Internet Marketing Magazine Feb-Mar 2015

FEB - MAR 2015

> INTERNET DUCKS P10

> 7 FIGURE YOUTUBE MARKETING P13

> IMPACT EASE GRID P17

> INCREASE SALES & CUSTOMER VALUE P21

COVER STORY:

> ECOMMERCE CUSTOMER SERVICE

TRAFFIC MASTER

P25

JUSTIN BROOKE >> THE ORIGINAL AND BEST INTERNET MARKETING MAGAZINE DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY FOR THE IPAD, KINDLE FIRE, ANDROID AND THE WEB

MEET OUR EXPERT PANEL Greg Cassar

is a Digital Marketing Strategist, Entrepreneur and Speaker from Sydney, Australia. He is the leading Internet marketing strategist behind the scenes of many of the biggest Internet marketers in Australia and abroad.

Read his article on Internet Ducks on PAGE 10 and The Impact Ease Grid on PAGE17

Mark Macdonald

is the Content Marketing Manager at Shopify. Get more from Mark on Twitter.

Read his article on How Luxyhair.com Built a Seven-Figure Ecommerce Business With YouTube Marketing on PAGE 13

Fuze is a Miami Digital Agency providing strategic and integrated Website Design & Development, Online Marketing and Mobile Solutions. Fuze seeks mutually beneficial relationships with clients looking to take their online businesses to the next level. Connect with Fuze via Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

Read the article on How to Increase Repeat Sales and Lifetime Customer Value on PAGE 21

Tucker Schreiber

an ecommerce entrepreneur and Content Marketer at Shopify. Get more from Tucker on Twitter.

Read his article on How to Take Charge of Your eCommerce Customer Service on PAGE 25

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CONTENTS

4 10

1Justin Brooke Cover Story on Online Traffic 1Learn

How to Get Your ‘Internet Ducks’ in a Row

13

1Discover

How to Build a Seven-Figure Ecommerce Business With YouTube Marketing

17

1The Impact Ease Grid to 80/20 Your Business Decisions

21

1Know

the 5 Ways to Increase Repeat Sales & Lifetime Customer Value

25

l5

Ways to Take Charge of Your Ecommerce Customer Service

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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he Internet is maturing and click costs are continuing to rise. For the hobby marketer times will get tougher and more difficult but for the sophisticated informed marketer that can generate better ROI’s than the majority of the pack there will be clear waters ahead. There has never been a more important time in history to keep up with the latest and keep ahead of the pack. Hopefully we can help you with that.

Following recent health issues with our editorial team we are going to continue on from last month by changing back to the bi-monthly format with 6 issues a year. We will strive to deliver you the very best content to keep you informed. Between issues we will post new content on our 2 blog sites at InternetMarketingMag.net and Collective.com.au/blog

This month we meet with a traffic and marketing genius in Justin Brooke, as featured on the cover. Justin buys traffic in enormous volumes and has amazing insights to share about where he buys media and how he structures those deals.

You will find the audio interview with Dave here. It’s got many sections in it that didn’t make the print version of this publication. For those with iTunes the Podcast version may be more convenient.

If you haven’t got access to the member’s area please feel free to do at http://internetmarketingmag.net/ become-member/ (it’s free).

A special thanks to those who have left reviews in the apple platforms as it really helps us out. If you are getting good value from Internet Marketing Magazine and you can spare 1 minute of your time to click this link to give us a quick honest review that would be greatly appreciated (click ‘view in iTunes’ then scroll down and click ‘write a review’, thanks :).

As always run your winners long and cut your losers short and have fun on the journey.

Greg Cassar Regards,

Digital Marketing Strategist & Editor – Internet Marketing Magazine

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

“

With Native Advertising our ads don’t look like ads, they look like everything else on the page - like a piece of content.

“

ALL ABOUT JUSTIN BROOKE • Justin Brooke is a Traffic Strategist of the very highest magnitude.

• Justin is a hard core direct response marketer with his finger very much on the pulse of the ever changing Internet Landscape.

• Justin’s agency IMScalable has generated billions of ad impressions and sold millions of dollars worth of products for their high profile clients including Snuggie, Trump University, Agora, Russell Brunson, Rich Schefren and many others.

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

JUSTIN BROOKE TRAFFIC MASTER An Interview by Internet Marketing Strategist Greg Cassar Many people associate you as a ‘Facebook Guy’ because you have been so vocal in that space online in the last year or so, but I see you are now very big into Adblade and other Native Advertising. What can you tell us about advertising on these platforms?

Justin: There is a huge world outside of Facebook, but over the last year or two, that’s what everybody wanted to hear about and as an agency that’s what clients wanted to buy so that was what I was vocal about. But I’ve been buying traffic for almost 10 years now and there’s a lot more networks out there that don’t have nearly half the rules that Facebook now does.

