Category: Blog

Holiday season online shopping has blown up since the Covid-19 pandemic. It is estimated that festive season sales in 2021 will reach a record $910 billion. These figures are a testament to the importance of preparing your eCommerce business for another busy holiday period. Whether your marketing team has come with some suggestions, you are still considering how to optimize your online website, or you have not yet heard of how to improve sales during the holiday season, this article discusses ways to prepare your online retail platform for the festive rush. With online financing and other easy-to-implement strategies, you can ensure that you experience a profitable end to the calendar year. 

Leverage Sales With Online Financing

Online financing from ChargeAfter is a novel eCommerce solution that helps businesses leverage more sales. In a nutshell, online financing is an option for consumers to seek financial aid during checkout to purchase their favorite products or services. ChargeAfter provides an industry-leading online financing service that connects eCommerce platforms with a large network of trustworthy lenders. These lenders can facilitate customers’ purchases through personalized repayment plans that come with no additional interest. Integrating ChargeAfter’s online financing feature this holiday season can improve sales as it can offer your customers several benefits. Beyond zero-interest loans, customers can receive financing at the push of a button and without having to leave your store. This keeps shoppers engaged for longer, driving sales and minimizing your website’s abandoned cart rates.

Improve Your Site Speeds and Stability

Site speed is critical to eCommerce success as you want consumers to get from your landing pages to checkout as quickly as possible. Furthermore, Google’s SEO algorithms favor websites with faster page loading speeds. To ensure that you sell more during the festive season, check your site speed analytics via platforms like Google PageSpeed Insights or UberSuggest and remedy issues that affect speeds. Another tip to deal with the influx of shoppers during the holiday period is to ensure that your website is stable. This may involve migrating to a more reliable hosting platform. That said, most eCommerce platforms provide comprehensive support and you can lodge queries directly with your service provider if consumers are having trouble browsing your website. 

Prioritize Your Shipping Capabilities

Consumers shopping during the festive season want assurance that they will receive their products before Christmas Day. As such, you should ensure that your shipping facilities are available, capable, and reliable. If you market that your delivery will take up to 3 days, then you need to provide some level of guarantee that you can live up to this claim. The last thing your eCommerce brand needs is negative reviews during the holiday season as these will negatively affect your sales metrics. Some solutions are to handle shipping in-house, connect with trustworthy logistics companies, or consult a drop shipper to leverage efficient dropshipping services. 

Make Sure You Run Marketing Campaigns

Don’t let your eCommerce site succumb to the holiday marketing clutter. You need to run marketing campaigns during this season as the biggest and best eCommerce stores will be doing so. The competition will be rife, and if you want to get noticed then you need to budget for marketing during the holidays. You can run social media campaigns, PPC ads, page takeovers, and utilize a variety of other digital advertising avenues to put your brand front of mind over the holidays.

If you want to leverage the Christmas spirit and make more sales this holiday season, ensure that you integrate online financing from ChargeAfter, improve your site speeds, prioritize your shipping, and run great marketing campaigns.

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Target markets refer to categorized groups of consumers that are particularly interested in your eCommerce store’s products or services. These groups of consumers have specific buying behaviors and traits that marketing teams can tap into in order to encourage purchases. Whether you have an understanding of your target market or not, you can implement several techniques to broaden your target market and attract new customers to your store. In this article, we discuss how waterfall consumer financing can broaden your target market and how doing so can rapidly increase your sales. 

Defining Your Target Market

Before you can broaden your target market and attract greater sales, you need to clearly define said target market/s. Maybe you have completed this exercise already, however, target markets continue to evolve and the need to define your target market yearly at the very least is crucial to staying ahead of the competition and attracting the right buyers. 

To define your target market, you must first consider:

• Who benefits from the products that you sell
• Why do they need your products
• What sets your products apart based on the preferences of the market

Once you have answered these questions, you can begin doing a variety of things to gain greater insight into the target market’s buying psychology. You can host focus groups, share surveys, utilize social watching tools, analyze existing market research, and many other strategies on receiving critical information regarding your market. The intention is to find out as much as you can about this group of consumers. For example, their age range, earning bracket, geographical location, interests, hobbies, pain points, etc. Every piece of information is helpful for the next step in broadening your target market. 

Segmenting Your Target Market

With a clearer understanding of your target market, you can begin to segment them into specific groups. This may seem counter-productive in an attempt to broaden one’s target market, however, it is important that you ensure you are broadening to continue attracting the right consumers. It would be costly to broaden your target market to include consumers that are not interested in the products that you sell.

Instead, you can profile your target market based on your research findings and generate any number of customer segments. Each customer segment will require a different set of strategies, but you can ensure that the integration of these strategies is cost-effective thanks to developing a strong understanding of who these segments are. 

