The Jungle

Posts Tagged ‘aov’

01.12.11   |   By Brian Grady   |   Leave a comment

Repeat Customers

There’s an old saying that it’s five times more expensive to acquire new customers vs. keeping your current base. Companies spend a lot of money on acquiring new clients, but often don’t measure the lifetime value of these acquired customers. However, according to Forrester Research, 47% of web retailers showed an increase in repeat customers in 2010, and repeat customers account for 37% of all mid-market retailers’ revenue stream.

So it’s no surprise that many retailers have turned to building sites with better branding and user experience to boost repeat purchases.

Magento is a platform that can help support these retention efforts with its current functionality. The platform has the ability to recognize specific customer groups and automatically provide offers and personalized recommendations to them, increasing conversion and AOV. You can also create customized landing pages that only these specific customer groups would have access to, adding incentive to return. Several clients are also experimenting with private sales and reward points for their regulars to come back and help drive margins. And all these efforts will help you lower marketing costs since they’re baked right into your Magento platform.

As a retailer, sure, you’re going to get caught up in acquiring new customers at the expense of the loyal ones. Just remember Magento offers fully customizable ways for you to hold onto the folks you’ve already got.

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11.23.10   |   By Brian Grady   |   Leave a comment

Online Customer Service Technology Options

Forrester has put together a simple matrix to help ecommerce professionals decide what channels you should provide as outlined below.

All these technologies can be implemented on the Magento platform as well as the higher cost ECP’s. Another technology that is garnering a lot of momentum is video chat to help increase conversions on high ticket or complex items. We are implementing this for two clients that will be live this spring. Looking forward to its affect on conversion as well AOV.

Characteristics of Customer Service Interactions Based on Complexity and Corresponding Technologies

Low complexity
• Low value
• High volume
• Repeatable
• Single-source answer

o Self-service
o FAQ’s
o Site search
o Virtual Agent

Medium complexity
• Medium value
• Circumstance related
• Multiple sources required to answer

o Virtual agent
o Email
o Click-to-call
o Reactive or proactive chat
o Community Forums

High complexity
• High value
• Complex issues
• Multiple sources required to answer
• Significant customer info required
• High-value customer segment
• High technical complexity

o Click-to-call
o Reactive or proactive chat
o Co-Browse
o Telephone

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