Adblade is a great platform to check out.

Adblade used to be just ‘display advertising’ (banner ads). I call them ‘The Cockroaches of the Internet’, not in a bad way but because they’ve been through it all and they will probably outlive everything else on the internet as one of the oldest form of traffic.

Display advertising is the great grandfather of all Internet Advertising. Native Advertising is taking that to another level. With Native Advertising our ads don’t look like ads, they look like everything else on the page - like a piece of content.

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

Often times you may be reading Forbes or The Wallstreet Journal or BuzzFeed or whatever blog you read and you’ll see they have ‘Related Posts’ at the bottom or at the side bar you’ll see things like ‘From Around the Web’ or ‘Recommended Reads’ - those are native advertisements.

Native ad just means it looks native to the platform. It’s native because it looks like it’s supposed to be there and it doesn’t look like an advertisement. That’s why these things are on fire right now as the consumer doesn’t just tune them out. They don’t have banner blindness. Where you might have had .1% of people clicking on a banner ad, with native ads you see 3%, 4% and sometimes as high as 13% click through rate on some of our ads.

Greg: So often they’re like a headline and an image and that links over to a related article. Is that what you’re trying to do? Get them over to your site with some great content, and then remarket them and send them off to your offers?

Justin: Yes, and some networks out there only allow you to send the traffic to another content piece, so from one article to another article.

That article can be written persuasively with a formula of problem-agitate-solve. So that means you start the article with “Are you having this problem?” and then you agitate it, “Are you having all these other problems forming because of that problem?” and then solution. “Well the solution to that problem I found is my product you should buy it now.”

Adblade is different. With Adblade you can send the traffic straight to a Video Sales Letter (VSL) or to an advertorial – an advertorial is a content piece that presells the product.

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Everybody always ask me which works, “Should we send the content? Should we send to VSL?” The answer is ‘it depends’, you kind of have to test it. I mean, a good advertorial will beat a bad VSL and a good VSL will beat a bad advertorial, so it’s really test and measure.

Remarketing is obviously great for plugging the holes in the bucket and ascending prospects through sequences of pages. Do you have any ‘go to’ remarketing tools and strategies that you really like?

Justin: When you are using all these traffic methods, I consider those the fire hose, that’s where you’re going to drive your mass clicks from. Now of those mass clicks, let’s say you drive a hundred thousand clicks to your website, there’s only a certain portion of those people that are going to convert right away.

Usually in Internet Marketing circles, we say if 1% or 2% converts then we’re pretty happy with that.

That does mean that 99% or 98% of the traffic is not converting. Retargeting helps recycle that traffic and you start getting a lot more of that traffic to convert. Anybody who is not

> COVER STORY: doing retargeting right now is leaving a lot of money on the table. Whether you’re driving paid traffic or not, if you’re getting any visitors at all to your website, you should be doing retargeting so that you can recycle that traffic.

EXPERT INTERVIEW

waste so you’re only spending the money on the good stuff.

So if you’re retargeting this 60% of people who are going to bounce, that’s a huge amount of waste.

So what we do is we retarget people who’ve been on the page for a minute or two minutes.

We developed a piece of code that hides the retargeting pixel until 45 seconds or 2 minutes or whatever timeframe you set it for and that way you can let all that bounce traffic go and then drop your retargeting pixel on that traffic who’s actually interested in what you have.

I know you do a lot on the email solo ad space.

What is a “solo ad” and how does the process works?

What I’ve seen a lot of people do wrong with retargeting is they look at it like list building, so they just want to retarget as many people as possible and build the biggest retargeting list possible, but I don’t believe that is the right way of looking at it.

Justin: In the Internet Marketing circles is really the only place they call it the solo ads. When you approach the networks, it’s ‘email advertising’ or ‘dedicated emails’. Effectively you’re buying an email advertisement in somebody else’s newsletter, they call them solo ads because it’s you going out solo to that email list.

The right way of looking at it is you want to ‘retarget the right people’, so here you need to think about bounce rate. Most people know bounce rate is people who come to your website and they leave right away because they weren’t interested. A good bounce rate is about 60% or 70%. If you’re in the 30-40% it’s ‘wow this page is amazing’.

So that means if you’re retargeting like most people, 60% of the people that you’re retargeting are a complete waste of money, and I have a saying that ‘Waste is the enemy of ROI.’ The job of all of advertising is to identify where is the waste and remove the

When I first started, there was lots of different types of ads. You can buy a top ad, you can buy a bottom ad or middle ad or you can buy a solo

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> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

ad which was you bought the whole email that was going out to that list. There are great places where you can buy them from such as dedicatedemails.com and many others.

want to roll it out at scale, but you’ve got to keep a firm focus on being cost-effective.

