Ever wonder if you’re really getting the most out of your e-commerce site? If you have the sinking suspicion that you aren’t, you’re probably right.
Now the question is: What to do about it?
One stat goes a long way to providing the answer – increasing customer retention by a mere 5% can boost revenue by over 25%.
And holding onto customers means putting greater emphasis on customer engagement.
With this in mind, here’s a look at five applications to keep your customers onboard and maximize their revenue potential.
Zopim – Keep the Conversation Going
Making real connections with customers and helping them feel at home often requires direct communication.
Zopim is a live chat service that allows e-commerce sites to engage personally with their customers in real-time and respond to their needs, questions and complaints. But much more than being just a quick “hot-line”, it also allows for automated, pro-active chats to engage and reactivate customers based on triggers and address their queries even before they get in touch.
Other key features include:
- Real-time analytics – to better understand visitors and build profiles
- Automatic message routing – to match customers to agents quickly
- Customizability – to personalize the interface with Chat Badges
Some of Zopim’s clients: Phillips/Hyundai
SearchSpring – Smarter Searching Equals Smarter Sales
SearchSpring provides the ability to proactively engage with visitors who come looking for products and services.
With a more intuitive and personalized search process, customers move more quickly through the selection and checkout process which keeps them happy and makes it more likely that they will come back again. Complex search options, rich auto-complete, user-relevant results based on analytics data all contribute to a superior customer experience.
SpringSearch also offers:
- Targeted promotions – use visitor data to present the most relevant sale items and promotions
- Mobile optimization – keep the same rich customer experience even on mobile devices
- Analytics – track top keywords, product views and filter usage to refine the customer experience.
SearchSpring partners with such platforms as: Magneto, Shopify and 3dcart
AddShoppers – Driving Revenue with Social Influence
The premise of AddShoppers’ software suite is that latent revenue can be activated by analyzing and mobilizing social influencers – those who interact with a brand on various levels and across various social media platforms. One key element to increasing Average Revenue per Visitor (ARV) is the use of social rewards to “get the ball rolling.”
The SaaS-based platform is divided into four apps which can be used separately or together:
1. AddAnalytics – gauges social media referrals and content engagement and aggregates data to provide insights into trends as well as ROI.
2. AddSocial – includes Social Media login forms, specialized Social Sharing Buttons, and a Pintrest-style Trending Wall to encourage easy engagement.
3. AddSocial – allows businesses to build social rewards campaigns and contests to get customers actively involved as well as Refer-A-Friend programs to build customer loyalty and trust.
4. AddTargeting – provides behavioural targeting and retargeting capabilities based on purchase intent data from AddAnalytics as well as integration with Facebook Ads.
AddShoppers has been implemented by The Economist and Everlast, among others.
Rejoiner – Combating Revenue Leakage with Smart Re-engagement
Ecommerce businesses lose massive amounts of revenue each year due to shopping cart abandonment – a pain point that Rejoiner addresses directly. By re-targeting customers who have already engaged with their brand, companies can significantly increase customer lifecycle and lifetime revenue.
Some of the platform’s key elements are:
– Real-time re-engagement email campaigns – allow businesses to quickly react to visitors who abandon their cart using personalized, automated emails including a link to a user’s abandoned session.
– Pre-submission tracking – identify visitors as soon as they enter their email address, even before they submit an order.
– Segmentation – for more personalized engagement based on customer behavior, transaction history and demographics
– Campaign optimization – A/B testing for email campaigns, hold-out group testing to determine sales impact
Rejoiner is used by: Grasshopper, VTech
SmartGift – Getting More Out of Giving
No one can doubt that gifting is a major source of revenue for e-commerce. Just think about the Christmas shopping season.
SmartGift is for those who want to tap into the $10 billion e-gifting market and leverage the happy emotions connected with gift-giving to build stronger connections with customers. The advantage of drawing both the gift-giver and recipient to a website, goes without saying.
The tool includes a clean checkout interface, multiple options for notifying the gift-recipient, easy and fun ways to access the gift, as well as flexibility for recipients to choose sizes, colors or even exchange an item.
Two of the applications featured above (AddShoppers & Rejoiner) were developed by the Clearcode team. Read more about how they were built.
This article originally appeared at MultiChannel Merchant.
