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The Beginner’sGuide to Starting an eCommerce Store

A GUIDE TO CREATE, GROW, AND SUSTAIN A PROFITABLE ONLINE BUSINESS

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Grow a Profitable & Sustainable Business

Welcome to “The Beginner’s Guide to eCommerce”. This guide is meant to give you an understanding of how to grow a successful and above all profitable ecommerce store.

We will go over every step of growing an online store, from choosing a platform for your new site, all the way to creating brand advocates who continually buy from you and even help you promote. Don’t worry we will cover everything in between as well.

This book revolves around a concept we at Sweet Tooth like to call the “Complete Customer Journey.” This is the journey that every shopper will take when interacting with your site. The goal of the customer journey is to take an online browser and convert them to an advocate that will bring more business to your site.

It is a full circle way of viewing your customers which leads to a healthy, sustainable, and profitable online business.

The Customer Journey:

Online Browser

Visitor

Purchaser

Repeat Purchaser

Brand Advocate

Chapter one will focus on selecting the right ecommerce platform for your needs, after that each chapter will focus on an area of the customer journey above. If you can attract customers, and get them coming back again and again, you have an online store that is set up for success.

Look for this symbol throughout the book for extra tools & resources

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Jump to a Section

One: Selecting a Platform (pg.1)

Two: Creating Awareness (pg.5)

Three: Generating Site Traffic (pg.10)

Four: Converting Traffic (pg.14)

Five: Drive Repeat Purchases (pg.20)

Six: Create Brand Advocates (pg.26)

About the Author (pg.30)

Additional Resources (pg.31)

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What Platform is Right For My Store?

Choosing the right platform is one of the most crucial decisions an ecommerce site can make. The right platform can set you up for immediate online success, but the wrong platform can hinder growth and create unneeded expenses.

These expenses can come from paying for more than you need, or choosing a platform that is missing some functionality you need. When a platform is missing the functionality you need you will have to purchase an extension/app to offset that.

This chapter will explain some of the major decisions you need to make when selecting an ecommerce platform and give you a con-venient visual breakdown of five popular ecommerce platforms for companies that are new to ecommerce.

SaaS or Deployed? That is the Question

One of the first considerations to make is whether you are looking for a software as a service (SaaS) solution like Shopify, or a deployed solution like Magento. There are a couple differences between them, but the main considerations are: functionality, customization, and price.

SaaS• Easy to implement • Little technical know how needed• No hosting cost • Customization is minimal

Deployed• Can customize to your liking • More technical know how required • Must pay to host your site • Implementation is a longer process

Once you have determined which is a better fit, you can start to look at other factors including marketing functionality, security, support and of course price. These factors are displayed visually in the following charts. We have done the research so you don’t have to!

“Shopify’s SaaS platform states that an ecommerce site can be set up, and ready

to sell in as little as an hour”

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Pricing:

Hosting and Website Tools:

Saas orDeployed

Deployed SaaS SaaS Deployed Deployed

Hosting Costs

$100 - $200per month

None None$20 -$50

per month$20 - $30per month

Platform Speed

(Ranked)3 1 2 4 5

Storage Space

Unlimited1GB -

Unlimited3GB -

UnlimitedUnlimited Unlimited

# of Free Templates

500+ 20+ 115+ 5+ 500+

Templates for

PurchaseYes Yes Yes Yes No

Cost of PaidTemplates

$10 -$300 $80 - $180 $140 - $250 $39 - $139 NA

Built in Blog? No Yes No Yes No

Price Free$14 - $995per month

$30 - $200per month

Free Free

% of Transaction

None2.5% - 2.9%+ 30 cents

1.5% on Silver Plan

None None

When comparing prices it may seem that Shopify and Bigcommerce are the expensive options. Before making a conclusion it is important to evaluate all areas of the platform and look at associated prices. For example, Shopify and Bigcommerce do not have any hosting fees.

The hosting costs in this chart are approximate and will vary depending on store size and other factors. It is also important to note that while storage space for deployed solutions is unlimited, it will be dependent on the size of the stores server.

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Shopping and Marketing Features:

Mobile Friendly

StorefrontYes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Customer Reviews

Yes Yes Yes Yes Free App

Loyalty Program

Paid App Paid App Paid App Paid App Free App

Affiliate Program

No Yes Paid App Paid App Free App

Multi Language

StorefrontYes Yes No Free App No

Abandoned Cart

ReminderPaid App Paid App Paid App Paid App Free App

SEO Tools Paid App Yes Yes Yes Yes

Customer Segments

Paid App Paid App Paid App Paid App Yes

Upselling & Cross Selling

Yes Paid App Free App Yes Free App

Social Media Integration

Paid App Paid App Yes Paid App Free App

Depending on what you have decided to sell some marketing functions will be more import-ant to you than others. Take a look at what marketing tools are offered on each platform and select one based on your individual needs.

If you are looking to implement a multi language storefront be sure that you select one that is capable of that. The same is true if you wish to start an affiliate program.

Is a Loyalty Program Part of your Platform Decision?Loyalty and rewards programs are our area of expertise, our loyalty programs are offered

on Magento, Shopify, and Bigcommerce.

Learn More! Learn More! Learn More!