What’s your thoughts on the game plan?

Justin: The way that I would attack it is that you have to start with really knowing who your target audience is, and who your target customer is. Having a firm customer avatar and knowing their fears; their desires; their frustrations; what are the competitors they are looking at; what are they hearing from the competitors, what are they hearing from you; really doing that research to understand the person you are targeting - that is the most important step that most people are skipping.

Another alternative is that you can go direct you go to Google and you type in your market, maybe tomato growing and then in quotation marks you put, ‘subscribe to my newsletter’, Google will then go out and find you all the pages that have the word ‘newsletter’ and they are also about tomato growing. This is a great trick to go and find a lot of people who have newsletters that you can strike up a deal with them to advertise to their subscribers.

I’ll also say what every other buyer has said to me in my career, ‘nobody pays rate card’. The only time you pay rate card is when you don’t know any better. In the email advertising world ‘It’s always negotiable’.

So with email, the simplest way to negotiate is ask “Is that the best price you can give me?” and then be quiet and wait for their reply.

Now putting this all together? If it’s your money and you have a winning offer and you

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So once I have that, I like to go the content route. For me, content is easy. I feel that I get a better quality customer where I lead with value instead of when I lead with dangling a carrot in front of them to try get them to become a lead. So I usually create a piece of content about what their biggest frustration is.

I’ve got a blog post in the Facebook market that says, “Are you making these mistakes with Facebook ads?” and it talks about one of the biggest mistakes I see people making and I talk about the other problems that this mistake causes and I tell them what the solution to that is.

> COVER STORY:

EXPERT INTERVIEW

So I would write a blog post that talks about the number one frustration that they have, all the other frustrations that it causes and the solution to that and then I will use native advertising. I use Adblade, Tabula, Twitter, Facebook, everything I can to drive as much traffic of my target audience to that blog post that’s highlighting their number one frustration.

Get them thinking about the problem and then lead them to the solution, then from there I will retarget. Then again, I would retarget smart. I will drop the pixel after about 45 seconds and I would follow those around the web, I would use retargeting on Facebook and Twitter and I would follow those people around with what my solution was.

Justin Brooke can be found online at the highly popular blog of his IMScalable.com agency at www.imscalable.com/blog/articles IMM

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Stop “Just Getting By”... Master Traffic & Conversion And Make More Money Without Working Harder

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INTERNET MARKETING

GET YOUR ‘INTERNET DUCKS’ IN A ROW

By Greg Cassar

S

ince 2003 I’ve documented all my learnings from my own businesses; my marketing agency and now our Internet Marketing coaching business and developed a framework that we call ‘The Internet Ducks’.

This is really one of the most important things that we have ever learned about online business because your ‘Internet Ducks’ really need to be in order, if you want your business to succeed.

Important – What I’ve found in businesses that were failing is that they were missing one or more of the ducks. All it can take is for one duck to be out of line and you don’t have a winning formula. On the other hand all the

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successful businesses that we’ve worked with have all the ducks.

Click to watch the short 4 minute video above to learn about the 16 internet ducks and see if you have all these lined up in your business right now.

If you don’t it may be time to see if it’s fixable or else be prepared to say ‘next’ and pivot to a different business opportunity, product or service.

In particular, I’m interested to know how you’re going with Internet Duck 13, as this is something that I see many businesses struggle with, time and time again.

> Below is a summary of what the 16 Internet Ducks are: 1. Want it – people need to actively want your product.

2. Supply – you need to have a supply of your product and at the right time when your customers want it. (is your product seasonal?)

3. Pricing – your pricing has to work for the market and your profit.

4. Logistics – you need be able to make stuff happen without having the business relaying on your to do it. I see many people get stuck in businesses being the packer, shipper and administrator and they end up not having enough time to work ‘on their businesses’ because they are spending too much time in their business.

INTERNET MARKETING

one product. you need logical upsells and cross sells. You don’t want one trick pony.

12. Passion/enjoy – you have to either love or at least enjoy what you do. Many people go into business just for the money but from my experience the ones who are passionate about what they are doing are more successful.

13. Energy units – I’ve seen this problem in many businesses. Usually entrepreneurs are doing many things at once and never finishing, instead of taking one thing and driving it the whole way through and smashing it out of the park.

14. Speed – how quickly do you implement something and especially if it’s a new concept?

5. Searching for it – ideally you need people to be already searching for your product.

6. Target them - In addition to having people already searching for your product you need to be able to target them. If people are not already searching for your product then you definitely need to be able to target them.

