Saving Your E-Customers from Defection

E-customer conversion rates hover near 1.5% and abandoned online shopping carts have soared as high as 88%. Sure, you want to attract high value online buyers. But more importantly, you want to keep them. But be ready for a tough fight. Here's why.

Higher expectations. Ask an 'average Joe' off the street what the web represents and you'll likely get responses like 'instant access', 'more information', 'great prices' and 'no more waiting in a line to pay'. Sure enough, research has found that many customers come to the web expecting to receive a higher level of customer service than what they'd ordinarily expect in a bricks and mortar environment. Why? Because, they reason, it's on the web and that means it must be 'instant'. No doubt, 30 seconds of wait time staring at a computer screen seems like an eternity compared to the expectation of 'instant'.

Easy exit. Your e-customer's exit strategy is just a keystroke away. Site too hard to navigate? Downloads too slow? Disappointing product selection? Goodbye is so easy. They don't have to walk out of the store, find their cars and fight incessant traffic to shop somewhere else. Instead, e-customers simply type in another email address and they're gone. Little wonder that the top 4,500 consumer sites garner 70% of visits by web surfers; but, on average, fewer than ten percent of site visitors actually make a purchase.

Unpredictable experience. Recent studies suggest e-customers are anything but impressed with their on-line experiences to date. A recent study by Boston Consulting Group found that more than a quarter of all attempted online purchases failed during the past 12 months. Likewise, Resource Marketing,, an e-marketing firm which recently spent 10 weeks surfing 1,500 consumer sites to evaluate the state of online customer service, concluded the customer experience was "unpredictable at best". Resource Marketing looked at 14 key factors including account administration, security, and returns. The six greatest shortcomings found were:

No email responses within 48 hours - 56%

Poor phone assistance - 36%

No responses to e-mail - 26%

Glitches in order processing - 25%

Late packages - 14%

Packages never arrived  - 6%

Your Save Strategy. The strategy for saving e-customers is very simple. Assume every e-customer you have is immediately at risk for defection and act accordingly. Without a doubt, no customer will tolerate for long the web site shortcoming outlined above, so get those basic purchase and customer service issues fixed and fast! But don't stop there! To save an e-customer, you must get personal. Ironically, personalization is one of the greatest advantages an e-marketer has; yet, to date, it's one of the least used tools.

Consider this: Broadbase Software, an e-commerce application producer, recently examined business website marketing techniques in its on-going study, Evaluating the "Sticky Factor" of E-Commerce Sites. The study monitored communications from 50 leading e-commerce sites as they contacted customers during a period of 30 to 90 days after purchases were made. According to Broadbase findings, e-merchants did not use the communicative and personalizing features of the internet to anywhere near their fullest benefit. For example, sites took an average of 25.6 days to follow with a first promotional offer. In addition, well under half the offers made efforts at cross-marketing and very few were personalized.

More specifically, the Broadbase study found that for those sites with follow-up marketing within 90 days after purchase, only 11% of sites used offers related to specific customer needs, only 16% of sites used offers personalized to individuals, and a lowly 5% used offers related to a customer's original purchases. Broadbase further reported that of the follow-up promotions and offers, a whopping 63% were simply sales announcements or monthly specials.

Here's the bottom line: A customer at risk of defection (on line or otherwise) is largely unmoved by a generic message. Instead, it's the "we-know-what-you-like-and-we're-going-to-give-it-to-you" message that resonates and gets results. The time is now to turn your e-commerce site into a high performing loyalty insulator. The tools are there. Put them to work.


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Jill Griffin is the best selling business author of Customer Loyalty and co-author of the new book, Customer Winback: How to Recapture Lost Customers and Keep Them Loyal . She can be reached at www.loyaltysolutions.com and jjillgriffin@earthlink.net.