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Backoffice and Security:

Payment Gateways Included

Yes Yes Yes Yes No

Mobile Responsive

AdminFree App Yes Yes Free App No

Dropshipping

Paid App Yes Yes Paid App Paid App

Fraud Protection

ToolsPaid App Yes Yes Paid App Free App

Advanced Reporting

Paid App Paid App Yes Yes No

While backoffice and security features may not be as sexy as some of the marketing features, they are important. Are you a very analytical person? Make sure you choose a solution with advanced reporting. Are you going to be drop shipping? Make sure you choose the best drop shipping integration.

Drop shipping is a great way to start selling online! Guides and Videos to Learn More

Platform Help and Support:

Live Chat Yes Yes Yes Can Purchase Can Purchase

Email No Yes Yes Can Purchase Can Purchase

Phone No Yes Yes Can Purchase Can Purchase

Support is often vital when first starting your ecommerce site. Make sure you select a platform that offers the amount of support you are comfortable with.

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ssLetting People Know Who You Are

Unfortunately “build it, and they will come” does not work in the ecommerce world. Customers need to know who you are and what you sell. Awareness is the foundation for a purchase, without it your ecommerce site is going to have minimal success.

Once you have chosen a platform and have a site to sell from, you should immediately begin to create awareness for your site/brand. In this chapter we will go over where awareness comes from and tools to help you get it.

Ways to Create Awareness

1. Word-of-mouth2. Social Media3. Organic Search 4. Site Referrals 5. Paid Advertising

Awareness From Word-of-mouth

Word-of-mouth advertising is one of the most influential advertis-ing source, with 84% of people believing these recommendations to be trustworthy (Nielsen). The easiest way to take advantage of word-of-mouth is to get existing happy customers telling others about your site. The more people you get talking about you, the more people have heard of your brand.

Tactics:

Go above and beyond for customers

When customers feel like they have been treated well they are much more likely to share the experience with their friends. Going above and beyond the call of duty is often referred to as a “magic moment.” Provide as many quality customer experiences as you can to get customers talking about you to their friends.

“84% of shoppers find word-of-mouth to be the most trustworthy form of advertisement.”

- Nielsen

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Awareness From Social Media

Social media is a great way to inexpensively increase your awareness. Many people believe that you need to have a massive following in order to effectively use social media, but that is not true. With the use of hashtags you can reach an audience outside of your following. This is a great way to get your message out there while also building your following. You can also take advantage of your customers social networks.

Tactics:

Find an influencer

An effective way to improve the reach of your social channels is to identify influencers within your community. These individuals do not have to be celebrities, they could be journalists, blog-gers, or simply network members who have built a loyal following of their own. Social tools like Klout and SproutSocial allow you to monitor your social presence, engage with followers, and identify influencers in your space. When you have identified these influencers, reach out to them and build a relationship. Provide them with value through your relationship, find out why they have influence and create a discussion surrounding their content. When they see that the relationship is two-way and they are not a means to an end, they will be more likely to promote your brand.

Research where & what to share

Providing content that your audience will share could also expand the reach of your brand. Be-fore you go off and write a 3000-word blog post, take a step back and do some research into what content your audience values most. This differs across customer groups and industries.

For example if you are in the fashion industry, you should consider sharing images. Custom-ers in that industry prefer to consume information in the form of images. You also need to find out where to share your images. If you’re a womens fashion site, you can share over Pinterest which is 80% female.

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Awareness From Organic Search

In order to drive brand awareness through organic search, your site needs to be optimized. When your site is optimized for specific keywords, the more likely it will be returned in searches for those keywords. While there are naysayers and those that believe “SEO is dead” the fact of the matter is ROI from SEO is proven and your competitors are investing in it.

Tactics:

A whole ebook could be written on search engine optimization, and many already exist. In-stead of listing out all the tactics I will show you where you can learn tips and tricks for your-self, as well as some SEO specialists who can do the work for you. I would recommend getting Google Analytics setup for your site to track and monitor how well your site is doing.

Awareness From Referrals

Site referrals are when your store is linked to on another site. This can occur when you are included in a blog post or linked to in a list. This is beneficial for two reasons. One, it can drive traffic to your site. Browsers who see you mentioned on another site (especially if it is a high ranking credible source) can follow the link to your site. Second, more inbound links drives in-creased organic traffic. Just be sure they are high quality links.

Tactics:

Establish relationships

Industry blogs and sites will not be looking for ways to include your site, you will need to let them know who you are and that you are a credible site/source. The best way to get included in these publications is to establish relationships.

Start by determining the bloggers and sites that you want to generate links from. Then, you can begin to engage with them. Don’t ask for a link right away; that is rushing the relationship. Start by commenting on their posts, giving your opinions, and reaching out on social media. This will show experts that you know your stuff and will make sure your name and site are recognized.

Sign up for HARO

While you are establishing your credibility and building relationships, signup for Help a Report-er Out (HARO). This is a service that shows stories reporters are currently working on. You can receive queries three times a day and pitch your story directly to the reporter.

Expert advice on Search Engine Optimization

Visit The Moz Blog

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Awareness From Paid Advertisements

Paid advertisement is a great way to get your site and products noticed initially. Once your site is operational you can start to generate a buzz with paid ads. Be sure that you don’t become reliant on this form of brand awareness as it can become an expensive way to conduct busi-ness. Be sure that you are supplementing paid ads with other forms of awareness. You don’t want to get caught having to pay for every single customer you get.

