Build Rapport With Online Customers

One of the hardest problems online business websites have is converting their visitors to buyers. This is experienced by mostly all business websites, probably even yours if you have one. To make a good conversion, there are a few steps that an owner should take, based on the observations of certain patterns created by common shoppers. By tracing these patterns, almost all of this can be avoided and those browsers will soon decrease and the buyers will be on an increase.

Probably one of the most important things to do first is to make sure that your website offers quality customer service. Remember, customers always want to feel important so give them utmost importance. You may consider outsourcing the customer service support aspect of your business to companies like http://live247support.com so as allow you to focus on the other aspect of the business. Next factor to consider is the checkout process which should be clear, concise, and confined. The top reason people leave their shopping carts is because it is taking too long to checkout. The Global Millennia Marketing Study also cites some other important reasons people leave the shopping area such as the following: requiring too much personal information, poor navigation, poor download times, confusing checkout process, and requiring registration to purchase.

Checkout is a key part of your online website, mostly because it is one of the biggest sorts of revenue for your site. This can be crucial to the upkeep cost of the site. When people decide they want to buy, they should be able to buy quickly. The more time they spend trying to buy, the more time they may spend second guessing themselves. There are some very good ways to keep the complexity of this problem down. One of them is by not requiring your guests to login before their purchase. Most buyers are not going to remember their login information, so they won’t want to waste time getting their information. Allow the buyers to skip this step and possibly track their order by the order number, or you could invite them to create their login information after the purchase.

By now, you need to make sure that you are keeping everything simple. Nothing is to be too complicating with this process. Make sure that you are only asking for the minimum amount of information that is needed to make the sale. Remember that the more screens a user sees or has to flip through, is money coming from your pocket. You need to make sure that you have a perfect balance between the numbers of pages in a checkout process to the length of the pages. A user doesn’t want to have to flip through a bunch of pages just to get to the end. Nor does the buyer want to see one long page that he or she has to fill out, since this may scare them and force them to abort the purchase. Find the balance between the number of screens and the amount of information asked for in each screen. By breaking up screens, buyers will see that the process seems to be shorter.

What’s a purchase without knowing how well the product seems to be with a marketing survey? The last step that you should make of your checkout is a survey on the marketing. These questions are to collect data on the type of buyers that are coming to your site. One important thing about these pages is that they need to load fast. Buyers don’t want to wait a long time for these pages to load. A good way to get rid of that problem is to decrease the graphics on the page to little or none. The page should load with in two seconds. Basically you should just make the survey pages look a lot like the checkout pages, so that the buyer is used to the same page layout.

After all these good tips, how can the effectiveness of the checkout actually are measured? The most common way of measuring this statistic is by calculating the ratio of the number of people that order and the number of people who began the checkout process. This is called “cart conversion.” Ideally you would want the cart conversion to be 100%, but that is not always the case. The high shipping costs at the end could force someone to leave their cart. These are normal barriers that will have to always be fought. A high cart conversion is ideal for everyone in this business, but not always possible. By analyzing the visitors and buyers on your website, you should be able to make some good fixes to the page layout and check out process to satisfy your buyers and increase your sales indefinitely.

The Conversion Strategy

You’ve built your website, sourced your suppliers, set your terms, and launched the perfect on-line business. Then you wait, and watch. Day after day, you check the stats, they’re looking, they’re visiting, but they are not buying. The frustration sets in and you ask yourself, what did I do wrong?

Cart conversion, or turning shoppers into buyers, is critical in your on-line business. Cart conversion affects your bottom line. The more cart conversions that go through successfully, the more money your site makes. One would hope that everyone who put something into his or her shopping cart would convert to a sale. Unfortunately, the national average of conversion is roughly 30%, according to various sources, including FireClick. So 70% of your customers will not actually purchase what they pick up. There are many cited reasons for shopping cart abandonment, including poor navigation, slow loading pages, asking for too much information, and registrations. Here we enter into a look at on-line business strategies that can turn your lookers into buyers.

Throughout this article, there is a key strategy that applies across the board. SIMPLIFY – I just cannot stress enough, the importance of simplifying. Don’t overcomplicate your site, and make it easy for me to do business with you.

