebPage that you can read or just follow the abbreviated instructions here:
- Log in to your Auctiva Commerce administration.
- Hover your mouse over the Store menu and click on the WebPages option.
- Then click on the Webpage icon in the Add WebPages box.
- In the Page Title field enter “About Us” (without quotation marks).
Now let’s turn our attention to the actual content in this page. This information goes in the “Page Content” field. You can click on the HTML Editor icon if you want to use this tool to format your content.
About Us Content Approaches
Your About Us page is another store branding opportunity that allows you to communicate who you are and your business values to potential customers. This opportunity shouldn’t be taken lightly. Let’s sharpen our pencils and get ready for a quick writing workshop. First, let’s reflect on our store branding rules:
- Keep It Simple
- Keep It Brief (this is the Internet after all)
- Be informative, Be Yourself
With these rules in mind, let’s aim at writing about 150 words or 6-8 sentences for our About Us page. You can certainly write more if you like, but remember the most basic purpose of this page is to prove to skeptical buyers that you are a real person and not a scammer. That can easily be done in a few sentences, especially when you focus on being yourself. Make sure to personalize this text where possible and also clearly illustrate the benefits of doing business with you. To achieve this goal, let’s take a look at a few examples.
Read more…
Product descriptions hold a lot of valuable information about the type of products you sell, which mean that they are also a great resource for search engine bots to use when indexing keywords. Let’s take a closer look at this field and see what you can do to help improve your search rankings.
Killing Two Birds with One Product Description Field
Not only are product descriptions useful to search engine bots, but these fields are critical in making the sale. Shoppers will read product descriptions to learn everything they need to know about the product before adding it to their cart for checkout. When we optimize this field for search engines, we must also keep the reader (the buyer) in mind as well. This field is an opportunity to build a narrative that is rich with keywords that add meaning and value to the customer. Always keep that in mind. Not only do we want to rank higher in search results, we want to convert this web traffic to paying customers.
Your Headings Really Matter
Search engines weigh different sections of content more heavily than others and one signifier of importance is a header tag (that’s HTML lingo). A header tag breaks down to several levels of importance, starting from h1 (i.e., the highest of importance) and going down to h5 or beyond. On your Auctiva Commerce store, the most important content is stored in h1 headers. For example, the Featured Products heading on your homepage is enclosed in the h1 tag. This hints to the search bots that this is the most important part of the page. The hope is that the search engine bots will pay close attention to the products that you are featuring.
When it comes to product pages, there’s a different hierarchy for the importance of information. For example, the Page Header is enclosed in the h1 header tag and the Product Description is enclosed in an h2 header tag. So, search engine bots will weigh the keywords in the Page Header as more important. But it won’t stop them from crawling the Product Description for more keywords. Using the HTML editor in the Product Description field, you can add more header tags should you want to create more opportunities to signify levels of importance. For example, you could add another heading in the Product Description field and enclose it in an h3 tag.
The artist in all this header madness knows what to emphasize as important. Ask yourself, what is so important that it deserves a header tag in the Product Description field? Start to answer that question by remembering who your audience is. It’s not the search engine bots; it’s your potential customers. What would be important to them? Search engines do their job by connecting people to the content that they’re looking for. If it’s important to your shopper, it’s likely they’ll be searching for that keyword. Let’s take a look at an example.
Read more…
Many of you who are long-time store owners probably have an address book full of customers you’ve done business with in the past. But, are you aggressively collecting email addresses of store visitors who are simply browsing your store? Capturing this audience will get you one step closer to converting visitors to paying customers. This is a top priority for both new store owners and those who’ve been doing business for quite some time.
We’ll show you a simple and effective way to start capturing email addresses of web visitors so that you can create a dialog with these potentially profitable visitors. In our example exercise, we’ll use a store launch event as the hypothetical situation. So, if you’re new to Auctiva Commerce this will be right up your alley. More experienced store owners can customize this lesson to fit their specific needs. We’ll be giving you suggestions on how to do that as we go along.
The Power of Email Lists
Email lists are a terrific selling tool. It allows you to frequently keep in touch with your customers and drive high-quality traffic to your store. There are a variety of ways to do email lists, including a guerilla-style technique where you send emails to your email list through your standard email client (e.g., Microsoft Outlook or some other email application). This is one of the least expensive ways to operate an email list, however, it can become difficult to manage and design your email campaigns. This method also does not automate opt-in or opt-out functions or provide analytical data.
A good email list managing tool will automate the most essential email managing tasks and provide insights into the success of your email campaigns. This means that when you send an email to the recipients in your email list, you’ll be able view how many of those people open the email and how many of those click on a link within the email (i.e., the click through rate). This additional information can help you decide the value of the emails you send as well as assess which types of emails drive the most valuable traffic back to your store. Let’s say you want to feature a new product on your store next month. What kind of marketing copy would compel your email recipients to buy this product? You could write a hard sale, such as “Just Added to Our Inventory-Get 10% off Now.” Or, would you do better with something softer by writing a paragraph about the product itself and why you are excited to offer it on your store? These are difficult questions to answer, but a good email list tool should be able to offer us some insights. We encourage you to take a closer look at these tools and see if they’re right for you.
Email List Setup Summary
Here’s what we’re going to do:
- Plan our Email Signup Workflow
- Create a MailChimp account. We’ll tell you more about these monkeys later.
- Create a new email list.
- Create a Sign-Up form.
- Create a new WebPage in Auctiva Commerce.
- Create a link to the New WebPage from the Home Page.
We won’t discuss how to do an email campaign in this exercise. We’ll talk about email campaigns at a later date. This exercise is simply for creating the “net” that will capture web visitors so that we can sell to them, later. Let’s dig in.
Read more…
Social networking is exploding—and with it, the technique of viral marketing, or using social networks and word-of-mouth advertising to create buzz about new products or brands.
To read the complete article, check out our Auctiva Education Section.
DID YOU KNOW?
Nielson Online reports that YouTube is the No. 1 entertainment site for consumer product advertising. Videos provide great advertising—and they can be very entertaining.
Micro-blogging site Twitter can also be a great tool for promoting specials and discounts. Many businesses are already using “tweets” to promote their enterprises. According to one survey, 66 percent of respondents said Twitter was “somewhat” or “extremely” important to their business.
WHAT CAN YOU DO?
- FaceBook: Connect with Groups that could be interested in your products; if you sell dog-care products, find an animal-lovers group.
- YouTube: Create a fun “how-to” using your products. Become an expert within your line of products.
- Twitter: Tweet about Sales and Specials. Provide a special discount to your followers.
Now go start connecting with others. Your Auctiva Commerce Store will greatly benefit from the exposure. Post links to your store in your social-network accounts, and link to any videos you make in your store’s “About Us” page. Remember, when it comes to spreading the word about your store, it’s all about going viral.
Remember, Auctiva Commerce has a complete Help Section, replete with step-by-step tutorials and video guides.
If you have questions or comments, please visit our Community Forums.
And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter!
