Ecommerce is a challenging industry. If you’re struggling to secure long-term sales, loyalty and retention at your WooCommerce store, you’re certainly not alone. Lucky for you, you’ve stumbled upon this article. In it, we’ll deliver five powerful, easy to integrate and proven methods that you can start using right now to not only get more sales, but to keep customers coming back for future purchases, too. Read on to learn more.
Make Your Return Policy Shine
Getting prospective customers to visit your store is hard work. So, don’t deter them from coming back to make a repeat purchase by making it hard to return products that didn’t work out. Did you know that 74% of people polled by UPS stated that if an ecommerce store made returns hard, they wouldn’t shop there again in the future? What’s more, 80% of those polled said that if there was a return shipping fee, they’d avoid making a future purchase as well.
The natural conclusion is to make your return policy transparent, fair, honest and easy. Avoid charging return shipping fees, if possible, and make it easy and convenient to return products. Let customers know that it’s not a hassle to shop at your online store, even if their purchases don’t work out once in a while.
Nurture Relationships with a CRM
Today’s ecommerce customer has a million different options to buy the products they want, and the next store is just a mouse click away. To keep them coming back to your store and making future purchases, you’ll need to take the relationship to the next level and get to know your customers better. By learning the behavior of your customers, you can more easily nurture the relationships and improve loyalty.
But to make this happen, you’ll also need the right tools. This is where a WooCommerce CRM, such as this, can help you by giving you detailed customer profiles with an order timeline and business intelligence that helps you learn who to market what to and when. Using the real-time data that you’re provided with, you’ll know how to approach each customer relationship to maximize sales, decrease returns and boost retention.
Offer a Free Shipping Threshold
A free shipping threshold is a powerful, effortless way to increase sales and keep customers coming back. It’s a simple philosophy: offer them free shipping on set order minimums to encourage an increased average order value by offering a unique value proposition. Commonly, stores that use this method offer free shipping on orders of $50 and up.
A free shipping threshold isn’t the end-all, be-all to getting more sales, though. However, numerous studies have found that it can help improve conversion rates across the board and has the potential to increase average order value by $10-$45, depending on the customer. Given these immediate benefits, it’s a smart, easy move for your online store.
Encourage Conversations with Live Chat
Live chat has become a proven staple to ecommerce and for online services providers. Recent studies have found that 30% of the consumers who visit your site, your prospective customers, expect you to offer live chat. If you’re not offering live chat, you are dehumanizing the experience. It’s important to remember that a more human-like experience is conducive to more sales as well as improved loyalty.
A variety of live chat services are available online, all that offer different features, pricing and functionality. In many cases, you can program in common responses and automate most of the live chat experience—so that your customer support reps are free to help as many as six customers resolve issues simultaneously. Numerous studies concur that when a customer has a question about a product, live chat increase the chance that they’ll purchase that product tenfold.
Automate Customer Updates with Drip
A lesser known marketing tool, Drip offers complete customization for your automated emails to new and existing customers. For example, you can program a workflow in Drip to automate the emails it sends to your customers after a purchase has been made. These emails can include things like personalized greetings, information about the order, tracking number, invoice, and much more.
Drip also lets you send out newsletters, follow-up emails and marketing emails at the push of a button, or you can set it and forget it by creating a custom workflow. It’s an excellent way to improve customer service and build long-term loyalty and retention. The best part, it’s cost effective (plans are cheap), and it’s super easy to use.
As you can see, there are some simple, immediate steps you can take to get more WooCommerce sales and to encourage repeat sales and second-chance sales. When put into motion, these proven methods deliver immediate results that help you build up and nurture a loyal customer base.