There are many ways you can advertise your store online. These include search ads (ads on Google and Bing), display ads, and promoted social media. Let’s go over these in more detail.

Tactics:

Search Ads

Once again entire eBooks have been created on this topic, so I will stick to the basics and pro-vide resources to learn more about search ads and Google Adwords. Here are the basics you need to know about advertising on search engines.

Search ads are ads that are displayed when someone searches for a keyword(s) that you are targeting. Choose keywords carefully, as you want the traffic they generate to be as likely to buy as possible. You don’t want to throw money away. Try using Google’s Keyword planner or Hittail to find keywords that will work for you.

Once you know the keywords you want to use, you can set the max price you will pay per click. Search ads are charged on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, meaning you are only charged for the ad when a potential shopper clicks it.

Search ads are a great way to immediately start driving tailored traffic to your site. Start with this type of paid advertisement before you move to others.

Display Ads

Display ads are the advertisements that appear above or to the side of content you are view-ing online. These ads are more relevant to established companies that have a brand presence. This is because viewers will know exactly what the ad is for without needing background infor-mation. You can however use banner ads for a new site if they are disruptive enough.

Find free publicity to help build linksHelp A Reporter Out

More of a visual learner? Visual Representation

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While search ads are paid for on a CPC basis, display ads are charged on a cost per thousand impressions (CPM). This means that you will be charged an amount for every 1,000 eyes that see the ad. I am sure you can already see the benefit of CPC over CPM. CPC is action orient-ed while CPM is passive. With display ads you are being charged even if the ad is completely ignored.

There is a time and a place for display ads, but if you are just getting into ecommerce I would start with search ads before moving into display ads. To learn more about display ads you can go to AdSense, Google’s display ad network.

Promoted Social

In my tactics for social media awareness I discussed finding influencers and researching where and what to promote. This is still important, it makes sure that you are speaking to the right people organically. But, if you want to accelerate your social reach you can use promoted so-cial.

Promoted social is social media messages that are pushed to more viewers by the social media platform. Next time you are going through your Twitter feed on your phone look closely and you will see some promoted tweets from accounts you are not following. Promoted social lets you reach more people than you would be able to organically.

Promoted social is a great way to create awareness if you are selling something that has a lot of shareability or is relevant to the majority of users on that platform. That is why research is again important here, make sure you are using promoted social on networks that your target customers are using.

(Next Chapter: Site Traffic)

Example display ad from American Express

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Awareness is Great, But You Need Traffic!

In the last chapter we discussed some ways to get people aware of your brand and site. This is great but does not do you much good if they are not on your site. Some of the awareness tactics will drive traffic to your site, but you also need to keep them there.

Traffic Sources

The most common sources of traffic are

1. Organic Search 2. Referral 3. Direct4. Social

Organic Search

If you have effectively established brand and site awareness, traf-fic will most likely come to you through organic search. Customers may remember your name or what you sell and do a search for you in a search engine.

Make sure they are finding you by ensuring that you are the first search result for your company name. You can do this by optimiz-ing your homepage for the name of your company. This is the first step in a total search engine optimization strategy that you should begin to adopt.

After you have optimized your homepage you can begin to opti-mize other pages on your site for popular keywords. Again there are very detailed guides on how to this out there that will devote an entire book to the subject.

Referral

Referral traffic are site visitors who have come to your site from a link on another site. Think of it as another site recommending you and your product.

The Beginner’s Guide To SEOHow to SEO for yourself

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We talked about referrals in the awareness chapter, and if done right referrals can become a big traffic generator for your store. In the awareness stage we discussed establishing relation-ships with industry experts and using tools like HARO. Once you have the first couple of links you can begin to encourage others to link to your site in a more natural way.

This is done by establishing yourself as an expert in your field or industry. The easiest way to do this is by creating content that educates and informs customer, influencers, and other in-dustry experts. The easiest way to include content on your site is with a blog. You can update your blog with stories and information others will find useful. If someone likes your content they may link to it, which generates referral traffic and helps with organic search.

If you need an example of building content check out our Sweet Tooth Blog, and other industry leading ecommerce blogs.

Direct

Direct traffic is exactly as it sounds: users that come directly to your site by inputting your site’s URL. To encourage customers to find you directly, you need to have a domain name that they can easily remember. An easy to remember domain name is either memorable or logical.

A memorable domain name is one that is different and therefore not easily forgotten. A log-ical domain name is one that relates strongly to what you sell. An example of a memorable domain name would be godaddy.com: It does not tell you what they do (sell domains), but it is not easily forgotten. An example of a logical domain name would be cheaphumidors.com: the domain tells you exactly what they sell.

Social

This is the traffic that comes to your site through a social channel, whether it be your own so-cial pages or mentions from another. Everyone knows about Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. But other social media sites can help drive traffic to your site as well.

Try answering customer questions on Quora, commenting on discussions in your industry’s Reddit page, or adding your pages to Stumbleupon. All of the above social channels are great because they have more longevity than Facebook and Twitter. Posts to these sites provide more value over the long term than other social channels.

For examples, and to gain more insight, check out these industry blogs

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I Have Traffic, How Do I Get Them to Stay?

