eCommerce amidst COVID-19 challenges

 

While the world deals with an unprecedented crisis due to COVID-19, businesses need to realign by focusing on eCommerce offering or improving their online experience. It’s time to optimize the business to fuel future growth, by realizing the potential of the business, tightening up loose ends, creating a resilient organizational structure that can survive any uncertainty in the future.

For many businesses around the world, Digital commerce has risen to the top and creating a winning eCommerce experience has helped them thrive and not just survive in these challenging times.

FORWARD THINKING

Businesses evolve on a regular basis, having an effective and forward-thinking strategy that meets customers’ requirements is imperative. Spending time to understand customers’ online requirements and current challenges, in these testing times, gives a good idea on how to improve your business processes, increase revenue, cut down cost and make them more profitable.

Delivering the right product using  Data Science algorithms, on existing eCommerce storefronts,  provides a personalized customer experience increasing online revenue by nearly 5-10% annually. It definitely helps to know about customer online shopping patterns, providing the right products when the customer revisits the site for another purchase. Comprehending your customers’ new expectations and your readiness to meet them is what is critical in today’s extremely competitive global eCommerce.

ENGAGE WITH YOUR CUSTOMERS

In a time with a lot happening around us, it’s imperative to step up your customer engagement with effective marketing campaigns more than ever. Tools that send out emails, enticing shoppers to purchase online, and being able to track the customer behavior based on click-through rates have proven to be cost-effective, efficient and more personalized. In fact, there’s 6 times more likelihood to get more click-through rates through emails instead of tweets and 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.

Your business will be at the top of your customers’ mind when they get personalized emails from you. Additionally, with so many people working out of the comfort of their homes, and with a little bit more time at their disposal by not having to drive   to work, social media has proved to be another effective channel for businesses and people to connect, in turn getting the economy moving. Social media provides enhanced tools that analyzes which campaigns or what types of posts are doing well that would increase your online revenue.

APPEALING TO THE NEXT-gen

The new generation or Gen Z prefer to buy most of the essentials online and they are more inclined to visit sites that are more appealing or trendy. We all have noticed an exponential increase in the online orders during these testing times. With restrictions on movement for everyone around the globe, the only choice to shop around for essentials were online stores. If you have been monitoring your site metrics and sales trends for spikes in interest, you will notice an upward trend especially among the Gen Z shoppers. Data shows average share of income spent online is more than 10% among the Gen Z shoppers. There’s a unique shopping pattern among Gen Z, in that they go through online reviews, read blogs, get all that they need to know of a product they would like to purchase before they click on the Place Order button.

IMPROVED CUSTOMER SERVICE

With a surge in online traffic, and with disruptions to our normal lives, its imperative service after sales is not affected. With emotions running high, minor dissatisfaction with a product purchased online can be detrimental to the business, if it’s not acted upon immediately.  Additionally, customer service increases customer loyalty. Outstanding customer service motivates higher spending decisions that increases the average order value. 86% of customers pay up to 25% more when they get a good customer service rep on the other end of the call or online chat who is able to guide the customers in a buyer’s journey.

79% of customers prefer live chats because they offer instant responses. Live chats have the highest customer satisfaction rates at 92%. Interestingly only 17% of the companies planned to add live chats on their online storefronts. To cut down on operational costs, Chatbots have also started replacing live chats. With customer expectations sky rocketing, expecting answers in less than 10 minutes, live chat or chatbots have become popular with 71% of the businesses believing online chat would come on top by 2021.