Eight tips for selling products and services online

The commerce landscape has changed considerably over the past few years and competition is fierce.

Customer expectations have shot through the roof and companies that don’t deliver effortless and seamless tailored experiences across all channels will fall behind. In fact, they already are, with customers saying that only half (49%) of companies deliver.

65% of customers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising. In fact, 1 in 3 customers will leave a favorite brand after just one bad experience.

So here are eight tips for reducing churn and delighting customers at every turn and having them coming back for more, time and time again. 

1. Make sure your customers can find what they’re looking for

 66% of consumers feel that a company valuing their time is the most important thing in providing a good online customer experience because wasting time looking for a known product feels like a cost to them that they wouldn’t have had to spend elsewhere.

When 77% of consumers consider inefficient customer experiences detract from their quality of life, it becomes imperative that your online customers can find what they are looking for easily.

Whether you sell goods, services, e-products, memberships, or bundled products, Kentico Xperience gets your products in front of your customers fast.

You can leverage full-text search capabilities and let customers refine results with different filters, such as product categories, attributes, and availability.

Managing your portfolio is easy and you can create product catalogues with flexible design and navigation and categorize products using defined attributes, even create multiple departments with different product types. All to ensure your customer finds what they are looking for, quickly.

And when they do, you can guarantee they’re greeted by a beautiful product page containing rich interactions, imagery, videos, and technical specifications, even product variants and customization options!

Once you’ve imported your products from external sources like SQL databases, XML, or XLS files (saving you hours!), you’re in full control thanks to superior product information management based on SKUs, prices, and stock records for each product and variation.

So, you can put your products right under your customer’s nose and then sit back and wait for the purchase.

2. Run promotions and offer discounts to boost sales

70% of US internet shoppers say discounts have the biggest effect on their purchase decisions during the holidays.

In fact, 64% of online customers wait for a sale before making a purchase and 59% search for promo codes before buying anything.

Discounts can increase traffic, enlarge basket size, monetize inventory, move seasonal stock, boost sales, and create stronger relationships with customers.

Managing and applying discounts, gift cards, and offers is easily done with Kentico Xperience using predefined or custom rules with automatic start and finish times.

You can set up multiple types of discounts, such as rules-based discounts, volume discounts, and total order discounts. And you can offer coupons, gift cards, and free shipping, as well as accept promotions as a form or payment. (Did you know that customers are 4-5 times more likely to make a purchase when free shipping is offered?)

Encourage more sales by running cross-sell and up-sell promotions with multi-buy offers and even target select groups by enabling catalog and volume discounts.

3. Deliver exceptional personalized experiences 

80% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand that provides personalized experiences, 74% of them feeling frustrated when content is not personalized.

Personalized marketing activities can significantly increase visitor engagement, enhance the customer experience, improve brand perception, boost conversion rates, and increase lead generation and customer acquisition… not to mention boost sales.

It’s clearly essential that you provide a personalized experience at every touch point (web, mobile, social, and email), and with Kentico Xperience, it couldn’t be simpler to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.

By leveraging data like demographics (gender, age, job title, location), behaviors (visited pages, downloaded content, purchased products, campaign clicks), customer context (browser, device) and customer journey insights, you can create touchpoints that offer unique content to different types of visitors or content that dynamically changes according to the actions they perform.

You can define guidelines and rules for personalization and segmentation and, in just a few clicks, set up multiple personalization variants, i.e. different content for specific customer segments belonging to particular personas.

Creating new rules for a variety of real-life scenarios for use across all your touchpoints, campaigns, and automated workflows is easy. You can identify your most frequent users and publish content relevant to their interests immediately.

And you can analyze results to be always optimizing content and improving the personalized experience your customer so clearly demands. 

4. Leverage in-depth data for smart recommendations

91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and recommendations. By providing recommendations to your customers that reflect their interests, you can increase engagement, conversion rates, and basket size.

Of course, Kentico Xperience helps you recommend relevant content and products to customers with built-in personalization features and custom-designed drag-and-drop recommendation widgets.