Take a look at your checkout process. Even the most avid customer will stop mid-sale and leave your site if the process is too consuming. Are you collecting too much information? This can leave customers feeling uneasy. Is the process too long? According to a recent survey by Nielsen Online, a service of the Nielsen Company indicated 81 on-line shoppers out of the 1000 surveyed, shop online to save time, not money. Do not waste their time. What information do you need to conduct your transaction? Only collect that information from your buyers.

Do you have your customers register or log in to make purchases? This can be a major deterrent to most on-line buyers. When you go to the local grocery, do they ask you to register to buy food? No, it’s a waste of time. Think - get in, make the purchase, and get out. Requiring customers to register or log in, unless you have a really good reason for doing so, is pushing your customers away. Remember that they are shopping your store for convenience of time. How many sites have you registered on, and forgotten the login or password? Presenting the option however, of registering to gain the ability of reviewing previous order history, or tracking their order, feels like great customer service. Just offer it after you’ve gotten the sale, this allows them to choose whether or not to spend the time.

How do your checkout screens check out? Is it one, continuous, overwhelming screen? Is it many screens collecting piles of unnecessary information? Customers need to get in, make the purchase, and get out. However, the checkout process should build confidence, or they start second guessing their purchase, and start tossing items out of their cart. Or worse, they run completely. Make the process short and sweet. One continuous form they have to scroll down looks like a big process to time savvy customers, so break your checkout form into quick, and bite sized pieces. Keep the graphics on the checkout pages to a minimum; eliminate them with great product descriptions if you can. The ideal number of screens to check out is two to three. This eases the customer by building confidence that you aren’t collecting too much information, or wasting their time.

One final aspect to examine is your placement of your marketing survey. Marketing statistics is the key to tracking the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, so eliminating the collection of this data isn’t an option. Entertain the idea however, of moving the collection of this data to follow the sale. Again, this is a time conscious shopper; don’t distract them from buying your products. The relief comes to the customer once they complete their purchase, and they most likely will oblige in providing the information you desire.

Now there are obviously, many other site issues that can impact cart conversion rates, such as security, shipping time or shipping rates. It’s always best to look at the whole picture from the customers’ point of view. Cleaning up, simplifying your checkout process and quality customer service are key steps to securing more sales for your on-line business. There are several customer service support providers around like http://live247support.com -- and analytics tools available on the web that can aid you in the fine tuning of your on-line business, such as Google Analytics. So take the time to make the process simple, and then track the effectiveness of your hard work.

Enhance Your Online Business

Advanced technology enhances business and live chat software is one of such example. Constant touch with the customer is the latest buzz in the business arena of today. Live chat software exhibits this function at a very economical way as it boosts the sales right from company’s website. Live chat software provides live interaction of site visitor or customer individually and help resolving their individual queries. It helps them to final business deals while saving much of the time.

For any business type, live chat software is the ultimate choice. It also lifts the visitors or customer from their usual time taking queries to fast resolving option. This software provides all the details of the visitors on your web site at any point of time like what page they are searching, from which place they belong, at right time etc. It also shows whether the customer needs your help or just checking it out. Moreover this software helps you to give direction to your website visitor to the particular web page that you think could be more useful for the visitor.

In this way you can provide more information to your visitor through your website and help them to decide purchase. If the visitor expresses any doubt you can instantly invite them for chatting with you in order to resolve it. Live Chat Software is good for providing live help or support to your customer. This software makes your website live and more interactive as it is the need of the hour. Check out http://live247support.com for instance and find out why it is no doubt that this software offer best customer care services and resolve customers’ needs instantly.

The software enables you to help different customers at the same time on individual basis at low cost. This helps you to use the stored responses and push web pages and save time in a cost cutting method. Live chat software has several functions like the actual time visitor supervision, live text chat on individual basis, automated positive chat invitation, personalized online or offline status graphics, pushing of web pages, incorporate with auction web sites such as eBay etc.

Live chat software has different audio notifications, web based edge for visitor observing and chatting. There is no need to downloading or install the software. It has individual windows application for visitor observing and chatting is completely free. Apart form all these functions this software has several sections support, leaving message for specific section, providing hidden hits counter or hits log analyzer, personalized on-line or off-line images, pre-chat or leave message for personalization, personalized visitor chat window. You can use any language or extending support by using any language, geographical location tracking for visitors like city, region and country. This software canned the responses with pro-pop ups or auto pop-ups. It also has pay per click or publicity campaign tracking and sends live support status in e-mails.

