In comparison to brick-and-mortar establishments, an eCommerce firm is more reliant on the goodwill of its customers. It’s actually quite straightforward. When a customer enters a typical physical store, they are more likely to make a purchase. After all, they went through the trouble of visiting the store. Furthermore, they are looking at the merchandise with the intent to purchase something. Therefore, few consumers leave a real store without purchasing something.

An eCommerce business, on the other hand, does not have this advantage. Since they are not actually ‘in’ the store, the customer can just close the link. Moving on to another site, the customer leaves no trace.

Here are some things you can do to make sure this doesn’t happen in your eCommerce store.

1. Downtime for eCommerce means off time.

One of the best aspects of an eCommerce site is that it is constantly open, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Therefore, you can take advantage of the fact that more and more people are using the internet to purchase goods and services. As a result, you can be selling your wares even while you are asleep.

That won’t happen, though, if your site crashes on a regular basis. If your site is unavailable, your target audience will most likely move on to another site rather than wait. Therefore, do everything you can to make sure that your site is stable and secure.

2. Customers don’t flock to slow-loading eCommerce websites.

An internet buyer’s typical attention span is roughly 3-4 seconds. Therefore, if your site does not load quickly enough, your clients will most likely leave. They will go elsewhere for another solution. After all, why shouldn’t they? There are millions of other online eCommerce stores to choose from. Therefore, make sure your site is as fast as possible if you want your customer to stay with you.

3. Make sure that the CTA is clear and in plain sight.

Why should your clients choose you above your competitors? It’s because of your call to action. This is the thing that leads people down the web marketing rabbit hole. You will lose a lot of clients if this call to action is not easy to see or not there in the first place. In addition, your shopping cart should be easy to find so that the customer understands how to purchase the items.

4. Get rid of things that aren’t selling well.

There are things that sell quickly and there are those that do not sell. This happens in every store. Therefore, concentrate on the former. Furthermore, removing the latter from your store is a great way to clean up your website and make it look and feel better. Dead products can halt your cash flow and, over time, bring your business to a halt.

Of course, you don’t have to throw them out. Instead, you could have a real sale. This is, of course, not a fake sale where retailers inflate prices, then cut them down to give an impression that they are on sale. Customers will buy your slower-moving products once they perceive that you are offering an opportunity to provide real value at discount prices.  You’ll also be able to get your cash flow rolling this way.

5. Check to see if your website is mobile-friendly.

The number of individuals engaging in eCommerce shopping on their cellphones has risen considerably in recent years. Furthermore, there are no signs that this trend will slow down anytime soon. This means that a website that isn’t mobile-friendly will miss out on the entire market. Therefore, it is critical that your website become more mobile-friendly. That way it will be easily viewable even on a small screen.

Apart from that, you should improve your SEO tactics. This will help your site appear in organic search results.

6. Include a live chat feature on your eCommerce site.

By answering all of your consumers’ inquiries, live chats will help to gently encourage them towards making a purchase choice. It’s an excellent approach to increase conversion rates and keep your target market happy. Even if they don’t buy the product, they’ll return back because of the timeliness and quality of your response. They will, at the absolute least, bookmark your website.

7. Use residential proxies to help you improve your business’s eCommerce shopping experience.

You can use residential proxies for market research to gain valuable data on your target audience’s purchasing behavior. At the same time, they’ll keep your identity hidden.

If you truly want to increase sales and improve your business’s eCommerce shopping experience, you must ensure that your site is free of latency and downtime. Furthermore, you should employ residential proxies to assist you in conducting market research on your target audience.

Image Credit: Pixabay; Pexels; Thank you!

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Indeed, unless you manage to nudge your leads towards making the final purchasing decision, it doesn’t matter how well you’ve been converting them before. 

Why is it so Hard to Get Bottom-Funnel Conversions?

The ones who’ve already signed up for your product — hand-raisers, your trial-period users, your last-stage leads — all of them comprise the bottom of your sales funnel, BOFU. These conversions should be a piece of cake. They’ve already travelled from the top of the sales funnel, which means they’ve shortlisted you. It shouldn’t be difficult to make the last final step towards a commitment, should it? Unfortunately, it’s the commitment that is the problem. 

Customers are always afraid of making a wrong choice, specially when they’re B2B customers with more than just their money at stake. They’ll keep looking for the best option available for them, fearing to settle for anything less than that. That’s why they’re such a challenge to deal with. Sales reps need to convince their BOFU leads that the search is over and the solution in front of them is the right one.