You can segment users with a plethora of possibilities and create variants to analyze which content performs best.

Using the AI-powered recommendation system Recombee, you can display products, services, and articles your customers are most likely to appreciate in real time thanks to learned customer behavioral patterns and attributes.

What better way to show your customers that you care?

5. Create successful campaigns across channels

85% of digital consumers start the customer journey on one device and finish it on another and 90% of consumers want an omnichannel experience with seamless experience between communication methods.

With Kentico Xperience, you can launch omnichannel campaigns faster and manage all assets from one place using a host of out-of-the-box functionality and sophisticated automation.

Leverage form controls and workflows to manage high-level social marketing using drag-and-drop widgets and automatically post to multiple channels.

Execute cross-channel digital marketing campaigns (including website, emails, online store, and other channels) with ease, and gain intelligence (likes, shares, reach, followers, mentions, and more) on individual channels for a truly 360-degree view of your customer.

Build custom campaign funnels and get automated reports of how your audience flows through them. Nurture your leads at scale, delivering relevant content along their journey, and trigger personalized drip campaigns to warm them up while gathering more insights.

Analyze your lead generation and promotional campaigns with precision, measuring performance with real-time data (interactions, conversions, current conversion rate) and optimize live campaigns at any time.

There’s always room for improvement, and Kentico Xperience shows you where. 

6. Improve and automate your email marketing strategy

63% of companies are outperforming competitors thanks to marketing automation. Leading to increased performance of your campaigns, automation is one of the most effective ways to increase conversions.

If you want to send beautifully crafted newsletters and targeted marketing emails based on customer data and lead score, Kentico Xperience has your back.

Not only can you create emails faster (using drag-and-drop technology to personalize content), but you can ensure high deliverability while gaining insights into unique open rates and click-through rates.

It’s simple to identify best-performing content with A/B and multivariate testing that generate detailed reports.

Your campaigns will work seamlessly with email marketing and deliver in-depth statistics on their success in terms of delivery, engagement, contact loss, and more. And, your dynamically-populated newsletters will be timely, their performance and subscribers easily monitored.

Perhaps that’s why nearly half of all companies are using marketing automation.

7. Boost revenue with a tailored checkout process

Did you know that 69% of your customers abandon their online shopping carts before reaching the payment stage? Or that 74% of people are likely to switch brands should they find the purchasing process too difficult?

Online businesses have to closely manage cart abandonment and focus on identifying issues that cause friction.

To provide a shopping cart and checkout experience that is fully customized to your customers’ needs, Kentico Xperience makes it easy to acquire customer details and keep in touch with them about their order.

You can build single-page checkouts or checkouts for specific scenarios and encourage customers towards successful purchases by enabling them to add, update, or remove products and services easily, even displaying stock availability.

It’s easy to integrate your choice of payment methods and enable payment in multiple currencies (at pre-defined or real-time rates) with cross-platform authentication.

You can even automatically calculate real-time shipping costs (via integration with shipping companies) based on factors such as the weight of a product, country, date, and more.

Purchasing from you couldn’t be a more pleasurable experience for your customers. 

8. Manage multiple websites with ease

If you have vastly different offerings, or are targeting different audiences with dissimilar branding, you will benefit from having multiple websites.

Microsites can offer better SEO, better presentation of your offering, and more effective branding.

Kentico Xperience allows you to efficiently manage multiple stores from one place, helping you create a seamless digital experience across your corporate website, microsites, online store, community, and blog—sharing products, data, code, credentials, payment methods, order statuses, and invoices among them. Your assigned managers can then switch between them using a single set of credentials.

Microsites are quick to deploy from custom templates and designs, and you can automatically show customers content in their language, currency, and time zone.

How better to showcase your offering and grow your customer base?

Wrapping it all up in one platform

I guess this conclusion is self-evident:

If you want deliver a seamless personalized omnichannel customer experience that increases engagement, conversions, and sales, while decreasing cart abandonment, customer friction, and manual work for your content team…

You could do a lot worse than with Kentico Xperience. Schedule a live 1-on-1 demo with one of our experts to learn more.