Shoppers are finding your site and you have a decent amount of site traffic. Now you need to keep those visitors engaged so they stay on your site. As soon as a shopper lands they will be evaluating your site, so make sure you are showing well. Here are three tips to get that hard earned traffic to stay.

Make your site easy to navigate

Site navigation is big reason someone stays or leaves. it is important that you make it easy for your shoppers to quickly locate what they are looking for. If they came looking for a red polka dot sweater, they better be able to find that without too much effort.

Having tabbed navigation at the top of your site has become standard. Divide your site into sections so that a customer can quickly jump to what they are looking for. On a clothing site it might have Men, Women, Children listed across the top of the page.

The key to successful site navigation is to keep it simple and organized. Keeping products well categorized and cataloged will make sure your customers can always quickly find what they desire. Make sure to stay on top of categorization and cataloging as you add items to your site. As they say “inch by inch life’s a cinch, yard by yard life gets hard.”

Make your site visually appealing

In ecommerce, looks are everything! A study by Stanford University concluded that 46% of those studied assessed site credibility on looks alone. All the site traffic in the world will not help you if your site looks like it is from the 1990’s. Utilize what your brand stands for to create a site that reflects what you do and who you are.

If you are not a graphic designer or web developer, I would recommend going with a ecom-merce solution like Shopify or Bigcommerce. These platforms make it easy to create a visually appealing site with little technical or design background. If you do want the additional customi-zation of other platforms I would reccomend getting some development and design help if you are not versed in these yourself. I will put some development agencies for each of the plat-forms mentioned in the additional resources at the end of this book.

Make your site mobile friendly

Gone are the days when everyone searched the internet on a personal computer. More and more people are using their mobile devices to browse and even shop online. The New York Times estimates that by the end of 2016 we will see about a quarter of ecommerce business coming from a mobile source.

“46% of those viewing a website assess the credibility of a site based on the look alone.”

- Stanford University

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“By 2016 more than a quarter of online sales will come from a mobile source.”

- The New York Times

This is why it is important to make your website mobile friendly. You do not want to miss a po-tential sale because your store does not scale well (or at all) to a mobile screen.

What to Avoid on Your Site

The following site components lead to high bounce rates and should be avoided if you want to keep your hard earned site traffic.

Sounds & music

If a site starts playing music or makes loud sounds upon entry customers are likely to leave. They might be enjoying their own music or browsing on a mobile device while in public. In both these situations a shopper does not want your music to interfere.

Annoying popups

Popups do have a place in ecommerce, if they are done right. They need to be well timed, vi-sually appealing, and relevant. If you want to do popups right I would recommend looking into tools like WisePops.

Do not have a popup display as a visitor enters your site. That is a sure fire way to have them leave. Let customers search your site before you bombard them with popups and notifica-tions. If you do want to let your customer know about a promotion or a deal with a popup, make sure they have purchase intent before doing so. Have your pop up display after a certain amount of time or a certain amount of pages.

Interstitial

I think these may be worse than popups, especially when used before a shopper has even entered the site. If a customer is looking for something and comes across a roadblock like this, they may just leave.

Stay away from interstitials, your customers will thank you!

Browser Incompatibility

One of the biggest turnoffs for a site is when you go to a site and it appears broken, or a fea-ture won’t work because of the browser you are using. While there are many browsers out there your site should at least be usable by the big three: Google, Internet Explorer, FireFox

“Chrome is the most popular browser at 35%.” - The Next Web

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Converting Traffic into Buyers

Now that we have an idea of how to get traffic, and keep it on your site, we can look at converting that traffic into paying customers. In ecommerce this is known as your conversion rate: The percentage of your visitors that end up buying something from your store. The average conversion rate for ecommerce is somewhere between 1% - 3% (Smart Insights).

Turning a Visitor Into a Customer

One of the ways to increase your conversion rates is by reducing the amount of shoppers who add an item to their cart but don’t actually buy it. This is know as your sites cart abandonment rate.

Moving a shopper from browsing to actually buying is more difficult than you might expect. The average cart abandonment rate is somewhere around 60%. That means there is a huge op-portunity to increase your conversions by reducing cart abandonment.

It is unreasonable to think you can eliminate cart abandonment completely, but there are strategies to reduce it.

Strategies to Get a Shopper to the Checkout Page

1. Cart Visibility 2. Call to Action3. Readily Available Shipping Info

Number of Purchasers

“59% of the time a customer puts an item in their cart they fail to actually buy it.”

- Internet Retailer

Site Visitors= Conversion Rate

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Keep Your Shopping Cart Visible

Shoppers want to be able to keep tabs on what they have chosen and how much it will cost. Keeping the cart visible ensures that a customer always knows how many items they have, the cost of said items, and allows them to quickly see the exact items they have.

In our example from ASOS you can see that the cart or “bag” is displayed in the upper right. This is visible on every page until checkout. When a shopper hovers their mouse over the cart the dropdown appears. The drop down gives a description and a visual representation of each item in the bag.

Have Clear Call to Actions (CTA)

Don’t make shoppers search to checkout! Have a clear button to checkout wherever they may be looking. In this ASOS example every time you add an item to your cart the drop down is displayed, and shows the item being added to the cart. The drop down includes a “pay now” button at the bottom of it. A call to action like this is perfect. It subtly asks your shopper if they are ready to checkout. After a couple of seconds the drop down disappears to let them contin-ue shopping if that is not the case.