The Best Practices to Increase Your Bottom-Funnel Conversions

1. Don’t Dive Straight Into the Selling Process 

We get it. You’ve already been waiting for long enough for your leads to reach the bottom of the funnel, and you want them to make a purchase as soon as possible. But put yourself into their shoes. They’re on the verge of making an extremely responsible decision that will have an immense impact on their business. Hesitation is natural. They need to be 100% sure that the product they’re about to invest in is worthy before they wire the money. 

Fear of commitment is exactly the reason why it’s so challenging to get the BOFU leads to convert. As a B2B sales rep, it’s your job to do your homework and conduct thorough research on the leads at the funnel’s bottom. You need to know exactly who you’re trying to convert to succeed at doing it. The secret to selling isn’t so secret after all. You just need to be able to address your customer’s pain points and challenges. Find insights and context on needs and challenges they face at the moment to personalize your nurturing emails and demo call at max.

Certain pre-sales activities can drastically increase your chances of winning the deal. After a lead pops into your CRM system, qualify and inspect them to find out the things that can help you build your further communication around the potential buyer. Even before the first interaction with your BOFU lead, you need to learn as much about them as you can. Find out everything about their business workflows, current tech stack, team composition and other relevant details. 

Based on your findings, you can map out your customer success strategy and better prepare for the demo call. Knowing their current situation, problems they are dealing with and which other options they’re considering, helps you show them how your product can fit right into their processes and help to accelerate their growth. 

2. Start Small, Be Specific and Don’t Overwhelm Your Leads

Once you’re done with your research, you should know exactly what your BOFU leads are after. Make sure you put that knowledge to good use. Instead of trying to sell your product A to Z, focus on the features that fit your leads’ needs the most. 

Of course, it can be extremely tempting to present your product in all its glory straightaway. You want to brag about it to your potential customer because it will surely convince them to make an instant purchase. The problem is – it probably won’t. 

The difference between you and your lead is that you’ve spent ages working on your product. Thus, it’s easy for you to navigate through the endless list of its marvelous features. On the other hand, your lead is only now getting to know your product. Too much information can be overwhelming. When you talk too much, nothing stands out. Which is why you should only briefly mention your product’s main features, and focus on describing the functionality that is particularly relevant to the lead. 

Talk about how they can benefit from adopting your solution, explain its advantages, and save the rest for later.

3. Understand Your Prospect’s Real Concerns

I don’t know if we can afford your solution at the moment, sorry.

No matter how affordable your product is, you must have heard this phrase from your bottom of the funnel leads at least once. The product’s price is never an issue. The real issue is it not matching the product’s value. 

When your leads are 100% confident that your product will solve their problems and help their business prosper, they won’t care how much they have to pay for that. However, if they’re not, they’ll keep looking for excuses to postpone the purchase.

It’s essential to identify your potential customers’ real concerns regarding the offer and work through them, if you want to prompt bottom-funnel conversions. Instead of ignoring the concerns your leads voice, try to uncover the underlying problem and the reasons behind it. This way, you could negotiate more effectively.

Let’s go back to the initial example. Whenever a lead says they aren’t ready to make a purchase because the price is ‘too high’, they just don’t see the value in your product. Therefore, you need to find out what would help them to justify paying more and show them you can deliver on that. 

To convey your value proposition, you can try out the following tactics:

• Showing side-to-side comparisons of how using your product brings positive results (before and afters);
• Discussing implementation plans;
• Providing social proof from clients with similar use-cases. 

4. Make Sales Enablement Your Kingpin

If you want those bottom of the funnel leads to finally make a purchase, it’s absolutely essential for you to marry your marketing and sales departments. Creating proper sales enablements to support your selling points that will appeal to the potential buyers’ pain points and challenges will help you close the deal. 

There are lots of different types of content that you can create and promote to your potential customers. Just make sure that you personalize it well and target the right segments of BOFU leads. For instance, you could produce a unique and helpful blog post, presentation, or a YouTube video. Include some elements of pre-boarding to reflect on the issues your lead is dealing with at the moment. Alternatively, you could create an in-depth comparison of your product and your competitors’ products to highlight the value you offer to your customers. 

Finally, you could create and disseminate a case-study with a current client. The one that runs a business in the same industry, faced the same challenges and had the same pain points. In order to do that, though, you need to make sure that you use a CRM tool to track your interactions with different customers and effectively segment them into relevant categories. 

Just remember! When it comes to sales enablement materials, consistency of communication throughout the whole customer journey is your best friend. You need to eliminate the human factor out of the equation and make sure you don’t miss a single follow-up! The best way to do this is to automate the sales process by setting up a drip campaign. 