7. Have money – your customers need to have money and not be afraid to spend it.

8. Motivated to spend – your customers need to want to spend. I had a client once who was on the procrastinator market. As you can imagine his prospects couldn’t be stuffed buying or getting their credit cards out. Which didn’t work well for business.

15. Timing – timing of the market is crucial.

I was into podcasting about 10 years too early. I was trying to monetise it back then.

Now, people are making a lot of money from podcasting. Timing can be everything.

9. Google and Facebook have to like it – with any advertising you’re doing or website you’re building, Google and Facebook need to like it.

16. Mindset – 70% of everything comes down to mindset.

10. Time Effective – you need to have a product that you can scale, without having you in every step of the process.

Have you got all your internet ducks lined up?

What ducks are you missing? Do you disagree with any the 16 internet ducks? Have you had success without all 16? IMM

11. Range depth – you don’t want to just sell

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YOUTUBE MARKETING

HOW LUXYHAIR.COM BUILT A SEVEN-FIGURE ECOMMERCE BUSINESS WITH YOUTUBE MARKETING

By Mark Macdonald

W

hen Alex Ikonn and his wife Mimi realized how hard it was to find good hair extensions, they knew they had stumbled on a business opportunity.

They took their problem and solved it by creating

Luxy Hair - an extremely successful online store selling hair extensions for women.

And the coolest part? Their business is powered almost exclusively by tutorial-style YouTube videos.

Their YouTube channel was created in 2010 and since then has amassed 1,474,246 subscribers and 173,657,125 total video views.

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YOUTUBE MARKETING In other words, Luxy Hair is the perfect example of an audience enabled business that relies on a loyal community of fans instead of other channels like SEO and paid advertising.

I caught up with Alex to find out how they took their site from idea to million dollar business.

Describe your business and product(s) in 1-3 sentences.

Luxy Hair is a customer-centric hair extensions ecommerce retailer.

wedding. She wasn’t able to find what she was looking for and I was lucky enough to be in the room when she was talking to her sister Leyla about her predicament. At the time, I didn’t even know what hair extensions were.

And this was all of the market research we needed, as I knew if she wasn’t able to find a solution for her dilemma, we were going to try to solve it!

How did you create, manufacture or source your product? What were some key lessons you learned during this process?

I started sourcing the same night. I went on Alibaba and probably contacted every hair extension supplier that was there and just started asking questions about how to make it happen. I asked many stupid questions, however, that made me learn more about the product and how to actually make the idea a reality.

In choosing our supplier, ultimately it came down to the quality of product. From my initial list, I narrowed down to about 10 that I had pretty good communication with and then started ordering samples. The supplier with the best quality product and communication won our business.

How much revenue are you currently generating per month?

I believe a more important measure for businesses is profitability and I can confidently say we are profitable in the seven-figures (annually).

How did you come up with the idea for your business/product(s)? What kind of market research did you undertake?

My wife Mimi and I were getting married and she was looking for hair extensions for the

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To our surprise, there was no minimum order with our supplier, however, we still had to place a pretty big order as the product itself is very expensive. Our initial order was $20,000.

A key lesson I’ve learned is the communication you have with your supplier is really important.

As weird as it sounds, you have to feel a connection and trust your intuition. It’s fluffy but it worked for us and we still work with the same supplier.

How did you promote your business initially

> and where did your first sales come from?

Any major media mentions or PR wins since then?

Our business was entirely grown through our YouTube channel, the YouTube community and word-of-mouth. We only recently started experimenting with paid marketing - up until then it was all organic.

And our initial biggest win was a YouTuber with about 15,000 subscribers reviewing our product. This did way more for us than any magazines mention can do as we’ve been featured and it’s nothing compared real people on YouTube.

YOUTUBE MARKETING

how the product looks and how it can transform your hair to help you create different hairstyles and look great! It’s a visual product.

How do you handle shipping and fulfilment and organize the back-end of your business?

Key lessons/tips for doing this successfully?

The most important thing I would recommend to anyone is to work with a third-party fulfillment warehouse from day one. It will save you a lot of headache. We used Shipwire when we had a crazy idea and no sales to growing to be one of their biggest customers.

Your YouTube channel has over 173M views.

Why is video working so well for you and what advice do you have for other businesses looking to leverage it?

The key lesson is shipping takes a lot of time and you want to use a service that will enable you to scale quickly and not interrupt your growth.

YouTube works well for us because of the way we approach the YouTube community. Our approach is to try our best to give people value and a personal connection when we create our videos. We honestly don’t focus on selling and instead focus on these two factors. The sales and word-of-mouth come as people can feel we genuinely want to help people. We don’t even use our product in most of our videos.

