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Expert Advice
For Success in e-Commerce
Our team of e-Commerce experts outline an effective strategy for increasing and optimising your sales!
 
e-Commerce is entering an era of “M-Commerce” which has a strong influence on sales: according to a study by d’O² a shop’s sales can increase by 8% by personalising the shopping experience.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) has in just a few years become a key factor in e-tailers’ success. Customer relations are linked to your brand image, which is connected to the increase or decrease in your number of customers and depends on how much of a priority you make them. Having a CRM solution gives you the opportunity to interact with your customers and create closer relationships with them. This means getting to know them better, winning their trust, building loyalty and increasing your sales. These goals are perfectly in line with your ambitions as an e-tailer when you double your efforts to strengthen your brand and reputation.

Let’s look in detail at what makes CRM an essential tool for e-tailers today.
THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND:
1. Having a personal relationship with your customers means building their trust in your brand and your website.
2. More customisation = more sales, more customer loyalty and a better average shopping cart.
3. With the information collected and treated by your CRM you can better segment your customer database and target your customers with customised messages.
4. You can turn your most loyal customers into ambassadors for your brand and use this to your and their advantage with referral schemes.
5. CRM also means social: discussions on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest will help you better understand your customers, their needs and attract more prospects.
6. RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) offers you a way to segment customers so you can offer them specific deals and increase your sales.
CRM and Data helping you grow your e-Commerce business
01 CRM: What’s hiding behind these three little letters
CRM is a range of tools (databases, email marketing, satisfaction surveys, community management, etc.) that enables you to get to know your customers better, meet their needs, offer them a personal shopping experience and adapt your communication according to the data you collect. CRM can also refer to a specific domain such as Social-CRM which means community management, a priority in e-Commerce today in which comments and ratings allow your clientele to form an opinion of your brand, even before visiting your site.

Good CRM will help make your site a familiar place for your customers, like their favourite store they go to so often the employees know and recognise them. You’ll learn what kind of advice your customers are looking for, what they might be interested in, their buying habits and also what will put them off. Customers always appreciate a personalised approach, whether it’s a question of clicking on an email promotion, customer referral, answering a satisfaction questionnaire or leaving a customer review. The more you use the data you have, the more you’ll collect.

Your data has to be good quality to be usable, which is why you should take your CRM solution seriously. The specific data (buying history, personal data, interests, newsletter or push promotion reactivity, which promotions they respond to etc.) concerning key e-Commerce factors allows you to tailor your offers, animate your sales, decide which products you are going to put on sale etc. With this data you can segment your customer database by evaluating your clientele and separating different groups that you can target more specifically. This will lead to more effective sales strategies and grow your prospecting base.
02 CRM: a tool for e-Commerce growth
How will using a CRM solution to collect data help you? It will lead to more sales, more recurring sales and a higher average shopping cart. It’s a tempting prospect, and our e-Commerce experts are here to help you achieve it.
Let’s look at the different tips and benefits of CRM that could help you increase your sales in the next few weeks!
- Better Segmenting
Segmenting your prospects is the foundation of marketing. Without this step, you would only have a vague idea of the people you’re trying to sell your products to and your marketing strategies would be a one-size-fits-all approach. By segmenting your customer database you know what profiles your customers fall under and can send them the right products, promotions and messages at the right time to lead to purchases.

- Personalise your messages
How many times have you read a newsletter that you weren’t interested in and that seemed like it was targeted to a mass audience? Probably never. Personalising your messages is essential to make your customers feel like they aren’t just numbers. A study by Aberdeen Group showed that 75% of consumers appreciate brands that personalise their offers and messages. Customers who appreciate your approach will remember your brand name and will put you at the top of their lists when choosing where to make a purchase.

- Automatic retargeting emails
Automatic messages are essential to reduce your number of abandoned shopping carts. In 2013 for Whereoware an automatic email campaign proved to be very effective with a 40% open rate, 47% average click through rate and a confirmation of 9% of abandoned shopping carts. These retargeting emails are possible by using CRM effectively and will improve your results.
  • Click here for more details on retargeting emails and 10 other tips to lower your abandoned shopping carts in this previous Oxatis Expert Advice

- The tools necessary for really building customer loyalty
You can go far in your loyalty programs with the help of CRM. In order for your loyalty offers to work they need to be targeted to correspond with different customer profiles. The more you build customer loyalty, the more information you’ll have on your customers and the more you can customise offers and promotions to meet each individual’s expectations. You can strengthen your customer relations even more by offering exclusive offers (private sales) and/or limited-time offers. This will make your customers want to keep coming back and benefit from their special status. This is a technique at the heart of Oxatis' loyalty program that you can activate for your site in just a few seconds.
  • Refresh your memory and take a look at the Oxatis Experts’ tips for building customer loyalty
Above and beyond loyalty, you can turn your best customers into ambassadors for your brand. How does an ambassador system work? With referral schemes. The customer, motivated by the advantages for him/herself and the person they refer (a free item, a discount on their loyalty card) encourages his/her friends and contacts to create an account or sign up for a loyalty card on your site. With this system, offered by the Oxatis solution, you’ll win customers convinced of the legitimacy of your site and create significant word-to-mouth traffic.