BOFU is only challenging when you don’t know how to approach it. Increasing the bottom-funnel conversions is easy when you have a clear plan of action:

• Learn everything there is to know about your lead’s pain points
• Identify and address their concerns
• Create added value to justify the price
• Strengthen your value proposition with social proof
• Convert through using sales enablements.

The post 4 Ways for B2B Sales Teams to Get More Bottom-Funnel Conversions appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

For businesses with limited budgets, resources, or employees, cloud-based software can often fill in the gaps and allow smaller operations to perform with enterprise efficiency. That’s why the majority of small businesses have transitioned from storing their customer data in Excel spreadsheets to managing their entire sales cycle with an online CRM system.

Working with a user-friendly, multichannel CRM tool, businesses of any size and industry can perform their daily sales, marketing, and support tasks with a speed and efficiency that no spreadsheet or post-it-note strategy can rival.

But small businesses can grow, quickly. At least, that’s the goal, right? Maybe you want to add a new product or service to your offerings or expand your sales or marketing team. How do you manage a more complex sales cycle, keep track of new accounts, and, most importantly, ensure that your CRM is working just the way you need it to?

When operations kick into high gear, some smaller businesses turn to outside consultants, analysts, or marketing agencies to help them better understand their growing customer base and improve their processes—if they can afford it. Others work overtime to internally fine-tune their workflows, better interpret customer sentiment, and predict the likelihood of hitting sales targets in order to fix their weakest links.

But contrary to either of these options, the right technology can—yet again—fill in the gaps.

Similar to the advancement that comes when a business transitions their sales management from spreadsheets to online CRM, a new level of productivity occurs for those who incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their daily workflow.

This technology that was once hard to imagine is now more accessible and easier to use than you might think. Although a new frontier, there are already well-established software companies offering AI as a game-changing sales tool for small and medium-sized businesses—allowing them to sell faster, smarter, and better.

As a leader in the multichannel CRM space, Zoho understands the nuances of sales force automation and how our users operate at their peak when using a sales tool updated with AI and machine learning.

With the introduction of Zia and Zia Voice last year, all Enterprise edition CRM users can now work with an artificial-intelligence powered, 24-hour sales assistant.

Instead of replacing your workforce, as opponents of AI would claim, Zia allows each of your team members to operate more quickly and with more accuracy, noticeably improving every one of your customer-facing activities—at no extra cost.

Zia is designed to work and learn right along with you. As you log more data into your CRM, Zia will home in on processes and activities that you carry out often, to spot patterns and suggest improvements.

Notably, this AI tool comes with lead/deal prediction abilities, anomaly detection, workflow advice, and it even gets to know your customers.

With Zia Voice, the first conversational AI for CRM, you can talk to your personaI digital assistant. Use the “Ask Zia” chat box on your desktop, or call her directly on your phone, to request to add, view, or change any information in your CRM. Ask her to pull up a report, set a task or reminder, or dictate what’s on your calendar for the week. Small business owners wear many hats, and when you have to juggle multiple tasks at once, being able to communicate in real time with a smart CRM can help you get it all done.

By understanding which leads are likely to convert and which deals are quicker to close, Zia helps your sales team balance their time and effort on the accounts that need the most attention. Zia can even forecast how each activity will affect your overall sales revenue, whether or not you’ll meet your targets, and where your team might be underperforming.

And while she’s working hard behind the scenes creating these predictions and reports, Zia will also be automating the repetitive, manual tasks that would otherwise take up much of your time. Why send the same email and update the same fields, day in and day out, when Zia can alert you to create a workflow instead? You may even find her suggesting a macro you didn’t know existed.

With the assistance of Zia, you can tap into your customer preferences faster than before. By using calculations from SalesSignals, Zia will let you know which day and times are best for contacting a specific lead or customer. Create follow-up reminders based on her suggestions, and cut down on time wasted on missed calls and lost opportunities.

Zia can further improve your relationship-building efforts by alerting you to customer sentiment in emails and social media posts. Knowing, at a glance, whether the customer is happy or frustrated will help you quickly craft the best response.

Using an AI tool, in combination with your familiar CRM, your business will save time and money by eliminating the need for third-party consultants to streamline common processes. Your sales will become more efficient, your marketing more targeted, and your customer support less repetitive and more customer-focused. Upgrade your business with a more intelligent CRM.

Author

Sarah serves as a product marketing manager for the SMB segment of the Zoho suite of applications. She creates content that reflects the needs of small business owners and connects with customers over the benefits of using cloud-based software. With 30+ applications built on the same platform, Zoho provides companies of any size the tools they need to successfully run their business.

