Have you ever missed a sale because you didn’t know about it in time? Have you ever lost out on a limited edition product or missed an event because you weren’t in the loop? Chances are that if you have a product that people desire, your customers have missed out too.

Twitter has created a product that makes it fun and easy for you to keep up with your customers. Rather than posting entire blog posts or newsletters that can take up valuable time and resources, Twitter will allow you to send and receive short messages with other people using Twitter. You can receive messages via text message or email, and you can send messages with Twitter’s easy-to-use website or even your cell phone.

Twitter is fun for college kids keeping up with each other, but it can also be a useful tool for merchants. Do you have inventory that is frequently updated? Let your customers know when new shipments come in by sending them a message in less than five minutes. Do you have one or two day sales like many merchants had this past weekend? Announce them using Twitter. You can announce events like webinars, club meetings, parties, viral video releases, book signings, or really anything using Twitter. It can also be a useful tool to remind customers of these announcements, since people are inundated with messages these days anyway.

Twitter goes both ways though. Ask for feedback on a particular product. Ask what customers thought of an event, or ask for ideas for an event. Can’t think of a good blog post idea? Ask your customers what they want to know about using Twitter. The advantage of using Twitter is that you can reach your customers so quickly and unobtrusively.
How do you get customers to sign up for your Twitter updates? Here are some ideas:

1.) Remind them that it is really easy to sign up for Twitter. Unlike Myspace, a person can join Twitter AND invite all of their contacts to join Twitter in less than ten minutes.

2.) Export your contacts list into a Gmail, Windows Live, Yahoo or Hotmail account. Twitter will pull this contact list in and allow you to send invites to everyone on your contacts lists in less than a few minutes.

3.) Remind them of all the cool events or promotions they will receive by signing up!

Volusion microblogs in your Volusion Admin Area. How are you keeping up with customers? Learn how to write a blog for your store, and use Twitter to promote your blog and products.

–Michelle Greer, Volusion Marketing Specialist
http://www.volusion.com

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Before the internet, merchants often made more money by withholding information. To shop around for a car, you had to comb through scores of newspaper classifieds or drive to several dealerships just to compare prices. Before do-it-yourself websites, a contractor banked on your insufficient knowledge of the electrical components in your house. If someone didn’t teach you and you didn’t have the time to read a book about it, you just had to trust the person selling you the good or service.

Now, comparative shopping sites can pull up the same product’s pricing from dozens of sites in less than ten seconds. The service that seemed too hard to do on our own is outlined step-by-step on a do-it-yourself website. In this internet age, being an informed consumer is easier than ever. Rather than trying to hold on to information that your customer should be able to find anyway, be the first to offer useful information in forums so you can become an influencer in your industry.

What are you more likely to trust—a site that is completely new to you or a site that is owned by a trusted member of the forum you like? Would you be more likely to trust a site that has no other presence on the web aside from their store, or a site that pulls up on pages and pages of forum and blog posts when you Google them? You can put your phone number, address, and profile on your store to establish credibility, but it doesn’t show that you are a leader in an industry. It just shows that you exist.

If you read our blog frequently, you saw how creating a blog can help you establish yourself in an industry. But how will people know about this blog? Participate in forums, and when appropriate, you can include links to your blog or even your store with helpful information. Forums are full of people with tons of questions. If you can answer those questions AND lead those people to a blog post or your storefront with even more relevant information, you can gain that customer and possibly other forum members who read that thread.

Be sure that the forums you post your links in allow links in their forum posts. Sometimes forums consider this spamming. Spamming a forum can get you banned from that forum. Just read the terms and conditions for the forums you join.

So focus on offering a service to the web community. You will be rewarded by search engines, and hopefully by more customers.

-Michelle Greer, Volusion Marketing Specialist

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If you think about it, buying something on the internet without speaking to someone is actually quite odd. You can’t see the person you are buying from or verify that they actually have an item in stock. You don’t know where they are, how they got there or what they have done. Nonetheless, when you see something you like, you take out your credit card, punch in those digits that easily allow anyone to spend your money, and then you click “submit.”

Merchants often wonder why they don’t get sales, but they often fail to think about the trust involved in actually purchasing something online. No matter how you convey to your customers your trustworthiness by creating a legitimate looking site, it still helps them to offer the outside perspective of someone else, “a person like me” as the phrase goes. This is why it helps to offer customer reviews on your site.

Customer reviews allow consumers to get a better sense of the product you have and the service you offer. Without outside reviews of some sort, you often become someone else trying to take their money. Considering how many other companies bombard consumers with every product under the sun, this is not a worthwhile proposition.

Here are just a few stats from the “Customer Review” portion of Bazaarvoice’s “Social Commerce Report 2007,” which highlighted trends of European and U.S. online merchants:

• Of the 28% of online merchants who currently use customer reviews, eight out of ten merchants thought the reviews were beneficial to site conversion.
• 73% of these merchants found the reviews improved retention and customer loyalty.
• Customer reviews improved merchants’ search engine results due to the added content on internal pages.

When can customer reviews actually hurt a merchant? When they are not genuine. A negative review that is mysteriously left out can make the customer who left it question everything about your site. Statistics show that customers who bother to leave reviews are typically your best customers, so losing one can be bad news. That product review user is 21% more satisfied with his or her purchases than other buyers and is 18% more likely than other buyers to buy from that site the next time he or she needs similar products, according to a study conducted by ForeSee Results and the University of Michigan. One bad review could cost you five good ones.

Monitoring these reviews too closely will also prevent new customers from purchasing. Overstock learned this after loosening its customer review monitoring policy. Tad Martin, senior vice president of merchandising and operations at Overstock.com, stated that Overstock “learned that customers won’t trust the site if there are only positive reviews.” Makes sense.

So be fearless. Stand behind your product and let your current customers tell your new ones how good (or bad) your products really are.

Are you ready to improve your Volusion site’s conversion by including customer reviews?
Simpy go to Settings–>Config Varables, and check Config_EnableCustomerReviews.

-Michelle Greer, Volusion eCommerce Consultant

*Sources:
Wall Street Journal
eConsultancy

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