Live chat software offer numerous options to help you enhances your business and the price you pay for this is very meager. This software is available at very reasonable rates.

Increase Customer Confidence

Shopping online is an entirely different process than that which one might expect to experience as a consumer in a department or specialty store. It is the direct, one-on-one, face-to-face sales communication that makes the difference in closing a sale, and now, that important edge is available via a live chat program to answer questions from customers as soon as they arise. For online businesses, this is godsent for three important reasons:

1. Time and money (Count as one reason only, please.) Live chat software saves money and resources - two valued commodities in any online business. Compared to the cost of hiring phone operators, live online support is less expensive and better adapted to servicing the needs of customers. Consider the amount of time that could be saved if operators could send prepared responses to those most frequently asked questions.

2. Availability. Live chat software doesn’t go home, to the bathroom or close for weekends, holidays and vacations. It is always there to service the needs of customers quickly and easily. Help when it is needed and not when it is convenient is a very important selling point of Live chat software, which can honestly promise to be there “24/7” and deliver its claim every single time.

3. Increasing the browse-to-buying ratio. Online customers demand answers when they ask them and the process of having to wait could make a consumer reluctant to make a purchase. Quick answers and a customer’s confidence in the answer can only help to close a sale quickly.

The last thing I want to do is recommend things but http://live247support.com stands out to be the leading example in providing excellent online customer service.

So what are YOU waiting for?

e-Commerce 2.0

Successful website owners, including online business owners, know that every nook and cranny of your website matters.

The very first thing a person notices when your site has loaded (after the amount of time it takes for your website to load) is the visual appeal. This is a combination of your layout, images, graphics, and so on but the content is also very important.

You should never intimidate a visitor, because your competitors are only a few clicks away.
Instead, everything about you should be friendly and inviting… encouraging your valued visitor to read on, or to browse your catalog.

And, of course, you want to collect information from your traffic. This information can be used for email marketing and other methods of building lasting relationships… without spamming anybody. But this is where many website owners make their biggest mistake… costing at least 5 times the relationships you could be building.

To find out if you have been making this mistake… then all you need to do is answer the following question:

Is Your Shopping Cart Drop Rate Higher than Your Bounce Rate?

If you answered yes… then I have good news for you! You are well on your way, and a few more adjustments are all it takes to improve this slight error.

The problem is that the action of making a purchase should never take too long… and it should never feel like it is taking too long. Think of when you are standing in a store, in a very looooooong line… and all just to buy a candy bar. It takes a very short amount of time before you are analyzing whether that candy bar is worth it… and not much later you will be putting that candy bar back and leaving the store.

Shopping online is even worse. There are no long lines, but there are long processes. If you are required to make an account, provide all of your contact information, personal information, favorite colors…

Well, this is all it takes for a potential customer to “give up” and change their mind. You not only lost a sale, you also lost a relationship.

Your mistake?

Requiring an account to be built before a purchase is made will not only lose potential members, but also increase your shopping cart drop rate.

The smarter, more effective method is to give opportunity (and not a requirement) to open an account after the sale has been made and processed quickly. If you don’t already know the “secrets” of gaining permission to send newsletters and other benefits of being a member… then you should reflect on the most basic trick of attraction marketing there is…

Do You Offer Valid Benefits that are Not Self Serving?

If a visitor has already made a purchase, then they might be interested in making more down the road as well. This is good news for both of you, but there is no need to instantly push another sale.

Certain convenient capabilities, such as the ability to view prior orders and to save items in a shopping cart before purchasing at a later date… these are real reasons that a person would want to provide their information and become a member.

If you offer something useful, something worth signing up for, then you should have no problem lowering your shopping cart drop rate, increasing sign ups, and building lasting relationships with ongoing customers. And while you’re busy exerting effort in increasing your cart rate, you may consider outsourcing your customer support service to companies like http://live247support.com so as not to overlook this aspect of your business.

Remember, one should never compromise the power of quality customer service for this is the strongest weapon one can ever have in this tough competition.

Happy Shopping :-)!

Gabriel Taylor