- Collect customer reviews
Many studies have shown how effective customer reviews are for e-Commerce Websites. Customer feedback is one of the elements potential customers look at the most and can really reassure them when it comes to making a purchase. The site canaillougoth.fr for example has seen their conversion rate increase by 125% (up to 1.375% from 0.61%) after activating Shopping Satisfaction certified customer reviews. Customer reviews bring three main advantages:

> Better SEO: If you let customers comment on your products and the quality of your service this will draw traffic. It will also add textual content to your site making it more alive and visible to online shoppers looking for a review of a product.

> A higher conversion rate: customer reviews reassure your customers as they are left by “customers like them.” This will make them more likely to confirm their purchases.

> Improve your customer relations: customer reviews are part of that customer loyalty you want to build and encourage. When you let customers express themselves you are showing them that their opinions are important to you, which is something they'll appreciate.
Boost your customers’ confidence (and ensure the quality of their reviews) by using a certified system such as Oxatis' Shopping Satisfaction. Check it out today!

- More specific offers…
…and more effective ones. Having better targeted promotions according to your customers’ expectations and interests will maximise their impact. You’ll also avoid sending deceptive emails (for example, promotions on women’s items for men or vice versa) that could push customers to unsubscribe thinking that you have nothing interesting to offer them.

- Increasing your average shopping cart
When you start collecting customer information, especially concerning what products they look at, you can then suggest products they’ll be likely to buy. When they’ve added a product to their shopping cart, you can show them products that other shoppers who bought the same product purchased and in certain situations a bundle that will give them a discount (for example a telephone with a Bluetooth). This will help you increase your average shopping cart by showing your customers how well you know them: win win.

- More effective email campaigns
CRM gives you the chance to create personalised emails and increase your click through rate by 14% and conversion rate by 10% compared to generic emails. The benefits are clear for your e-Commerce website. Segmenting customers helps you adapt the emails you send, and is a feature integrated into the Oxatis solution.

- Optimising the ROI of your social network efforts
Communicating on social networks is great but it only brings you a small amount of traffic if you don’t make this presence as effective as possible. Social CRM is a good way to follow what’s being said about you on social networks and attract new prospects and visitors. This is what Oxatis offers you with the social login to an account: not only can visitors to your site create an account in one click (thus avoiding abandoned shopping carts), this will also allow you to link their customer profile to their social accounts.
- The impact of multichannel
CRM is essential for setting up a solution that links different platforms (store, website, smartphone ap.) for a coherent, personalised experience on each of your different sales channels. According to mybuys.com 40% of customers spend more when their shopping experiences are personalised on different channels.
  • Want to know more about multichannel? Check out our Oxatis expert advice on the subject
03 The future of CRM: Get ready now!
- Check out the RFM feature, the secret weapon of the most efficient e-tailers
RFM works on a basis of three key factors using the data collected with CRM:

> Recency refers to the date of the last purchase the customer made or how long it’s been since his/her last purchase;
> Frequency is the number of purchases made during the analysis period;
> Monetary refers to the overall value of the purchases made during the analysis period .

This information will allow you to segment your customers and give them specific offers. For example for a customer who frequently buys mid-level priced items or a customer who occasionally buys higher-end items. Analysing this data for your site means you can send these customers specific offers through different channels, from your site’s homepage to emails and text messages.

Do you need a hand setting up your SMS or email campaigns? Don’t hesitate to contact our experts at 0845 129 4800 or request a free call back by clicking below.
Call Back
- RFM is easy with Oxatis!
Oxatis manages RFM customer rating for you and helps you organise your customers according to their recent orders, frequency of purchases and amount spent. This feature will help you personalise your offers simply and easily!
- Next, Big Data?
Big Data refers to data analysis on a large scale and uses large quantities of information to go as far as to make predictions as to customers’ future purchases (predictive marketing), make stock management or budget decisions. This technology is for the moment used by e-Commerce giants such as Amazon and eBay and is complicated for smaller e-Commerce sites to set up.
That said, Big Data is becoming more and more widespread and in the near future it could be used by the majority of e-tailers. Customer relations will become more and more fine-tuned with this technology which will allow e-tailers to detect trends and segment their customers better than ever before. This is why e-Commerce experts work on features such as RFM: this is an excellent way to easily get ready for Big Data, when the time comes…

Now it’s your turn!