Perfecting The Last Mile To Drive Sales

You have great products and you provide your customers with an intuitive, streamlined online shopping experience. But your customers’ impression of your brand does not stop at the point of checking out – Your service at the last mile is an extension of your brand and a bad experience during this stage can impact future sales.

You’ve heard of this before – it costs 5 times more to acquire a customer than to retain an existing one. Customer acquisition albeit is important; to keep customers happy and returning is an easier and less expensive method of growing your business. Here we help you think up a few ways of driving the customer retention strategy of your e-commerce business by improving your last-mile journey.

Be very convenient

The ultimate way to ensure your customers return lies in making the entire shopping experience as easy and as convenient as possible. To encourage repeat purchases, make it simple for customers to find you and your products. Order confirmation emails are a great touch point, but you can increase the number of contacts by linking them to your tracking page where they would revisit to track their order deliveries. Another important aspect, that also helps a lot, is to make your payment process hassle-free. Take e-retailers such as Amazon for example, who make it really easy for customers to repurchase with their one-click payment process. So think about the different ways you can make the buying process so easy that customers would enjoy buying from you over and over again.

Be open, relevant and helpful

Continue the conversation with customers and own their post-purchase experience – don’t leave it up to chance by sending them away to 3rd party sites such as carrier tracking pages. Allow your customers to track their own parcels via your own branded tracking page, and keep them in the loop with timely notifications throughout the delivery process instead of having them reach out to you for help and updates. Customized parcel tracking services will not only offer customers a sense of control over their own purchases, but it also reduces the chances of them having to contact your customer service staff. By keeping your customers within your post-purchase channel, they can continue with your brand experience and remain engaged with your brand.

Offer a personal touch

Leverage your post-purchase channel to drive further engagement by providing your customers with relevant, personalized content and keeping your brand visible to them. Customers waiting on the delivery of their parcels will typically be open to communication from you, especially if the communication is personalized. Stay in touch with your customers even after the delivery is made – follow up and remind them of their great buying experience with you. Your customers want to be heard – so ask them for feedback to improve your customer service from good to memorable.

Embrace technology

E-commerce sales worldwide will continue to grow in 2017, rising 23% to reach US$2.3tn.(Source: IPC)

Leveraging the power of data will be more and more essential to the sustainable growth of any e-commerce business. Hence, looking at the growth potential to increase the volume of orders, you should look into optimising your delivery setup through utilising data to systematically collect and measure performance data. By aggregating and standardizing logistics intelligence data to showcase relevant delivery performance analytics, you can give your business the edge it needs to truly seize the opportunity. This is the reason it is so important to get your data right and being able to view all relevant statistics in one single platform. These valuable insights will help you to optimise carrier performance and trade routes, as well as forecasting delivery needs and customer demands to build a truly scalable logistics setup. This will save you time and money that you then can spend on activities that really matter. Time to ditch using Excel to manage your data!

Instill confidence and trust in your products – with easy returns

If customers know that they can return items or be refunded easily, they will not only be more likely to buy from you but will also be more willing to repeatedly do so. Having a clear and easy returns policy is a great tactic to persuade first-time customers to make a purchase as well as keep them coming back again.

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