Many companies have been mandated to temporarily minimize overhead cost, while focusing on increasing revenue through eCommerce. With reduced teams, now more than ever, efficiency is key. Here are few tips for surviving these challenging times:
Make sure your site stands out. Keep your content relevant and clutter free, especially homepage and product detail pages, to reduce friction when adding to cart. Side benefit, fresh content will also help your SEO.
Optimize site performance by compressing images and videos for a faster load time. Investigate any efficiencies with third party integrations such as content management systems, payment processors and so on.
While you’re waiting for inventory to arrive, focus on lookbooks to provide sneak peeks into new merchandise and create future buying needs.
Offer weekly promotions including free shipping, bundled products, or price/percentage discounts. Side benefit, these deals may end up on couponing websites to give you extra visibility and/or help with liquidating slow moving merchandise.
Offer additional payment methods (Apple Pay, Paypal, Android Pay, Debit, etc.) and/or the ability to pay in installments.
Take this time to work on loyalty programs and see how you can offer increased value to your customers. For example, perhaps giving 1.5 or 2 times the loyalty points and/or removing expirations for loyalty redemptions.
Be flexible with your exchange and return policies, taking into account that many customers are shopping online for the first time.
Review your customer service procedures and see how you can empower your teams to offer greater service to customers. Also, see how you can leverage technologies to facilitate the jobs of your customer service reps (Live Chat, Chat Bots, mobile apps, etc.)
Review cart abandonment strategies and see if your communications can be improved, or the offer made more compelling to get incremental sales.
Check in on your teams regularly to collect feedback. See if there are any pain points that have come up during this time and seek to alleviate them.
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