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Retail Summit 2009 - Online retailers battle against lack of customer loyalty
Archived article dated Saturday February 7th 2009
Customers have very little loyalty to online stores and prefer to base their buying decisions on price, the quality of the fulfilment experience, and the relevance of the marketing emails they receive.
This was the unanimous opinion of the participants of the panel discussion 'Online Retail in 2011' at the Retail Bulletin Summit 2009. Gary Hockey-Morley, marketing director of the Post Office, suggests: “Loyalty is for football fans. Retailers need a brand that aligns with customers and where fulfilment is good. It's not loyalty it is competitiveness and having relevant products for them. And it is about making the site easier to use so people come back.”
Francesca Ecsery, general manager at Cheapflights.co.uk, agrees: “In travel there is very little loyalty online. It is quite vicious. There is no power with loyalty schemes it's about delighting the customer right there and then. If you delight them then they'll come back.”She also regarded it as essential to serve the customer with relevant information whenever you communicate with them via marketing emails. Cheapflights.co.uk uses a combination of transaction data and details of where individual users have been on the site during previous visits to determine what emails they receive.
The company sends out a weekly email that might include things like a focus on specific locations rather than simply being a list of promotions and offers. Ecsery says the benefit of emails is that it is easy to measure their success because if they are badly targeted then recipients will simply opt-out. The objective is to use emails to not necessarily make a sale but to tempt consumers to visit the site. It is then the relevance of the information on the site that makes it 'sticky' and continues to attract customers.
To make a site attractive Henry Elliss, head of social media at Tamar, says retailers have to nowadays “not just talk to customers but to also listen to them”. To do this effectively he says interaction has to be part of the experience whereby if customers make an enquiry or post a comment on a retailers' blog then the company should respond to this as it shows that they are listening.
To better engage with customers on websites Elliss is an advocate of using things like product review areas, interactive elements and video content. “Even if a reviews section attracts some bad reviews, it has at least created an opportunity for the retailer to engage with the consumer,” he suggests.
Tagged as: retail summit 2009 | kurt salmon associates
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