The post How AI is Transforming Small Businesses and a Look at Zoho AI appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

If you focus on each individual, you’ll end up perceiving retention as this formula full of fine details where even the tiniest misstep can completely ruin your vibe. The truth is that customer retention—at least in the initial stages of growth—involves painting with the broadest strokes possible. Get too caught up in the details, and you’ll spend too much time on minutiae to run your business efficiently.

Repeat customers are the lifeblood of small businesses, with about a third of them reporting that 71-90% of their customers visit more than once per year and 70% of their profits come from their loyal customer base. Once you’ve gathered steam, you have to know how to keep it without blowing it all out. Here are a couple of guidelines that will create an environment that’s conducive to that kind of momentum:

Show Your Expertise

Let’s suppose you’re running a hardware shop and you don’t know how a rotary-percussion drill works. That would leave a horrible impression on customers even if they themselves don’t know this information. The moment someone walks up to you, they come with the expectation that you’re the authority on everything you’re offering.

Make sure that any employees you hire have a passion for what it is you offer. They should be willing to walk up to customers and assist them even when such assistance wasn’t requested. Interacting with people who represent a business makes it feel more “alive”. Even if you’re selling hammers, your customers want to feel like they also bought a service. They want to value the time that they spent with you.

Don’t Be Shy About Social Media

Surely your idea of running a business 10 years ago didn’t involve spending time on the laptop or tablet typing up tweets, did it? Oh, how times have changed! Almost half the world’s population is connected to the internet, which gives you a potential reach that stretches far beyond your local area.

Keep in mind that buying ads on social media has its uses, but it only takes you so far. People on the web pay more attention when you speak with them directly and give them a line with which they can reach you anytime. Facebook is great for this since it allows people with accounts to send your business page a message that you can reply to. Twitter on the other hand is great for inserting your brand into conversations. Get active on the web and see where it takes you. People who like your attitude will feel as if they “fit in” with your business culture. When others see that you are responsive to messages, they’re more likely to send you one, too. It’s up to you if you want to take advantage of the potential snowball effect.

Organize Your Background Processes

The modern-day small business runs on coffee and technology. The days of the “mom and pop” shop that closed at odd hours of the day to do its inventory and get its papers in order were left behind back in 2011.

Today, we are overwhelmed with the sheer amount of applications we need to keep everything running smoothly. Having most day-to-day functions handy in your point of sale system would not only ease this burden, but also keep your customers’ data safe. Modern POS systems offer you the possibility of introducing reward systems like loyalty cards and give you access to a variety of payment systems that anticipate any needs a customer might have.

Modernizing your infrastructure no longer requires the large investment it did back in the early 2010s and most applications now mold themselves around your business model. You now have a plethora of options that can give customers more incentive to return while at the same time improving their overall experience during visits. This two-pronged strategy provides you with the synergy you need to keep people coming to your door.

Reward Your Most Loyal Customers

Loyal customers often have a tendency to spend more. The 80-20 rule comes to mind, which states that 80 percent of your revenue will come from 20 percent of your customers. They’ve stuck with you and have given you the largest chunk of your revenue. Perhaps it’s time to think about how you can reward that.

By providing a reward, you’re giving your customers a clear signal that you appreciate their patronage. That may provide just the incentive they need to stick with you through the long run. Perhaps you can give them a discount on their next purchase or provide them with a higher-tiered loyalty program with which they can save more as they make larger purchases. Whatever you do has to be sufficiently memorable enough for you to have a reasonable expectation that the customer will come more often.

It’s All About The Experience

Customer retention goes hand-in-hand with quality of experience. If your customers walk out with warm, fuzzy feelings, they’re more likely to put your business in their “mental speed-dial”. This makes them more likely to think about your brand the next time they need something you have to offer. Rewarding loyalty will solidify the relationship you have with your customers, establishing a bond that gets more difficult to break as time passes. Building upon that increases your customer retention and makes life easier for everyone!

The post How to Become a Customer Retention Guru appeared first on SmallBizTechnology.

The study was a survey of 3,210 small and medium sized businesses with between 10 and 999 employees from 11 countries around the world. The survey asked respondents about their companies’ usage of digital technology and how it impacts the business.

Many survey sites lure with the promise that you can make a lot of money on their websites. They sometimes speak of several hundred euros a day, which you can easily generate on the side. But does that really correspond to reality? The answer is: mostly not . Nevertheless, paid surveys can be interesting for some people, especially to make a little money on the Internet without knowledge or previous knowledge. In addition to completing surveys, more and more sites are offering other methods of making money – for example, by watching advertisements or testing video games. It can be even more attractive to test products for which companies are willing to pay significantly higher amounts than for filling out a survey. Product tests are therefore usually much more profitable than online surveys, which is why we also offer you this service on our website. Go through produkttester to know more about the Earning money with surveys (online).

