Electronic Coupons: Just as Effective With No Print Costs
Just because you're now doing business online, you don't have to ignore tried and true methods of obtaining and retaining customers. Take coupons, for example. Customers love coupons that offer discounts on specific purchases. Retailers love coupouns because they are effective ad tracking devices. Electronic coupons work just as well as their printed counterparts, but without the printing costs. If you want to use electronic coupons as part of your online sales solution, all you need to do is send coupon numbers via email to your customers and allow space in your shopping cart for the customer to add the number and get the promised discount. It's effective, quick and relatively easy. Electronic coupon software can be purchased as part of an integrated online sales solution or separately to build into a custom online sales solution.
Tell-a-Friend
Viral marketing can be a very efective part of any online sales solution. Viral marketing is all about creating a buzz with a specific product or service and then enabling your customers to tell other potential customers about the product or service themselves. Creating the buzz is up to you as a business owner. But good online sales solution software will help you enable the connection chain with a tell-a-friend form. Put tell-a-friend forms on your site, adjacent to the product or service that's creating a buzz. More sophisticated or custom software will even allow you to create rewards for telling a friend or to expand the tell-a-friend system to other parts of your site. Even better, adjust your form to allow someone to tell five friends, or 10 friends. You get the idea.
Costs Vary Depending on Your Needs
The cost of an integrated online sales solution, combining a shopping cart-based purchasing package with online sales support and CRM software, can vary widely depending on what exactly you want the software to do. But expect to pay at least a few hundred dollars per month for an integrated online solution and even more for a custom, locally hosted solution (unless you're a software expert who can build it yourself). Make sure to decide exactly what sales tools you need to have -- vs. like to have -- before you go out shopping. It can get expensive and you want every dollar your spend to count.
Automate Your Customer Service With Email
Email is a great customer-outreach tool, but writing and sending dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of customer emails every day ranges from difficult to impossible and can take you away from more important parts of running your business. Automated email responders can make a big difference. Having an autoresponder as part of your online sales solution allows you to create and automatically send pre-written emails in response to specific customer requests. Often, autoresponder software can also be used as simple mailing list software, allowing you to create and automate the sending of emails to specific groups of customers. Email can be a very effective part of your overall online sales solution. Just remember to always allow your customers to opt-in and opt-out of mailing lists.
How Do I Build an Online Sales Solution?
If you're a new business looking for a turnkey online sales solution, you should probably look to a web-based/ASP model first. These systems come with proven packages of services and are already integrated. You sign up online with a credit card and can almost immediately begin building your online sales solution, shopping cart, etc. These services are billed monthly and all IT work and server maintenance is handled by the provider. However, if you have an exisitng ecommerce business, or have the time, energy and staff to create a custom solution, you can build exactly what you want. Either way, it's worthwhile to spend a lot of time researching what online sales solution tools would be most effective for your business.
Tracking Your Paid Advertising
Advertising and ad tracking is another critical component of an overall online sales solution. If you want people to come to your site, they need to know about it. Today, the most popular and effective form of online advertising is paid search ads from search giants like Google and Yahoo. However, many online advertisers still find traditional banner ads to be effective. Whichever you choose -- or if you choose both types of ads -- you're going to need sophisticated ad tracking software to determine your ROI with the ads. Sometimes, ad tracking software is built into an integrated online sales solution. If not, you'll need to investigate independent web-based or locally hosted ad tracking software. Either way, you need to have it if you're going to pay for online advertising of any type.
Make Them Come to You
For all of its strengths as an ecommerce platform, the Web has one big, unavoidable weakness: it is an inherently passive media. Customers have to come to you by clicking on a link. The best thing you can do is prompt them to click on that link. And one of the easiest ways to do that is with email. As part of your online sales solution, you absolutely must have automated email list software, which will allow you to put together lists of customer email addresses. Use these lists for follow-up marketing -- "Since you bought x, we think you might like to buy y" -- to announce new products for sale, pricing changes, etc. Many ecommerce software solutions include autoresponders, which in addition to sending out pre-written emails to specific responses, can also create and manage small mailing lists. If your lists start to get large and difficult to manage, you may need to graduate to specific email list software.
Use Software to Help Prospect, Obtain and Retain Customers
The easiest part of putting together an online sales solution is the ecommerce shopping cart software itself. Then you add a shoppng cart merchant account, payment gateway, secure server and product database. You have everything you need to sell goods and services online. Except that's only part of the online sales solution. What else is there? Prospecting, obtaining and retaining your customers through email outreach, affiliate sales programs and follow-up marketing and other customer relationship management (CRM) functions. Since you're running your whole business online, many of these functions can be Internet-based and even automated. If you're building an online sales solution with an e-business, look into integrated software that offers marketing and CRM solutions along with the Internet shopping cart software.
Put Your Customers to Work for You
Many ecommerce sites, from giants like Amazon.com and eBay to small, idenpendent sellers, find sales affiliate programs to be an important part of an integrated online sales solution. Affiliates are customers who agree to sell products or services for you through other web sites in exchange for a commission on every sale. To run an affiliate program, you will really need affiliate program software to manage and track what the affiliates are doing for your business and what they should be paid for doing it. You can find affiliate program software bundled as part of an integrated online sales solution or purchase it as stand-alone software.