I can also tell you that YouTube is not for every business. It works so well for us as you can see

What software, tools and resources are crucial to your business?

Definitely, Shopify and Shipwire! These are my secret weapons and they integrate so seamlessly together.

The Shopify blog is my go to ecommerce learning resource. Sometimes, too much content that I can’t even absorb it all.

Sounds like a pitch for Shopify but I honestly love the service.

What were your biggest mistakes or wastes of time and money (if any)?

Our biggest mistake was not giving into crazy customers and my lesson was that it’s better to

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YOUTUBE MARKETING lose a little money than to be right.

For example, we’ve had instances when the customer didn’t follow a certain refund policy and still wanted a refund. Sometimes it’s better to play nice and not follow your refund policy as angry crazy customers can make you lose a lot more money. With social media at everyone’s disposal you have to be very careful.

What other key advice can you offer to entrepreneurs looking to start a successful ecommerce businesses?

Stop thinking about yourself and your success.

No one cares.

Start thinking about others and how you can bring value into their lives and help them solve their problems.

Key Takeaways: • When looking for product ideas, examine your own everyday life and look for pain points that you can solve. Chances are, if it’s a product or service that you need, others will need it as well.

• Don’t be afraid to learn from suppliers and ask lots of questions - even if you know nothing about a product or industry.

• When it comes to video and content marketing, focus on creating content that has independent value and lacks a direct sales pitch.

This will help you build an audience, position you as an authority and ultimately sell your products in an under-the-radar way.

• Keeping customers happy is important and sometimes making small customers service concessions can save you time and money down the road.

• Provide as much value as possible through your content, products and services and you’ll be much more likely to find success. IMM

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IMPACT EASE GRID

THE IMPACT EASE GRID TO 80/20 YOUR BUSINESS DECISIONS

By Greg Cassar

T

eaching at Digital Marketer Warroom…

I was just recently in San Diego for the Warroom mastermind meeting with Ryan Deiss, Perry Belcher and Frank Kern. We were doing an exercise of planning out step-by-step how we were each going to double our businesses in the coming 12 months.

Ryan, who was running the session said that he heard me say something that morning that was

so important that he wanted me to change what he had planned for the afternoon and asked me to teach it to the entire group. It was very well received, so that’s why I thought it would be a great idea to share it with you also.

The Best 80/20 Business Tool for Entrepreneurs As Business owners and Entrepreneurs we always have multiple projects on the go and more important tasks that we can possibly ever get to.

It’s not always obvious which ones will have the

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IMPACT EASE GRID most impact on your business and deserve to get your focus and immediate attention.

You’ve probably heard me go on about the 80/20 principle before (the Pareto Principle) and that is for a good reason – because it saves you wasting time and effort on stuff that just isn’t going to produce results. The 80/20 principle effectively says what’s the 20% of things that are going to bring 80% of the results.

I was fortunate enough to work with the amazing business coaches Andrew and Daryl Grant who taught me the best 80/20 Business Tool for Entrepreneurs called ‘The Impact Ease Grid’. As soon as I saw it I remember saying ‘F#ck that’s smart’ – not politically correct I know, but I like to call things as I see them :)

Step by Step How to Do an ‘Impact Ease Grid’ The first step really is to list out the different possible projects that you could be working on (all the things that are either currently pressing for your time or are coming up).

Next we want to draw an X and Y Axis and on the top left write ‘Impact’ and on the bottom right write ‘Ease’ so that we name our Axis’.

So if we take project A. Lets assume project A would have a massive impact on the business in terms of revenue etc and is relatively easy to implement. We would plot it up in the top right quadrant of the grid.

Next lets assume project B would have a high impact on the business in terms of revenue etc but is not exactly straight forward or simple to implement. We would plot it up in the top left quadrant of the grid.

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IMPACT EASE GRID

The projects that end up in the top right hand corner are the best ones to run with as they would provide the most impact to the business with the greatest ease to implement.

With our final project here in this example (but you can have as many projects as you need on your one) lets assume project C would have a low impact on the business in terms of revenue etc but is relatively straight forward or simple to implement. We would plot it up in the bottom right quadrant of the grid.

Ryan Deiss added some great insight to this the other day. He said “anything below the dotted line is not worth spending time on no matter how easy it is to implement because it’s not going to have much of an impact on the business – it’s not a bridge that can build you to your next income level”.

As you add more projects their exact position of how much impact they will bring and how easy they are to implement will vary. You will ultimately end up with something like the more complex example below.

I hope you get some amazing value from that.

