4 ways ecommerce operators can achieve greater success

Working to drive incremental revenue is something that keeps every e-commerce person up at night. Let’s face it. To help ecommerce operators achieve greater success, Rokt offers these four tips to drive incremental revenue through a focus on long-term customer-centricity.

1. Start With Your Customers

Repeat customers are the lifeblood of an ecommerce site. But industry research shows that the buying behaviors of new shoppers compared to existing customers are different. For example, returning customers spend almost double what new shoppers spend.

Fixating on existing customers is important, but it’s not a certain path to success. That’s why innovations by Amazon, Alibaba, and other Internet behemoths are forcing everyone to step up their game by deepening customer relationships and creating more value.

Creating more value in a customer relationship requires ecommerce operators to be highly relevant and personal. For organizations with competing priorities and legacy systems, this can be difficult to achieve, but Rokt can help. We manage often-conflicting components of a company’s customer engagement efforts, so they are easier to implement.

At Rokt, we offer a sophisticated set of algorithms and machine learning to present the right item at just the right moment. This translates into better cross-sell/up-sell performance, as well as help e-commerce operators take advantage of monetization opportunities. A partnership with Rokt can yield a 10X increase in the value of critical, existing customer relationships.

“Creating more value in a customer relationship requires e-commerce operators to be highly relevant and personal.”

2. Look to Your Partners

Partners are another important source to help e-commerce operators drive incremental revenue. Such arrangements often involve sponsorships and other branding initiatives. Increasingly, that’s not enough as partners prefer to make performance-based investments in marketing.

If all that partners gain from such an arrangement is exposure on a site, they won’t be willing to go beyond “branding dollars.” Here, Rokt can help our ecommerce partners deliver a performance marketing offering to their partners. This yields a deeper, more mutually beneficial relationship between a site operator and its partner.

We know this works. For example, a global events ticketing provider and Rokt partner has an alliance with a leading credit card. The ticketing provider receives sponsorship money for exposing the credit card on the site. The company turned to Rokt to gain access to the performance budget. Together, we devised a set of activities that has delivered a multi-million dollar improvement in its business.

3. Take the Long View

When looking at customer relationships through a short-term perspective, ecommerce operators may miss a critical aspect of connecting with consumers. Having too much of a transaction-focused lens can work against producing value over time. Instead, it can erode consumer trust and diminish engagement quickly.

At Rokt, our view is that relationships that deliver the most value are built over time; a long term approach involves a greater consumer experience. We tested this out recently where we looked to significantly reduce the path length we present to consumers as they go through the post-transaction experience. By focusing on customer experience first, we delivered better engagement rates which, in turn, delivered almost double the value from each customer visit.

When working with Rokt, ecommerce operators that provide customers with native offers from top-tier brands can experience a 50X uptick in revenue.

4. Embrace New Customers

New customers don’t tally many page views, according to industry research. One reason could be that the process to engage is too intrusive. Over the last few months, we learned from millions of tests that the fewer steps a customer is required to take, the greater the opportunity to create a relationship. This reinforces one fact—the smart way to drive revenue is through customer engagement.

To be successful, ecommerce operators should create satisfying experiences for new customers (as well as returning customers) that occur in trusted environments.

While ecommerce operators still have to navigate the ongoing challenges of multiple channels and the complex customer journey, these four strategies provide a blueprint to help those become more successful in the ecommerce space.