Lesson 8 – How? – #3

Once you have created a sales platform, raised awareness and attracted traffic you will want your potential customers to purchase from you.

This lesson takes a look at the second part of the customer experience cycle – purchase. This is all about optimising your sales platform(s) and managing your potential customers once they are on the site.  

Common misconceptions about making international sales online

 One site effectively serves all international marketplaces (it doesn’t).

 You have to have your own international website (you don’t)

 Customers from different countries all buy online in the same way (they don’t).

 Once your stuff is up there you can sit back and wait for the orders (you can – but your conversions will be limited).

 Customers like a lot of choice (often they don’t).

 The customer knows what they want (often they don’t – and they don’t know what is possible – so education is important)

 Everyone is happy to buy in GB pounds (often they are not).

 Everyone uses PayPal (they don’t – PayPal is in more than 200 countries and supports 25 currencies but not all customers like to use it).

 Everyone trusts you because you are British (they don’t).

 Your customers need to know all technical details (they don’t – at least not initially)

Key considerations to increase international sales online

 Choose the most suitable online sales platform(s)

 Edit your online range.

 Communicate your offer effectively

 Manage your platform effectively – consider the customer journey and adjust to optimise.

 Manage the (purchasing) customer experience effectively – consider the buying process and responses.

 Build reputation and trust – with feedback and reviews

Let’s look at these areas in a little more detail

Four steps to effectively communicating your offer for international online sales.

Extra considerations if you are going to sell via established e-marketplaces

The most important thing to consider when using an online marketplace is how to make your products or services stand out from the crowd.: You can be up and running very swiftly on many existing platforms. Once again there is plenty of help out there to help you to do this effectively – most of the e-markets have clear on-line tips for optimising your listings , Here are some tips / key considerations to help you to hit the ground running:

 If you are selling third party products or services. If you are starting to sell your own, you might want to buy your own UPC code for your product or service so that you do not have to keep entering product details every time you post it on line. A word of warning – make sure that your UPC code information is updated with any modifications as otherwise you can land yourself in hot water for misdescription. If you are using details retrieved from third party UPC codes check the details as the seller you will be responsible for the description.

 If you are selling a third party product (that other sellers on the marketplace are selling) try to be sure that you are priced competitively – OR add some additional value elsewhere.

 As mentioned earlier – Use high quality images

• Show your products from multiple angles
• Use a neutral background
• Photograph key features close up
• Photograph labels close up

 Consider how the marketplace ranks the listings and work to get to the top – if possible use the marketing services offered by the platform to achieve this.

 Clear description of the product or service

 Use local language for all material

 Use local cultural look and feel – copy the style of local suppliers

 Use keywords for SEO – this will help you to get your listing discovered outside of the marketplace listing.

 Ensure that you give excellent customer service and generate good feedback – as a good seller you will usually be more highly ranked

Manage the platform effectively.

Key considerations when managing your sales platform for international online sales.

The most important thing when managing your platform is that you keep it up to date

 All of the material should be as current as possible.

 All links should work and media should load smoothy

 Prices should be correct.

 Manage the communication effectively – consistency and speed are of the essence

Manage communication effectively.

Getting your customer to your sales platform for the first time is just the starting point – remember Grow Global’s reference to the Magic 7 – your customer may need to communicate with you at least 7 times before making a buying decision. With this in mind, once they are on the site you will need to stay in communication with them to keep them engaged.

This is another area where the “freemium” model pays dividends – get your customer to register with you (and grant notification rights) in exchange for something free of charge – this could be some free education, a free digital tool that helps them to achieve something or it might be something that you physically send them (although be wary because as soon as cost is involved for each unit it can become an expensive exercise). Once you have their free details they are technically a “customer” (albeit they haven’t actually paid for anything yet) – so here are some more interesting stats from Invespcro.com

 The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%

 Existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend 31% more, when compared to new customers

You might consider bringing your new ‘freemium customers’ into a community with your paying customers and work out an internal communication plan for that community – keep giving them value, build confidence and look to upsell them to a paid product or service. Ideally you want to consider how you might:

 Build their confidence in you by demonstrating that you can deliver what you say – if you are selling a physical product satisfied customer reviews, pictures of customer using the product, awards, reviews etc play an important role here. If you are selling a service you might want to position yourself as experts in the field with general subject educational material. If you are a highly ethical business give some examples of how you behave etc. and make them feel part of what you are doing.

 Keep giving them value – new educational material etc.

 Give them special offers as a member or existing customer.