Also take notice of the checkout button. The text is slightly bigger, the color stands out from the rest, and it is slightly raised compared to the button beside. All of these subtleties make this button more likely to be pushed than other areas in the dropdown.

Show Shipping Info in the Cart

Another way to encourage your shoppers to move to the checkout process is to inform them of shipping and return policies. These should be easily found on your site to ease the decision to do business with you. In our example above, the shipping information can be found right underneath the pay now button.

Example Cart from ASOSThe next three recommendations will

look at this example

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Shoppers are looking for information on how much shipping will cost them. Tell them if you are offering free shipping, or at what dollar amount you offer free shipping. Shoppers don’t like finding surprises at checkout, such as shipping that will cost them more than the item. A survey by Webcredible states that 41% of shoppers abandon their cart when presented with a cost they had not accounted for.

It is also important to inform your shoppers of estimated delivery dates for their purchase. The same study states that 11% of shoppers abandon a cart when the estimate is not present.

Always Monitor & Always Improve

Following best practices is not enough to get the best conversion rates possible. You must test what works for your site. Seemingly small changes can generate huge results. The key is to always be A/B testing. We use Optimizely to do our A/B testing but there are many similar tools available to help you test.

As an example, the site www.mall.cz (Large Czech ecommerce retailer) saw a 9% sales increase just by increasing the size of the product images. These are the kind of results you won’t see unless you continually test.

You will also want to check your site’s analytics to see how your site is performing. Look at the page flow for your site. Are shoppers moving through your site as you intended? Is there a page that your customers are continually exiting on?

These are the types of questions you can easily answer if you are continually looking into your site’s analytics. Remember, the key to converting visitors to buyers is to always be improving and always be learning.

Convert on the Checkout Page

The checkout page: the gateway to ecommerce glory but also the most frustrating page for most merchants.The checkout is frustrating because a lot of would be shoppers exit on this page. However, there are some strategies to reduce the number of exits on the checkout page.

1. Guest Checkout2. Urgency3. Multiple Payment Options4. Zero Friction Forms

“www.mall.cz saw a 9% sales increase from simply increasing the size of their product images.”

Start A/B Testing without needing to codeOptimizely’s A/B Testing Tools

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Allow Guest Checkout

As much as it irks me to say it, you should allow guest checkouts. A registered account pro-vides a ton of additional value for your site, such as remarketing opportunities. However, if you are losing customers because you force them to register that is not helping your cause. You should allow your shoppers to checkout as a guest if they wish, but incentivise them to regis-ter. This incentive could be a discount, free shipping, or loyalty points. The Tri Shop (a client of Sweet Tooth) was actually able to increase account creation by 35% using loyalty points and the checkout page below.

Smashing Magazine conducted a study looking into what happens when customers are forced to register to checkout. The results were very convincing. They found that 30% of these cus-tomers abandoned their cart. Of these customers who abandoned their cart 40% of them stat-ed it was because they expected to be spammed with marketing material.

Create a Sense of Urgency

Creating a sense of urgency encourages your shoppers to proceed before something expires. When a shopper sees that they are on a time limit they will take action. This can help eliminate abandonments on your site.

Qubit posted a case study analyzing the effect of urgency on conversion rates. The study looks at a retailer who added an additional offer if customers bought before a certain date. The site offered a free ticket if you purchased before a certain date. The result: they saw an increase of 27% in sales.

Not offering guest checkout? You are losing 30% of would be customers, according to Smashing Magazine.

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Accept Multiple Payment Options

The benefits of this strategy are pretty straight forward. The more methods of payment you accept the more opportunities you have to sell. This is especially true for online merchants who may be selling to customers in different countries. Some countries are not as willing to pay online with a credit card as others. According to a Forrester Research Study credit cards are not the preferred online payment in China, France, and Germany.

Try to accept major credit cards, as well as at least one form of non-credit card payment. As you can see there are cultures that prefer to order without a credit card. If you don’t have an alternative, you lose that sale opportunity.

Zero Friction Forms

Complicated forms are a huge turnoff for your customers. The key to converting visitors into buyers is having a streamlined checkout process. This cannot be achieved with complicated forms. There are two ways to reduce complication and increase customer satisfaction with your checkout forms.

The first is to have a checkout progress bar. Shoppers want to know how many steps are in-volved before they commit to filling out the forms. Show your shoppers what step they are on and how many still remain. If we go back to our ASOS example we can see a progress bar across the top of their checkout page.

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The second way to improve customer experience at checkout and avoid abandonment is to have inline validation. This gives shoppers instant feedback as to whether they have filled a section of the form in correctly. No one likes to enter in information only to find out you entered something wrong and have to start again.

alistapart.com found that inline validation forms increased customer satisfaction rates by 31% and decreased the errors made by 22%. Once again a change that seems small but can have dramatic results.

Aid Post Purchase Analysis

Now that you have made your site into a conversion machine you still have to address the needs of your customers after the purchase. Ideally you want the customer to come back and become a frequent repeat purchaser (more on repeat purchases in the next chapter). Before a customer repeats they will conduct a post purchase analysis.