I know we use it in our business all the time to make strategic decisions, and all our high level Collective Mastermind members use it too. IMM

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INCREASE SALES & CUSTOMER VALUE

5 WAYS TO INCREASE REPEAT SALES & LIFETIME CUSTOMER VALUE

By Fuze less money to bring that customer back for subsequent purchases. In fact, if your product is good and the customer had a pleasant experience, they may come back on their own.

W

hat do all successful online retailers have in common? Answer: the ability to drive repeat sales that increase lifetime customer value.

If you run an ecommerce website, you know how difficult it is to continually grow revenue.

One of the biggest mistakes made by online businesses, is focusing too much energy on filling the top of the sales funnel, and losing sight of the importance of creating more human-like interactions that lead to long-term customer loyalty.

It’s easy to make ecommerce a numbers game, where each sale is nothing but a monetary transaction that ends up in a quarterly sales report. However, the more viable approach is to consider how much a single customer is worth over the course of 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, etc.

So, instead of focusing on selling more products to new customers, allocate a portion of your marketing, customer service and sales strategy to creating connections with past purchasers.

It’s easier and more cost effective to sell products to existing customers, as they often need only a small reminder or nudge to take action. These people have already given you a vote of confidence and, if their experience was good, they will gladly do it again…and again.

5 WAYS TO INCREASE REPEAT SALES & LIFETIME CUSTOMER VALUE 1. Know your customer’s purchasing habits The more you know about how, why, when and where your customers are likely to purchase, the more effectively you can reach them with timely marketing messages that encourage subsequent sales.

Consider the amount of marketing dollars needed to generate a single transaction from a first-time customer. It takes considerably internet marketing magazine february - march 2015

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INCREASE SALES & CUSTOMER VALUE Brands like Neiman Marcus, Haute Look, Men’s Warehouse and Drugstore.com, for example, utilize Predictive Marketing software to analyze purchasing habits of customers and deliver personalized marketing messages based on previous interactions.

Let’s say Drugstore.com knows from their analytics tracking data that Jane Doe typically places an order every 3 months containing a consistent group of items (e.g. shampoo, soap, moisturizer, etc.), they can generate dynamic offers for these products, delivered to Jane via email and social media. These timely personalized messages create “wow” moments for customers, and create emotional bonds that stimulate long-term loyalty.

Online Reviews Keep track of what is being said about your products on 3rd party review sites.

Press & Media Monitoring what media and press outlets say about your products can be quite telling, and provide insight into what you’re doing right and what can be improved upon.

A lesson from Dell Computers: For years, Twitter was used by brands primarily for self-promotion and pushing sales. But, along came Dell, the computer company that dedicated itself to an all-out customer service initiative using Twitter as its primary connection to consumers.

2. Listen to your customers Making sales is great, but driving repeat sales is better. Customer loyalty is the crux of longterm ecommerce success, and it all starts with understanding their needs.

Your customers have a lot to say, and they hold the keys to your reputation and livelihood. For this reason, you should make a habit of keeping tabs of what is being said about your brand online, and responding accordingly.

Social Media Connect with customers on social channels and learn what makes them tick. What brands do they follow? What type of content drives them to like, share and comment?

Product Reviews Closely monitor product reviews and keep track of issues, especially recurring ones. Respond by reaching out directly to customers and attempt to resolve issues by offering refunds, returns or future discounts.

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By establishing multiple Twitter accounts, including @DellCares for replying to customer concerns, Dell was able to keep track of every mention of their brand on Twitter, and respond immediately to customer’s questions and concerns. This altruistic approach reaped great rewards for Dell and in 2010 they generated an estimated $6-million in revenue solely from their efforts on Twitter.

3. Learn how to market to past purchasers Customers who have already purchased from you online should be segmented into a distinct group for marketing efforts. These customers

> have given you a wealth of data that can be analyzed and used for driving repeat sales.

Marketing to existing customers can be informed by many factors, including purchase history, seasonality, shopping cart abandonment reports, remarketing efforts and social media insights.

INCREASE SALES & CUSTOMER VALUE

Killer customer service Zappos, the king of customer service offers free returns both ways and has some of the fastest shipping you’ll ever experience. I’ve ordered shoes from Zappos simply because it’s fun to see how quickly they arrive and, because returns are so simple, it’s a very low-risk transaction.

5. Always think one season ahead Big-time ecommerce companies start planning sales initiatives one year ahead of time. This means instead of relaxing after a successful Cyber Monday or Valentine’s Day sale, they start planning for next year’s initiatives for the same holidays.

4. Give people a reason to buy again If you’ve ever purchased online from the likes of Bed Bath & Beyond, Sephora or Macy’s, you know they are incredibly aggressive about promoting sales on future purchases.

Often, they email promotions moments after completing a purchase, which attempts to shift your attention from the sale you just made, to the sale you’re going to make.