 Give them a world class customer experience

All links should work and media should load smoothly – according to SWEOR “39% of people will stop engaging with a website if images won’t load or take too long to load” and “47% of users expect a maximum of 2 seconds loading time for an average website”

Manage the (purchasing) customer experience effectively.

Key considerations when managing your customer’s experience at the point of purchase in international online sales.

We come back to the fact that a large part of your continued success in international e-commerce will be delivering a world class customer experience.

 According to SWEOR .com“88% of online customers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience”.

 On a positive note – great customer service can (and should) yield you higher profits (more about this later in the course). In their 2017 customer service barometer American Express claim that “US Consumers are willing to spend 17% more to do business with companies with companies that deliver excellent service (up from 14% in 2014)” . They also claim that “As a group Millennials are willing to spend the most (21% additional!) for great customer care”.

 Just to reinforce the point from American Express – “When it comes to making a purchase 64% of people find customer experience rather than price”

In terms of making e-commerce sales the primary consideration is to see everything from your customer’s perspective and there are four key questions that you might ask yourself:

 How easy do you make it for your potential customer to understand why they need your product or service?

 How well do you give your potential the customer confidence to buy your product or service?

 How easy do you make it for your customer to make the purchase?

 How easy do you make it for your customer to justify the purchase?

Getting your customer to understand why they want to buy your product – this is the motivation for the purchase. Consider this:

 Ease of communication is a bare minimum requirement – in an international context this is not only about the content – but the language and context that the content is delivered in. If you are to be truly world class you should look to localise the buying experience.

Transperfect.com point out that the vast majority of global internet retail customers do not speak English or strongly prefer to shop in their own language. According to a recent Forrester report:

 In Europe, 42% of online users say they never shop online in any language other than their own. Even in the Netherlands, where English-language learning is ubiquitous in schools, 50% of adults who have shopped online in the past three months agree that they only shop on websites in their native Dutch.

 In Canada—where most US brands first venture when going international—34% of online shoppers say a French-language site is somewhat or very important to them while shopping online. In Quebec, this number jumps to 64%. 

 In some of the fastest-growing online retail markets, such as China and Brazil, e-commerce is now attracting a much broader demographic of shoppers, many of whom aren’t comfortable or proficient in English. In fact, 95% of online consumers in China indicated a greater comfort level with websites in their own language.

A brand’s ability to effectively communicate with global audiences goes hand in hand with its success in monetizing new markets. By reducing language and cultural barriers, customers feel included and more comfortable (aside from just being able to understand a brand’s voice and vision), which leads to conversions. Local language communication has now transformed from a secondary consideration (“the language afterthought syndrome”) to one of the basic requirements for delivering a product or service to market.

 According to SWEOR.com It takes approximately 2.6 seconds for a user’s eye to land on the area of a website that most influences their first impression. Communicate results first and features second – Your customer is not primarily interested in what your product or service is, but rather what it does (for them) Results might be that it the individual will enjoy looking at it or being seen in with it (looks great), it will last (is robust), it delivers certain outputs that directly benefit the user.

 Educate your potential customer, show them what is possible – your potential customer may not even realise that they need your product or service as they did not consider their own circumstances, or rather did not know what was possible, so brief headline education or……

 Demonstrate the offer in context as this may help them to understand how and why they would use your product or service. People buy things on an emotional basis considering what it will do for them personally – will it make them look good? will it make things easier for them? will it win them accolade? will it save them time? will it save money etc. Think about how you might communicate this concisely to your target audience on your sales platform.

 Start with a challenging question(aire), an audit or a diagnostic If you are making a “big ticket” sale to uncover the baseline from which you can build extra benefits.

 Avoid ‘fluffy’ statements One tip here – avoid ‘fluffy’ statements – back each of your claims up with evidence – remember everyone says that they are high quality (even those that aren’t!) it is a meaningless phrase (and a waste of space) – however if you can demonstrate how or why it is of the highest quality it means something.

 Value your customers time

 Give your customers the opportunity to communicate with you during the buying process so that they can quickly clarify any uncertainties that they have. According to Sleeknote.com In 2018, 29 percent of consumers used or planned to use chatbots to shop online. Among the top reasons why consumers liked using chatbots were their 24/7 availability and the fact that they could offer fast responses.

While you probably don’t want to rely on chatbots for all of your customer service interactions involving ordering, they can certainly work for answering basic questions.

