Fostering the Repeat Customer Segment in D2C eCommerce

Determinant of Loyalty

Whether the customer will do his eCommerce shopping with you or your competitors depends on his experience with your brand. Out of three phases - the post-purchase phase carries most weight and is most influential in defining the total experience. So whether customers will choose to continue to shop with you or competitors depends mostly on post-purchase experience he has and had with your brand.

Pre-purchase Bias

With declining physical retail traffic, eCommerce capabilities and online sales growth development became shareholder's meetings top agenda point attracting major investments and management attention. However, most if not all management attention and investments are focused on pre-purchase phase of customer buying experience, while post-purchase phase has been ignored or left unmanaged.

Obstructing Growth

Ignorance of post-purchase phase of the eCommerce shopping journey seriously obstructs short-term, but more importantly long term and continuous revenue growth perspectives. If you are ignoring the eCommerce post-purchase experience you are directly obstructing the growth of your repeat customer segment and repeat purchases as important driver of total revenue growth.

Post-purchase Negligence

In search of eCommerce growth most companies invest heavily into online advertising and online presence. At the same time everything that happens after the check-out button often receives much less attention, especially from marketing & brand departments who, often from siloed departments' perspective, consider this part of consumer journey solely the supply chain department's area of expertise and responsibility.

Fostering Repeat Customer Segment Growth

The post-purchase is an essential, yet often overlooked, stage of the eCommerce customer journey. Given that across the board repeat customers account for 40% of store’s revenue, it’s important to have a strong post-purchase strategy in place in order to provoke repeat engagement, encourage referrals, and drive more revenue.

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SO DIGITAL GLOBAL E-COMMERCE OPERATIONS EXCELLENCE PLATFORM is a management tool that helps companies formulate, evaluate, and improve their e-commerce strategies by providing a systematic assessment of competitive performance of post-purchase experience across markets. It audits the most influential phase of customer brand relationship by contrasting the customer shopping experience across stages of delivery, tracking, packaging - out of box experience, returns & refunds ( the reality) versus brand set expectations (the promises).

Who is it for?

eCommerce leaders who oversee channel execution within a single or across multiple markets. Team leaders who have direct influence, control and responsibility for overall eCommerce performance and continuous sustainable revenue growth. Market level insights from our platform will help especially those who are tasked with nurturing customer loyalty and driving the repeat customer segment growth.

Marketing team, Supply Chain and eCommerce Operations team professionals are just some of the examples of those who can leverage insights from the market research and leverage them for tactical improvements, performance gaps identification and/or general market trends tracking.

When is it needed?

With increasing costs of new customer acquisition, continuous profitable growth in the long term can only be achieved through the expansion of repeat customer segment. Having insight into market level customer expectations from the e-commerce post-purchase experience performance will give you a clear benchmark which, if you're to develop true customer loyalty, not only do you have to meet, but on selected criteria exceed to create delight.

Customer satisfaction is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectations. Road to very profitable revenue growth driven by repeat customer segment starts with knowing your customer's expectations - explicit and more importantly-implicit ones.

How does it work?

Trained researches in target countries perform actual purchase of products from target e-commerce market players, recording their every step, while answering standardised scale based scorecard with average 200+ data points to provide insight into comparative performance on selected dimensions of loyalty defining elements of post-purchase experience : tracking, delivery, packaging (out-of-box experience), returns & refunds.

With yearly subscription, clients get access to benchmarked country data sets, while also being able to create reports on the platform itself to drive focused learning insights. Reporting module enables comparison of markets, retailers, data points and across completed benchmarks to discover trends.

How do you benefit?

As they are shaped by market maturity and collective performance of market players average implicit customer expectations give you a clear overview what are minimum acceptable levels of your performance. Identifying performance gaps between your and market level give you a clear guideline which elements require improvement to achieve customer satisfaction and delight.

The length of delivery time, variety of delivery options, tracking visibility and communications, how your product is packaged, the ease of exchanges and returns—it all contributes to customer (dis)loyalty. Post-purchase experience which meets and exceeds customer expectations drives customer loyalty and repeat customer segment growth.

How long does it take?

Depending on the number of countries researched and whether it is a standardized or individual client tailored benchmark research average duration of the project lasts up to 3 months. During this time client is able to actively participate and track research progress in the platform. In case markets of your interest have been benchmarked within last 6-12 months you can gain access to this right away.

Once you gain access to the platform through subscription packages, you can use it during the period of one calendar year, after which your subscription and access to the refreshed dataset will have to be renewed. During this period client designated users have an unlimited access to the data and are able to continuously create reports of their choosing.

How much does it cost?

Standard benchmarking contains research results of 20+ leading e-commerce players from a single market. Cross-industry sample usually contains all e-commerce models (marketplaces, pure-players, brands, e-retailers, omni-channel). Access to the standard country research that details into delivery, tracking, packaging, returns & refunds with omni-channel reporting starts at 5000 EUR / year.

In case a client wants to tailor the research so it is more focused on his particular industry and contain additional question sets, standard pricing will be augmented depending on the size and the scope of changes and markets that are researched just for this client. On average tailoring of research criteria (scorecard or industry) entails +30% per each segment.

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Obstructing eCommerce growth : ignoring post-purchase as the most influential customer journey phase

07.08.2019

If you are ignoring the eCommerce post-purchase experience you are directly obstructing the growth of your repeat customer segment and repeat purchases as important driver of total revenue growth.

Read Article