Free gifts Sephora offers free sample products during checkout, which are aimed to entice consumers to return to the site to purchase full-size versions of the samples they’ve received.

Customer loyalty programs Starbucks’ “My Starbucks Rewards” and Bloomingdales “Loyallist” are examples of highly effective loyalty programs that allow customers to earn points on purchases that can be redeemed for future discounts.

Holiday sales can be the biggest drivers of revenue for many brands, and your competition will likely spend big dollars on seasonal marketing efforts. If you don’t reach your customers with attractive sales promotions, your competitors will. IMM

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ECOMMERCE CUSTOMER SERVICE

5 WAYS TO TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR ECOMMERCE CUSTOMER SERVICE

By Tucker Schreiber

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owadays, every online shopper is extremely aware of the reach of their voice. Be it positive or negative - one tweet, status update, or blog post can reach hundreds of thousands of people in an extremely short amount of time if it’s picked up by the right outlets.

Providing exceptional customer service is an essential part of every ecommerce business.

It can be used as a marketing strategy, customer retention technique, as well as a way to raise awareness for your brand.

In this post, we’ll go over the tools and techniques you can use to provide an outstanding customer service experience, and how to really “wow” your customers.

Let’s answer the call!

The Importance of Multi Channel Customer Service It’s important to understand that providing an exceptional service experience in a timely, professional manner is critical to the success of your business long term. It’s just as important as defining your brand.

Multi channel customer service is a strategic way to manage all customer related questions about your business. You can take advantage of email, social media, phones and many other platforms to do this.

By taking advantage of different tools, you can make sure that you’re able to cover all of your bases through multi channel customer service.

In this post we’ll go over a few different channels interact with your customers. Not all are necessary when just starting out as a small ecommerce store, but it’s important to know which ones are available should you look to expand your support channels with your business.

Here’s what we’ll take a look at today • Email • Social Media • Live Chat • HelpDesk • Phone Support Our main goal with using these different channels is to be able to deliver a “WOW” experience to our customers in hopes that they’ll return as a repeat buyer, or share their experiences with friends, family and social networks. internet marketing magazine february - march 2015

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ECOMMERCE CUSTOMER SERVICE What is a WOW Experience?

Have you ever had an unbelievable customer service experience that completely exceeded your expectations? That’s a wow experience.

In today’s extremely competitive online market, consistently exceeding customer expectations is a fantastic way to separate yourself from the competition, get repeat customers, as well as get unexpected press around your business.

An article from Gregory Ciotti has a few fantastic examples of this. Take a look at what Sainsbury’s did after a young girl sent them a note about the name of one of their breads.

Often if you’re dealing with a few requests per day, it can be tough to work with threaded conversations, and you may forget to respond to a customer’s question.

One of the best ways to make sure you don’t miss out on any important emails, is to separate your personal email from your ecommerce store inbox. This makes it easier to organize what emails you need to respond to.

You’ll also need to be careful to “close” certain emails after dealing with them, otherwise your inbox will turn into a chaotic mess.

There’s a few services, some paid and others free, that will let you have a custom email address for your store.

For example, you could open up an email account for yourname@yourstore.com,support@ yourstore.com and more.

Lily’s mom posted Sainsbury’s response on her blog, and the letters instantly went viral.

Nothing but good press for Sainsbury.

Let’s take a look at how you can do the same using multi channel customer service.

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Here are some inbox services to get you started: • Google Apps for Business • Zohomail • Rackspace Email • Fastmail.fm • Pobox

1. Use E-Mail Support as a Simple Form of Contact Providing an email contact for your customers is the easiest way to get started.

Alternatively, you can take advantage of Shopify’s email forwarding feature.

Simply publish either a contact form on your storefront, or a public email address and you can wait for questions to start coming in.

Delivering a WOW experience via email: make it easy for your customers to contact you by adding a contact page to your store. Be sure to have a separate email account for support related requests.

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> Tip: If you find yourself answering the same questions frequently, consider adding the answer to this question to your Frequently Asked Questions page on your storefront.

Another option is to get setup with a program called TextExpander, which will let you type more with less effort by using keyboard shortcuts.

2. Communicate With Customers on Social Media

ECOMMERCE CUSTOMER SERVICE

32% of customers voicing their concerns on Twitter expect a response within thirty minutes, and 42% expect a response within the hour. Those are tough numbers to hit if you’re a small team.

Another study found that people share their experiences using social media. 30% of customers share positive experiences on social media, and a total of 45% shared negative experiences.

So, with all of that in mind, what’s the best way to manage your social media support efforts? Ideally being able to manage everything from one platform would be your best bet.

If you haven’t been paying attention to your social accounts, now is the time. In fact, large companies are more responsive over social media than other channels simply because of the immediacy of it.