Once you have motivated your potential customer give them the confidence to buy your product –

to reassure them that you are a safe pair of hands to do business with. Whilst you may have a few of these points featured most should be available for the potential customer to view at their discretion so they can be accessed on a secondary click There are two aspects to this:

 Reassure them that your business can deliver – some ideas for this – make statements about / illustrate

• Pedigree of the business.
• Your team – people in the business – make sure that all linked in profiles are strong – particularly for B2B transactions. Focus on education, expertise, experience.
• Standards – ISO, BCorp etc.
• Trade associations – particularly those with CPD, trading standards or performance insurance.
• Awards.
• Customers, and if possible customer testimonials.
• Suppliers and associated businesses.
• Capacity to deliver.
• Focus on customer satisfaction and service.

 Reassure them that your product or service can deliver – some ideas for this

• Demonstrate how it can deliver – tie features to results.
• Technical specs
• Quality standards / conformity
• Product Testing
• Customer testimonials (see the lesson later in this course)

Once again – no fluffy statements – evidence everything that you claim.

 Use third party endorsement: – this is really important, particularly if your offering is innovative or relatively unknown. Make it really easy for your potential customers to view testimonials or reviews. Wherever possible these should be localised

Make it easy for your potential customer to actually purchase –

once your potential customer has made a buying decision they want to make the purchase easily and quickly. Helpscout.com have an excellent article citing 75 customer service facts (gathered from a variety of sources) for e-commerce in the US – one of the key stats is that “74% of people are likely to switch brands if they find the purchasing experience too difficult”.

Time is a major consideration here Forrester claim that “66% of adults feel that valuing their time is the most important thing that a company can do to provide them with good online customer experience” – Amazon are really good at making things quick (1 click checkout etc) and that is major competitive advantage for them. How quickly can your potential customer buy from you?

Speed of response is very important

A survey by Forrester highlighted by Jivochat.co.uk shows that:

 At least 53% of consumers tend to give up on a purchase if they can’t find quick answers to their questions.

 When browsing between different stores, 78% of consumers will buy from the first company that answers their questions quickly and accurately, often putting product or service prices in second place.

Remember that online shoppers are ready to compare and switch which retailers they use based on your response level. Considering these data points, we can recognize that quick response times improve cart abandonment rates and boost customer retention.

If you are going to be World Class your responses should be

 Fast / timely

 Localised (in local language as a minimum)

The Temkin Group reinforce this thinking with regards to B2B transactions where they claim “Among B2B decision makers, lack of speed of interactions with their suppliers is the number one pain point, mentioned twice as often as price”.

With this in mind you might want to review your checkout procedure and ask the following:

 Is the buy now call to action clear? – (75% of small business websites lack a call to action on their home page)

 Is the procedure unnecessarily long?

 Is there information that we are gathering from the customer that we do not need or will not use? – if so, why are we gathering it?

 Is it easy to fill the forms in? – will the customer have all of the information to hand? Is there an autofill function activated?

 Is it easy to pay? – with local preferences, and reassurance of security

 Have you thanked your customer and clearly informed them of what will happen next? (more about that in a later lesson)

Wishdesk.com cite a cumbersome checkout process as the number one complaint that customers have when shopping on line – The checkout process should be simple and clear but often is still a real challenge for buyers. Many customers complain they have too many fields to fill out in order to check out.

Some top tips to solve this issue:

 Think of the minimum fields that are really necessary for the purchase and make the rest optional.

 Show your users the checkout progress indicator so they know how much is left.

 Use the inline form error indication that shows the user immediately if a field is filled incorrectly and offers a suggestion.

 Use the autocomplete feature for cities, shipping provider departments, and so on.

 Save the customer information for future orders so they don’t have to fill it in again.

Increase the yield from each customer.

Each potential customer that visits your site invariably costs money – for some the cost of this may be higher than for others. Regardless, you will no-doubt want to maximise the yield from each potential customer whilst they are in the ‘buying zone’. It is well documented that a customer who is buying is psychologically more susceptible to sales than someone who has not made a buying decision. You see this constantly at supermarkets where they are still trying to sell you stuff whilst you queue up to pay, you also see it on many on good e-commerce platforms where you are offered other products or services (often at a discount rate) before you checkout. With this in mind you might want to think about how you can capitalise on this with your own sales – so how you can maximise the yield from each person who is on the sales platform.

Key considerations when looking to increase customer yield in international online sales.

Some might consider yield as the amount of turnover that you generate (sales income value) from each customer. Whilst this measure certainly has merits it is usually not as valuable as considering the amount of gross profit that you can generate from each customer. We would suggest that you measure yield in terms of gross profit.

In short there are two ways that you can increase the yield from each online customer.

 Increase the margin on each item sold

 Sell them more items.

How might you achieve those things within an online context

 Increase your margins –

• Review your pricing
• Review direct costs associated with the product or service
• Review third party costs associated with delivering the product.