This is the behavior after the purchase where a customer evaluates the purchase. It is import-ant that you give them something to feel good about. This could be as simple as a thank you note shipped with the product that explains why the product is unique. Such as “Thank you for your purchase, we hope you enjoy your widget. It is handcrafted in New York City.” A great example of this is a clothing company called Everlane. They ship all there products with a very elegant looking thank you note, that explains that they obsess over detail.

(Next Chapter: Repeat Purchases)

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Generating Repeat Business

The previous chapters have focused on getting you awareness and sales. These are both vitally important, you need to get people shopping on your site to build up your site’s brand and sales. But continually paying for advertisements to get customers can get expensive and time consuming.

Once you have a good sized customer base you can begin to move some dollars to retention rather than straight acquisition. Acquisition is great for getting your site off the ground, but its not a sustainable long term strategy.

In this chapter we will go over why you should look to generate repeat business, as well as some strategies to get more repeat purchasers.

Hunter or Farmer?

Which one are you? Which one is better? This is a metaphor we like to use at Sweet Tooth to illustrate the evolution from early stage online business to sustainable ecommerce merchant.

Society started off as hunters. When we needed food we would go out and catch it. This is similar to what you need to do just starting as an online store. You need customers so you send out ads to find them. When you get a good customer base you can start to look at farming instead.

With a farming strategy you don’t have to be as active in finding customers. You already have customers so you can begin to take a more passive approach to growing your business. Another name for a farming strategy is a Customer Retention Strategy, which we will go over in this chapter.

Why Acquisition Alone is Not Sustainable

Many of the popular online advertising techniques including social media advertising and Google Adwords are trending in a direction that is not advantageous for those using them. These online techniques are becoming more expensive and less effective.

Become an Expert on RetentionThe Ultimate Guide

21

Google Adwords

The CPC (cost per click) that is being paid for a keyword on Google is becoming more expen-sive. To make things worse you are paying more for less. The price retailers are paying is rising and the average position they are receiving is falling.

While Adwords may be effective for you now, it may be losing its effectiveness over time. If you are solely relying on Adwords it will become a very expensive way to generate one time buyers.

Social Media

Social media marketing has its problems as well. While many people view social media as a free form of advertising, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep it free. Organic views on social media are becoming more difficult to obtain.

Facebook business pages cites a 16% reach within your network if the post is not sponsored. Facebook has been encouraging marketers to buy social media ads. They have taken a po-sition that fans and networks in the future will merely make paid advertising more effective. AdAge has done studies to show that the organic reach has dropped even further, citing the reach to be at about 6%.

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In summary, Facebook will become more expensive as we move forward. Will Facebook ads be sustainable into the future? I can’t say for sure but almost half of marketers polled think it is already an overrated way to advertise. There are some other startling stats coming from other social media platforms.

Are you using Twitter to generate customers? Well, 71% of the tweets you make are ignored and only 23% of tweets made generate a reply (iMedia Connection).

Want to use Google+ for customer generation? The average Google+ user spends a feeble 3 minutes a month on the network. If you are trying to reach young professionals on Linkedin you are wasting resources, only 20% of Linkedin users are under 30.

Are These Tactics Useless?

Not at all! As I had mentioned in chapter 2, Adwords and Social Media are great ways to gen-erate awareness and drive sales. These methods are becoming more expensive though. If you continue to just use acquisition and paid advertising you will not be able to grow a long term sustainable business.

If you are using them in a hunter-gatherer mind set you are not using them effectively. Use these mediums with a farmer mentality and they can become seeds for later profit.

Once you use these strategies to get a customer to purchase it is important to retain them. Many estimates put the cost to acquire a customer at 7X more expensive than retaining one. If you are using traditional online marketing to obtain make sure you follow it up with a retention strategy.

Strategies to Drive Repeat Purchases

1. Registered Accounts2. Newsletters3. Targeted Emails4. Loyalty Programs

“Companies tend to focus on customer acquisition even though it costs 7X more than customer retention.”

- KISSmetrics

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Encourage Account Registration

At this point you may be asking why I am saying to encourage account registration here, when just one chapter back I said to allow guest checkout. Simply put, guest checkout allows you to not lose a one time sale. A registered account sale gives you the opportunity to drive repeat business.

When a customer creates an account they are providing you with contact information. This is information you can use to market products in the future. Just don’t be continually sending generic emails, more on that just ahead in targeted emails.

But how do we get a shopper to register for an account? You need to show what is in it for them. Show what they can gain when they create an account. This could be letting them know that checkout times will be faster the next time they shop.

Many merchants are also offering incentives to create an account. This could be a percentage off your current purchase, or points if you are using an ecommerce loyalty program

Newsletters

Newsletters are a very cost effective way to get customer engagement from your existing cus-tomers. The important thing with a newsletter is to not make it salesy. The newsletter should give your customers information they will find useful and relevant to your brand. Remind your customers that you exist without asking them to buy.

Use Targeted Email, Not Spam Mail

Targeted emails are a very effective way to re-engage. Simply sending a mass email out to all your existing customers just won’t cut it anymore. You need to show your customer that you understand them and their needs/wants.

You can do this by sending them promotions for things they have bought in the past. If they bought a dress from you last time send them other dresses that they may find interesting. You could send them gifts on their birthday, or send them specific emails when they perform cer-tain actions on your site.