It offers a form of interaction with customers who are either asking about your product or business.

Of all of the different forms of social media, one of the most effective forms of providing social media support is through Twitter.

However, it’s important to note that because Twitter is such a straight and to the point platform, if you aren’t answering quickly you might be in trouble.

A study by the team at Simply Measured showed that 99% of brands are on Twitter, 30% of which have a dedicated customer service account.

They found that the average response time was 5.1 hours with 10% of companies answering within an hour.

Here are some social media management tools to get you started. Keep in mind, some of these will even integrate with other channels to make managing your support even easier.

• Hootsuite • Everypost • Sprout Social Delivering a WOW experience on Twitter: be as active and responsive as you can across all of your social media accounts. Make an effort to answer any questions in under an hour.

3. Instantly Communicate With Customers Using Live Chat Services Adding live chat functionality to your ecommerce store is a great way to let your customers get in touch with your team. If you can, always have someone available to answer any immediate questions by being online during regular office hours.

Live chat is a fantastic tool to speak with your customers for a few reasons. Just think about it - they can use it while they’re at work, they don’t have to make a long distance phone call, internet marketing magazine february - march 2015

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ECOMMERCE CUSTOMER SERVICE and they certainly don’t have to listen to hold music.

4. Use a Helpdesk Center as a Community FAQ

A recent study by econsultancy shows that live chat has the highest level of customer satisfaction as well. 24% of customers polled said they have used live chat, and 73% of them said they were happy with their live chat experience.

Those who completed the survey said that they prefer live chat over any other method because they got their answers quickly, and 46% agreed it was the most efficient communication method.

Having an online helpdesk where your customers can go to see commonly asked questions can be extremely helpful to you as a ecommerce store owner. Not only will it answer the customers question(s) quickly, but it will also help to mitigate support debt.

That means less time answering questions, and more time focusing on sales and marketing.

There are quite a few different helpdesks available nowadays, so it’s a matter of finding which one suits your needs. I recommend trying out a few of them to see if they have a trial period in which you can test out the functionalities.

Here are some tools that you can use to add a live chat feature to your store: • Bold Chat • Tidio Chat • Live Chat • Olark Delivering a WOW experience on live chat: try and find a service that lets you be mobile and still answer live questions. If that’s not an option, get started with a live chat platform that doubles as a contact form on your storefront so no requests are missed.

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Here are some popular ones to get you started: • Freshdesk • Kayako • GrooveHQ • Zendesk It’s good to have an interactive helpdesk that doubles as a contact area. For instance, some helpdesks have a feature where a customer can submit a public question and you can answer it publicly, or have a customer answer the question - effectively creating crowdsourced customer support. This also helps mitigate support debt.

> Delivering a WOW experience with a Helpdesk: build up an online portal that acts as a forum, contact area, and frequently asked questions page to help mitigate support debt.

5. Take Customer Calls with Inbound Phone Support

ECOMMERCE CUSTOMER SERVICE

about them through casual conversation that would never come up in an email.

Faster service: Few things resolve an issue or get a question answered faster than a phone call. It’s a great customer experience.

Easier to build rapport: Talking directly with a person allows you to build a rapport and then turn a potential lead into a life-long customer.

Builds trust for high-priced items: Selling $4,000 diamond-studded fingernail clippers?

You’d better have a phone number! The more expensive the items, the more likely your customers will want to talk to you before pulling the trigger. (Plus, wouldn’t you want to find out who was spending $4K on nail trimmers?)

It can, however, be daunting to provide your own personal phone number if you’re dealing with a large customer base. If you’ve never done any sort of call centre related work, it can be nerve-wracking to pick up the phone as well.

There’s quite a few ways for you to get a number specific to your store if you don’t want to give out your personal number. Here are some of the services that we’ve found to be useful for this: • Grasshopper • 800 • Telcan • Twilio • Ring Central

That being said, it is a fantastic way to learn more about yourself and your customers. In Andrew Youderian’s “Should You Have a Phone Number for Your Online Store” he weighs some of the benefits of having a phone number for your ecommerce store.

Delivering a WOW experience over the phone: set designated office hours that customers can reach you for a phone call. If you can, try finding a service provider that acts as a call forwarding and voicemail provider as well.

For most ecommerce stores, having a phone number that your customers can reach you at is tremendously important.

There are a lot of great advantages to offering quality, personal phone support: It’s a great way to learn: Especially early on in a new business, there’s no better way to understand your customers than by talking to them directly. You’ll learn all sorts of things

Conclusion Now that we’ve gone over the basics of multi channel support, it’s time for you to take these tools and apply them to your store. IMM

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