Among the findings, arguably the most important was the link between digital technology usage and growth. One third of all SMBs (and 45 percent of SMBs with between 500-999 employees) say they are “well under way in applying technology to connect people, devices and businesses” – and these companies also saw revenue growth of ten percent or more in the last year. The most popular digital technology in use is collaborative software (used by at least 50.6 percent of SMBs) followed by CRM (38 percent) and business analytics software (37 percent).

Other findings include:

• Over 39 percent of SMBs agree that “active participation in the digital economy will be essential to our company’s survival in the next three to five years.”
• Varying by region, between 52.5 and 60.2 of SMBs say that digital technology helps them streamline operations and improve productivity.
• Despite depending on digital technology, between 35 and 45 percent of SMBs are concerned that their company relies too much on data to make business decisions.Visit testerheld.de to know more.

Overall, the study shows that small and medium sized businesses are embracing digital technology and reaping the benefits in terms of business growth. If your business hasn’t made the switch yet, 2016 is the perfect year to hop aboard this important trend. If you’re not sure where to start, you can begin by exploring this list of the top 50 digital technology tools for small business owners.

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I’ve asked Loretta Jones, vice president of marketing, Insightly CRM to share some further insight on this.

There’s no denying that the customer relationship management (CRM) market has quickly become a crowded space. Not only are there an overwhelming number of platforms available, but also more niche offerings for specific industries make it difficult for the average small business owner to determine the tool that will best suit their needs. Making it even more confusing, some argue that the CRM acronym has become tired and overused, and needs an upgrade. There may be some truth to that for the large enterprise that uses CRM for traditional sales. But, for small business owners seeking effective methods for managing their businesses, CRM maintains its value as long as the “customer” remains the focus.

Businesses have traditionally turned to CRM because it’s an easy way to collect and organize customer data across the organization. As an added bonus, SMBs that emphasize using the information already stored in the CRM to improve customer relationships can expect to see an increase in employee productivity, revenues and customer loyalty.

Customers are at the core

Every business, big or small, understands that customers are the keys to success. In order to attract and retain those customers, small business owners need to make sure that every interaction with them is nothing less than stellar. With the help of a CRM, small business owners can track every email, phone conversation, and face-to-face meeting in one central location.

As a result, customer information is stored and accessible across the company, creating a customer experience cloud. This helps ensure that every employee is up-to-date on customer details, such as the product last purchased, the last point of contact and what was specifically discussed, or required next steps. Armed with this information, employees can anticipate customer needs and address problems swiftly. For example, a customer that calls the help desk about a recurring issue will have a far superior experience if the service representative can quickly pull up her record and review past service complaints without asking her to describe the entire problem all over again.

Similarly, if a product typically needs to be replaced or renewed every six months, a business representative can set an alert to follow up with customers when that date is approaching to help them avoid service gaps. This customer-centrality and service is what sets businesses apart from their competition.

Use data for a 360-degree view

According to a recent Zendesk study, 40 percent of customers begin purchasing from a competitor because of its reputation for great customer service. By collecting and analyzing customer information, SMBs can determine how they can best meet customers’ needs, especially if those needs change based on location and buying behaviors. By segmenting customers, business owners can see where they are falling short on meeting their needs and what needs to be done in order to negate the issue. For example, an integration with a tool that tracks customer support tickets can highlight the issues customers are complaining about most and allow SMBs owners to monitor how quickly employees are responding to these issues. In addition, it can provide valuable insight into potential product upgrades or new capabilities if there is an upward trend in requests.

Tracking this data and the conversations your reps are having with customers can help your business quickly determine what needs to happen in order to keep customers happy. Are new customers getting the education and resources they need to be successful? Is there a common complaint about the billing process? Is there an opportunity to support customers who’ve relocated to a new city or job? Identifying and addressing such problems makes it clear to customers that the businesses they are working with are paying attention to their needs, which results in more loyal and satisfied customers. It also shows that a business puts the success of its own customers high on its priority list.

Providing a great customer service experience should be at the core of every business decision. By using your CRM to collect and analyze the customer data that is most important, businesses can uncover valuable and actionable intelligence that can have an immediate impact on customer satisfaction. And by putting customer service, experience, and overall loyalty first, small business owners are giving their business the best shot at success.

Loretta Jones is the vice president of marketing at Insightly, a San Francisco-based SaaS CRM application for small businesses. With more than 15 years of experience in marketing, including marketing strategy, communications and lead generation, Loretta has grown marketing programs for both SMB and enterprise customers at Coveo, Adobe EchoSign and several other companies. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University.

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