Build a killer newsletterThe 7 Golden Steps

24

dotmailer is one example of a program that can help you target your emails to specific customer actions. The trick with email marketing is to make it personal. If your customer feels like they are just a sales opportunity, then you haven’t created any customer engagement and it won’t lead to repeat business. You can check out the dotmailer blog for more tips.

Once again this tactic is only useful if you can get your customers to provide their email address. Use incentives to generate an extensive customer list and start targeting for repeat business.

Repeat Business from a Loyalty Program

A loyalty program is very powerful re-engagement tool and can drive a lot of repeat business. An online loyalty program is different from their retail siblings because there is so much more you can reward for.

Gone are the days of simply awarding points for dollars spent. With an online loyalty program you can encourage repeat business and encourage other profitable actions. This includes rewarding points for registering for an account, or signing up for email updates. This provides great synergies with the other customer re-engagement tools listed above.

Anyone looking to maximize repeat business from their existing customer base should look into all three of these options. When used together these tools create a very powerful re-engage-ment strategy. Remember, a retained customer is more valuable than a new one. Use your marketing to take a farming approach rather than a hunter.

Amazing Customer Service

The step after repeat purchase is brand advocacy. Someone who continually gives you their repeat business is great. If you can get them to turn into a brand advocate that is even better.

Brand advocates are made when you are providing an amazing customer experience. We will go over creating brand advocates in the next chapter. Here are 5 simple tips to provide amaz-ing customer service.

Automate your targeted email campaigns dotmailer Email Automation

Engage customers with a loyalty program Sweet Tooth Rewards

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Have Human Interactions

It is very difficult for someone to become an advocate of your brand if they don’t see your brand as human. Enhance your customer service by providing human interactions when possi-ble. Remove automated customer service reps, don’t leave your customer talking to a machine when they call, and give your social channels a human element.

Listen

Your customers are the best source of ideas for improvement. Listen to them! Encourage your customers to talk to you by following up after orders or periodically asking what they think. You never know what your customers will come up with.

Remember Customers

This comes from great customer management. Customers love to feel like they are more than just a customer at your site. Use support systems to keep tabs on as much about each indi-vidual customer as you can. Have systems in place so that every employee knows about each customer regardless of if they have spoke in the past. A CRM can help with this.

Be Adaptable

Not every customer is alike and no two business situations are alike. Be flexible in how you handle customer problems and do business. Accommodating a customer’s needs can be very beneficial. In fact 55% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

Be Prompt

No one likes to wait, including your customers. If they have a question or want to know more about a product you need to make sure you have someone to answer it. A great way to pro-vide fast customer support is through Olark live chat.

(Next Chapter: Creating Brand Advocates)

“55% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.”

- Defaqto

Answer shopper questions instantly with live chat

Olark Live Chat

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Ch

apte

r S

ix: C

reat

ing

Bra

nd

Ad

voca

tes The Entire Customer Journey

This is the final stage in the customer journey outlined at the be-ginning of this book. This is the stage that you should aspire to get your customers to. Once a customer has become a brand advo-cate they will show you brand devotion and will actually help you promote your store.

In this chapter we will go over how to create an amazing customer experience with some examples, tips to create brand advocates, and how to encourage brand advocates to promote your brand.

A Customer Experience Strategy

Don’t have a customer experience strategy? Thats ok, most com-panies do not. In fact, it is estimated that only 8% of companies have an effective one in place. So, how do we create a customer experience?

Outline How You Want Your Customers To Feel

The first step in creating an experience strategy is outlining how you want your customers to feel. It is tempting to just say some-thing like “happy” or “good” but you need to dig a little deeper.

If you have a site that features premium products maybe you want customers to feel “royal” or like an “insider.” If you sell toys you might want to make them feel “joyful” or “energetic”. If you are a law firm you will want them to feel “trust.”

Define a feeling based on what your brand/company stands for and build your strategy off that feeling.

Be Consistent Across All Touch Points

It is impossible to have one employee or even one department own a customers experience. The customer is going to be interact-ing with many employees and many areas of your business. It is important to stay consistent.

Be sure that you are keeping track of all interactions a customer has, phone calls, emails, and even social media activity. This will ensure that everyone knows exactly who each customer is, what they like, and what they have had problems with in the past.

A customer does not want to have a conversation with you, and then have to repeat it all when they talk to someone new.

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In fact, 84% of customers become frustrated when reps do not have immediate access to prior information.

Outline the emotions you want your customers to feel. Then arm everyone involved with the knowledge to keep that emotion constant across all touch points.

Attach a Real Person to the Experience

When a customer interacts with your company they want to deal with a person they can cre-ate a relationship with.

Brands and products create desire but human interaction creates an experience. There is a rea-son that when you ask a friend if they know a mechanic or a tailor, they usually respond with “I know a guy.”

They have established a relationship with the owner of the shop or the garage not the compa-ny, products, or brand. You can apply the same principle to your ecommerce site.

Some strategies to use in the online world include:

• Make sure you have real people available to answer questions• Always send support and marketing material from personal accounts• Mention the customer’s name when possible.