 Upsell – once your potential customer has made a buying decision can you bolt on additional features to enhance their user experience? They have made the major buying decision – now you want to get them thinking about the fine tuning.

 Cross sell – you know the score on this one as you will have been on the receiving end yourself many times – “people who brought this also brought” etc . Are there opportunities for you to do this? – Perhaps you could create great value packages / bundles of products or services? – this can work particularly well if you are selling on a marketplace. Which of your products can you cross sell? Are you highlighting these on your site?

 Repeat sales or recurring revenue – perhaps you can get your customers to buy again. Think about how you can make this easy for them with reminders or automatically renewable subscriptions to your services. If they need to buy your products regularly how are you making this easier for them?

 Consumables – the real money might not be in the core sale – but the consumables associated with the item that they have purchased. A good example of this is with printers – quite often the printer companies (HP / Epson / Canon etc) will just make a small profit – or maybe even break even or make a small loss so that they get the customer for ink sales (which is where the real profit is). Are you missing major opportunities for consumable sales?

 Customer retention – once you have sold to the customer once, if you have given them a good customer experience there is a good change that they will buy from you again. This is why the all-round customer experience is such an important thing when selling on line. Invespcro.com have written a very interesting blog all about the value of customer retention – and the numbers speak for themselves:

• On average it costs 5 times as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.
• The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%
• Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%

What is your plan for retaining your existing customers? – how are you communicating with them? Once again, remember that localisation will be key if this communication is to be effective.

Let’s increase that yield!

Here are some simple steps that you can take to quickly increase your customer yield when trading online.

Build reputation with feedback and reviews.

When people are deciding whether or not to buy something (particularly from a source that they do not know), they typically ask friends or colleagues for recommendations, and then do a lot of online research to determine their options.

Given that it’s so fast and easy to make purchases online without ever connecting with a sales person, the content on the site does the selling for you – and that can have a huge impact on if a customer purchases from you or not. The fact of the matter is, your company’s best marketers and sales people aren’t your employees — they’re your existing customers. 

Customer trust in businesses is fading. HubSpot Research found that customers trust recommendations from friends and family over any type of online marketing and advertising your brand can create. And in the absence of trusted recommendations, according to BrightLocal, 85% of consumers trust online reviews are much as personal recommendations — the single most trustworthy and credible source of “advertising” out there.

HubSpot Research also found that 60% of consumers believed customer reviews were either trustworthy or very trustworthy — meaning that businesses that can accumulate positive reviews had a good chance of them helping a customer make a purchase decision.

The same BrightLocal survey found that positive customer reviews make 73% of customers trust a business more, and 57% of customers visit a company’s website after reading positive reviews. That also means that, in order for businesses to grow in today’s competitive, online-first marketplace, they need happy customers sharing positive reviews of their experiences in order to even get visitors coming to their site for the first time.

The good news is, your customers are usually more than happy to help you out with this: The same survey found that, of the 74% of customers who were asked to provide feedback, 68% were willing to do it. So don’t be intimidated by the prospect of asking your customers for a favour — because all you have to do is ask, and they’ll likely be happy to help you out. 

Think about how you may gather feedback, gain reviews and publicise these to your customers. It is good to have a strategy for gaining positive reviews – according to Hubspot.com here are some considerations when doing this:

 Identify the right moment in the customer journey – this is very important. Typical good times are:

• After they have just purchased.
• After they have just received their purchase.
• When they re-purchase.
• After they experience success with the product or service (particularly important for service offerings).
• After they tag your offering in social media.

 Value your reviews and be consistent – According to BigCommerce, 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates. The big take-away here is that more reviews means more proof and, therefore, more trust in your brand. In addition, dated reviews inspire less confidence than recent ones.

 Ask personally (so they feel important – personalise the request).

 Begin with an open ended question.

 Make it easy to answer – check boxes are good.

 Let them know how long it will take – value their time.

 Reward them for their time.

 Do something that provokes a great reaction – a good thing here is to surprise them with something nice that they were not expecting. For example, after they have purchased you might send them a pack of accessories, or some consumables.

 Think about how you will publish (and communicate) your reviews – it is not good having a load of reviews on your laptop where no one can see them.

There are a number of software packages that can help you to organise this on your own site, and automate much of the process – these include Mopinion.com, endorsal.io, – you can see a comparison of other different packages on Capterra.com

Quite a bit to think about in this lesson – and a lot of practical things that you can do to make a difference quickly. You might want to go across to the action zone (insert link) to draw up an action plan for yourself.

So you have made a sale – now you have to deliver it. The next lesson takes a look at what you might consider when fulfilling orders to international territories.

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