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Get free accessE-commerce has taken the world by storm, and the past few years have only catapulted its growth. As this new trend expanded, we learned more and more about it and the people and businesses behind it.
Thinking that the strategies that drive sales in stores will have the same effect in an online setting is a missed opportunity.
There are some unique challenges that require specific strategies tailored to their KPIs, buyer personas, and customer journeys. After all, consumer behavior differs vastly when moved to an online experience. Let’s take a look at some tools you can use during the different stages of your customer journey.
Tech Stack for E-commerce: Do You Have the Right Tools to Reach Your Business Goals?
A key element for any e-commerce business is having the right tools to give its customers a connected experience while interacting with the brand.
A powerful combination features HubSpot working with Aircall and Unific.
Like every other business, E-commerce companies have a business that needs to grow in revenue and in sustainable profitability by selling products or services that solve a distinct market need.
However, it would be a mistake not to consider e-commerce as its own discipline and develop a GTM that doesn’t deploy tactics that are truly adapted to a digital customer, both considering product offering and distribution channel peculiarities.
The 3 Stages of an E-commerce Buyer’s Journey
The best way to understand the challenges facing e-commerce businesses is to review them through the lenses of one e-commerce merchant and their ideal tech stack and how those connect to the different stages of the flywheel (remember that the flywheel stages are Attract, Engage, and Delight).
An e-commerce story: Behind the store
Larry and Kate decided to get into e-commerce by selling jewelry. They built a website, added a business phone number for inquiries, and decided on a product portfolio. What comes next?
Right away, they’re faced with the challenge of never meeting their customers face-to-face in a physical store. Not for a sale, not for support, and definitely not for a second purchase.
How do they ensure they’re providing an optimal customer experience without the in-person elements a brick-and-mortar store provides?
Learn more about Unific and how its e-commerce solution can power your growth.
The Attract Stage: Get people through the virtual door
This stage will depend on your product type and your ideal customer profile (ICP). This helps you define personas and decide on which channels to use and what to say.
It will be limited by resources, specifically, how much you can invest in each channel.
How to define your ICP: questions to ask
What does your ideal customer need to hear or want to know?
Can you create offers or discounts to encourage a first purchase?
How can you take advantage of website real estate to showcase your most popular products?
How can you capture the visitor’s email address as early as possible?
Larry and Kate decide to use HubSpot as their CRM and ads platform, which helps them set everything up from one central dashboard instead of having to jump around from Facebook to Instagram to Google Ads.
They also chose HubSpot because it creates a contact record for every client, which means they can send emails to them even if they haven’t made a purchase yet. Finally, the mighty workflow tool allows them to automate internal processes that would otherwise be time-consuming manual steps
In tandem with HubSpot, they use Unific as their e-commerce integration and as a Dynamic Coupon Generator, as it brings in all the data from their cart (including date of last purchase, last products bought, and abandoned cart items) and lets them create coupons based on these actions.
To solve the challenge of collecting email addresses, they may choose to create a pop-up form that shares a 10% discount with website visitors who subscribe to their newsletter. Furthermore, as this discount is only valid if the first purchase is made within three days, it encourages visitors to purchase right away.
Since Dynamic Coupons can be set up based on buyer’s behavior, it increases control on how to distribute these incentives on a per-consumer basis, avoiding bulk creation (a potential abuse of the system).
Learn more about Unific and how its e-commerce solution can power your growth.
The Engage Stage: Increase LTV
Now that customers are coming in (and they even get a pretty sweet discount), Larry and Kate soon start realizing that they can’t live exclusively on net new sales. They need upselling and cross-selling, which requires segmenting the market by products and revenue. Not to mention that they also need to handle support and returns.
This is when they realize they need to start taking calls as a lead source but also as a support channel.
For this, they chose to go with Aircall, as it allows them to:
Log every call received and made inside HubSpot in the contact record
Target key segments with sales calls for specific high-ticket products
Get customers to the right person every time with a customized IVR menu
Access key customer info during the call, including their name, contact info, and order details so you can personalize your support accordingly..
Track call activity and call-resolution times and use this data to make staffing decisions.
Learn more about Unific and how its e-commerce solution can power your growth.
The Delight Stage: Amplify the Right Voice
Larry and Kate are delighted that this can all be done inside HubSpot alongside Unific and Aircall, but now it’s time to focus even more on the customer.
They have customers coming in through ads and offers and they’re engaging them with cross-selling and upselling while providing support, so what comes next?
It is time to focus on the brand’s success, and this means something different for every brand. For Larry and Kate, it means humanizing the reason someone buys jewelry and how they can be more involved in their client’s actual needs. The answer can only come from knowing their clients a little more. The good news is that they already have all the tools they’ll need.
How to gain customer insight
First, they can create a survey to send to the Loyalists and New Customer segments, asking about their product and purchase experience. This will let them know if they need to tweak something or if they are doing something in an outstanding way.
Unific’s Dynamic Segment tool allows them to easily make lists of these segments, taking the guesswork out of the process. They use HubSpot to build the workflow with the survey product of their choice.
From there, they can analyze the data from the calls logged using Aircall with some Unific data to answer the following:
How many bespoke pieces have been requested?
Which segment has been requesting them most?
What category do these pieces belong to?
Finally, they can use both Dynamic Segments and Aircall to call their Big Spender and Champion segments with a special offer while also asking questions about their experience and the need behind each piece they bought.
Dynamic Segments tell them who to call. Aircall lets them see their data during the call to personalize the experience and include notes for after.
Dynamic Coupons alongside Dynamic Segments increased the recovery rate of abandoned carts for returning customers from 15% to 56% in 12 months.
Using data to delight their audience
They can leverage data to answer questions like:
Where is their customer journey lacking or where it can be optimized?
Who are their biggest clients and what are their needs and favorite products?
What products are not of interest to each of our segments?
What offers did they like the most and which offers provided the most conversions?
From there, they can use those answers to further optimize the customer experience. After all, what better way to delight your audience than using personalized data based on your own buyers’ behavior?
“The HubSpot integration was perhaps the single biggest driver of going with Aircall. It’s made our lives so much easier. Whether tracking communications or linking updates to specific contacts, our work is seamless,” notes Bree Wright, Head of Client Acquisitions at The Photo Studio.
“In 3 months, we increased our abandoned cart recovery by 10%, and 33% of those customers were recovered without any discount.” Courtney Evans, Mother Earth Products.
Learn more about Unific and how its e-commerce solution can power your growth.
This post was created in collaboration with our partner, Unific.
About the author: Sandra Gudino is a data-driven marketer with over six years of experience writing content and developing brand strategies focusing on Customer Success. She loves writing, hiking, working out, reading a good book, and traveling.
Published on November 15, 2022.