A Great Example of a Fantastic Customer Experience

There is one online company who is on the forefront of developing customer experience, and that is Zappos. They are a leader in customer service and have created a lot of brand advo-cates along the way.

Zappos’ success has been attributed to its customer first approach. Which was a radical way of thinking at the time. Zappos eliminated all key performance indicators that aimed to reduce time interacting with customers. The result was the creation of the most highly regarded cus-tomer experience online.

“84% of customers become frustrated when customer reps do not have immediate access to prior information.”

- Mobius Poll

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If you are looking for ideas for your own customer experience strategy I recommend reading further into what Zappos has done. “Uncommon Service” by Frie and Morris is another great source of inspiration.

Now that the customer experience foundation is laid, lets look at how to create brand advo-cates.

Tips to Create Brand Advocates

A loyal following of brand advocates is difficult to obtain. Brand advocates are created from loyal repeat customers who have fallen in love with what your brand stand for and what it de-livers. So, how do we create them?

Creating brand advocates is not a quick solution, it requires time and devotion to your custom-ers. Here are some ways to increase the likelihood of a customer converting to a brand advo-cate.

Make Your Employees Brand Advocates

One of the best ways to create brand advocates is to start internally. You and everyone else at your company need to be your #1 brand advocates. If you are not an advocate, how do you expect others to be?

Be passionate about your brand, products, and company. Share your love on social media and encourage your employees to do the same. A study by Gallup concluded that companies with engaged employees had 3.9 times the earnings per share.

When you have your internal brand advocates dealing with customers on a regular basis you are much likely to encourage your customers to be brand advocates as well.

Starbucks does an amazing job of this. Their employees are incredibly passionate and knowl-edgeable about the Starbucks brand and product. There are no shortage of Starbucks brand advocates so their strategy of employee advocates is working well!

Create a Sense of Community

We are more likely to voice our opinion when that opinion is a popular one. It takes a real trail blazer to publicly endorse a new unproven product. They risk being judged by their peers and destroying their credibility.

That is why establishing a sense of community around your brand is important. When your customers are aware of a community of others they are much more likely to declare them-selves brand advocates.

“Companies with high employee engagement levels have 3.9 times the earnings per share compared to others in their industry.” - Gallup

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How to Encourage Brand Advocates to Promote You

Brand advocates are promoting your brand for you, and are the tool for creating a full circle customer journey. These advocates are promoting your brand to their friend and family through word of mouth and over social media as well.

It is important to realize that brand advocates are customers that have fallen in love with your brand. These advocates are different than standard industry or market influencers.

Brand advocates love your brand and don’t want to be told to promote you. But you can en-courage them to keep promoting. Here are two ways to encourage brand advocates to contin-ue promoting.

Social Media Monitoring

Your brand advocates are out there, you just need to figure out who they are. You can use so-cial media monitoring software to determine who these brand advocates are. There are multi-ple examples of social media monitoring software, one being ViralHeat.

Software like ViralHeat allows you to see who is talking about you and what they are saying. You can create reports that show the sentiment that your brand has on social media as well as the effectiveness of your social media campaigns. Most importantly it allows you to quickly find your brand advocates as well as advocates of competitors.

If you are looking for a free tool to do some basic twitter analysis you can use backtweets. The tool allows you to search terms in twitter and see what others are saying. You can search your brand and see what comes up. The tool is free so it is very basic.

See the difference between influencer & advocate Infographic

Need a free tool to find influencers? backtweets

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Once you have found your social media advocates you can reach out to them and thank them. They will love that you have reached out personally. You could also reward them with coupon or gift. Remember that you are thanking them for what they have already done, not telling them what to do in the future.

Loyalty Programs

Another way to encourage brand advocates to promote your store is with a loyalty program. A loyalty program develops a loyal repeat customer base that you can convert into brand advocates.

If a customer has been collecting points on your site and the customer experience has been great they will be willing to tell their friends. They will be even more willing if they are able to collect even more points for doing so.

83% of consumers say they are willing to refer yet only 29% actually do. Using points to re-ward referrals is a great way to get someone who “would” refer to turn into someone who “does” refer.

Points are a great way to increase outreach actions by your best customers and brand advo-cates. They will promote you on their own but encouragement helps.

Brand Advocate Summary

All companies should strive to create brand advocates. You can do this by putting a customer experience strategy in place that helps customers grow into brand advocates.

Follow the tips to create brand advocates and use tools to encourage them to promote. Do not pay or directly incentivise your brand advocates. As soon as you do this they are no longer brand advocates, and they lose the effectiveness they once had.

“83% of customers say they are willing to refer a friend to a site, yet only 29% ever do.”

- Texas Tech

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Thanks for Reading

I hope this eBook gave you the insight you need to start and grow your ecommerce store. I tried to keep the book as short and to the point as possible, with links to other resources that can help you. I couldn’t mention all the great ecommerce resources available within the body of this book. That is why I have included a list of helpful tools, companies, and resources to help you grow online.

Once again thanks for reading!

Alex McEachern

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex is a Loyalty Marketing Specialist with Sweet Tooth.

His areas of expertise include customer retention, loyalty

marketing, and all things ecommerce. Alex writes frequently

about the challenges and opportunities of the ecommerce

world. He is the primary author of the Sweet Tooth Blog

which you can subscribe to below!

Alex McEachern

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