The fact that it is significantly more difficult and expensive to acquire new customers instead of keeping existing ones is not new news. However, fierce competition and increasing expectations from customers means that you have to go the extra mile in order to provide a positive customer experience and increase your customer retention rates.
With this idea in mind, we’ve included features for the Cloudfy ecommerce platform to help you increase customer loyalty for your online business. Here are 5 ways in which you can use your newly built website on the Cloudfy platform to keep your customers happy and engaged.
1. Targeted email offers
Email marketing remains an ever important channel for driving revenue online, but it can also be used as an effective method for top of mind awareness, engaging your existing customers, alerting them to other products via cross-selling techniques and keeping them interested in your business through offers and interesting content.
However, the days of one size email fits all are over. Sending one generic email per month is no longer working for many businesses in the days of personalization. Today’s busy customers don’t want to be bombarded with emails that are not relevant for them. Highly targeted emails, based on segmented customer and order data is how many businesses are driving triple digit returns from their email marketing campaigns.
Cloudfy offers in-built email functionality which can be used to send targeted emails to different customer segments including reminders for basket abandoners, Cloudfy can also be easily integrated with 3rd party email marketing providers, such as Mailchimp, DotDigital or Bronto to name a few.
2. Providing Outstanding Customer Service
Customer service continues to be one of the key battlegrounds on which online retailers win and retain customers and is absolutely key when it comes to increasing customer satisfaction. Customer service is one of the main factors which can determine whether your web visitors become long-time valuable clients or if they’ll choose one of your competitors. Cloudfy offers plenty of useful features which you can use to improve your customer service, including, but not limited to:
- Live Chat so your customers can contact you easily via the website
- Enhanced Site Search which offers intuitive results based on product titles, SKUs, descriptions or other elements
- One Click Checkout to reduce the user journey and improve conversion rates
- Ask a Question button on product pages which sends an automated email with the customer’s inquiry, so they can receive a prompt reply
- Telephone Order functionality which allows users to place orders against a customer account through the admin Content Management System.
3. Delivery
Customers are becoming increasingly demanding when it comes to the price they pay for delivery and how and when the items are being delivered. With big players like Argos offering amazing same day delivery, the supermarkets offering one hour delivery slots and giants like Amazon and other advanced retailers providing excellent communication with text updates during the delivery process are setting a very high bar when it comes to delivering on delivery!
Being able to offer competitively priced and reliable delivery is essential if your online business is going to effectively compete in today’s ecommerce landscape. Cloudfy offers a variety of configurable delivery options to suit a wide range of an online retailer’s needs, international delivery set up, as well as being able to offer delivery surcharges for next day or expedited delivery. Cloudfy also has the ability to integrate with all the major courier companies and offer your customers delivery tracking on their orders.
4. Stock availability
One sure fire way to increase bounce rates and drop conversion on site is with out of stocks. Those businesses who maintain high stock holdings and communicate these effectively on their website will be the winners, particularly during peak selling periods like Christmas.
Making sure your website correctly reflects product stock availability is crucial when it comes to dealing with your customers’ expectations. The Cloudfy platform features a user-friendly product management system, as well as allowing you to assign custom stock messages to be displayed on your website. Handy in built functionality like ‘email me when back in stock’ is a useful action for your customers to take if a product is out of stock. Messages like ‘low in stock or ‘less than 10 in stock’ alert web visitors to fast moving items.
5. Fresh, innovative products
If one of the key selling points of your business is the fact that you constantly provide original and innovative products, then being able to properly market them on your website can help you attract the attention of your customers and making sure that they’ll keep coming back for more. Some of the features embedded in the Cloudfy platform for promoting products include:
- Wishlist functionality which allows your customers to add products to their wish list or email to a friend as a gift idea
- My favorites which allows your customers to short list and save their favorites or regular buys to simplify even further future purchases
- Discounts, Voucher Codes, Marketing and Merchandising capabilities which allow you to create and promote special offers to further attract customers.
- Email a Friend functionality which allows your customers to share information about a specific product with their friends
If you’d like to learn more about how the monthly subscription based Cloudfy business can you help accelerate your growth online, contact us now.