How Consumer Financing Can Broaden Your Target Market

Finally, it is time to broaden your target market to include the various segments that you have created. To do this, you need to deploy marketing strategies that attract each customer segment. There are many avenues, such as delivering social media ads that are highly targeted or remarketing to existing consumers. But, consumer financing remains a critical method to broadening your target market.

Consumer financing from ChargeAfter is a seamless checkout integration that provides your customers with on-demand financing solutions with zero-interest repayment plans. Consumers from all segments that shop with your online store may be attracted to the integration of consumer financing from ChargeAfter as it makes your products more easily accessible. They can shop items big and small with a comprehensive and reliable financial cover that supplies both you and the consumer a greater return on investment. This will give you access to shoppers that may have been previously unable to purchase from your store as their carts were too costly. With consumer financing, eCommerce platforms can leverage every single shopper that passes through their online store, broadening their target market and increasing sales.

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Customer acquisition is a cornerstone of eCommerce success, however, it is not the only pivotal pillar to profitable online business growth. Customer retention remains a crucial part of eCommerce growth and online store owners must consider ways to promote customer retention. In this article, we detail customer retention based on the importance of determining and improving customer lifetime values. We also provide a way to improve customer lifetime values through the integration of consumer financing from ChargeAfter. 

The Importance of Customer Lifetime Value

Customer lifetime value refers to a critical metric and the techniques that drive customer retention. In a nutshell, customer lifetime value is the total value of sales that an individual customer brings to an online store from their first purchase to their last purchase.

Improving customer lifetime values is critical as businesses do not need to invest heavily in return customers. Customer retention strategies are far more affordable than customer acquisition strategies. In the long run, businesses can ensure profitable growth by encouraging return customers to shop as opposed to launching extensive campaigns with costly budgets that may not yield the results intended. 

The importance of improving customer lifetime value lies in the following three benefits:

• It drives repeat purchases for greater long term profit and sustainability
• It boosts loyalty among existing customers who can influence other shoppers
• It reduces the investment costs required to drive sales

Using the following technique, you can better prepare your eCommerce platform to improve customer lifetime values:

The RFM Technique

RFM refers to recency, frequency, and monetary value. The technique involves segmenting your customers based on the value that they can potentially bring to your business. In order to do so, one must take into account these three factors:

• Recency: how recently a customer made a purchase on your website. The more recent since their last purchase, the more likely they will buy again.
• Frequency: how often a customer purchases from your store within a specific timeframe. Customers that purchase frequently are valuable as they express a loyal interest in your brand.
• Monetary value: the monetary extend of a customer’s last purchase on your website. The more expensive a customers purchase, the more likely they are to buy again.

Looking at these three factors, business owners and their marketing teams can categorize specific shoppers into tiers of value that help guide how affordable targeting those customers will be for greater return on investment. Customers that perform well in all three categories are your most valuable customers, and you should focus on them.

The Customer Lifetime Value Formula

To calculate customer lifetime value and assess the analytical significance of each customer, consider the following three formulas in sequential order:

1. Average Order Value = Total Sales / Order Count
2. Purchase Frequency = Total Orders / Total Customers
3. Customer Value = Average Order Value x Purchase Frequency

Following these three steps with each customer, you will have a monetary indication of their customer lifetime value. This will allow you to craft marketing strategies that attract your most profitable consumers. 

How Consumer Financing Increases Customer Lifetime Value

The next step is to implement said marketing strategies to leverage your loyal consumers. While there are many techniques to do so, one of the most cost-effective tools to improve customer lifetime value is consumer financing from ChargeAfter. This tool is a checkout integration that gives your customers access to on-demand and personalized financing plans at the push of a button when checking out. With this integration, customers can purchase from your store quickly and affordably. They will not have to seek the financial assistance of third-party providers that come with extensive repayment plans. Instead, they can easily shop with your store – encouraging existing customers to raise their average order values and increase their purchase frequency. The result will be a greater customer lifetime value for each consumer.

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If you haven’t considered or created a sales funnel yet then it’s high time you do so. In the modern world of eCommerce and digital marketing, a clearly defined sales funnel can help your business save money and attract the right buyers to your website. This can have a significant impact on your sales as you promote the right products to the right consumers willing to purchase from your online shop. In this article, we outline sales funnels in more detail and suggest how online financing from ChargeAfter can support the profitability of your eCommerce site’s sales funnel. 

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel, simply put, is a visualization of the journey that your consumers take from becoming aware of your brand to visiting your web store, signing up to a newsletter, adding products to their carts, purchasing those products, and receiving email confirmation and newsletters after a purchase. While these are a few common steps in a sales funnel, they can vary from one eCommerce store to another and change depending on the types of consumers that are attracted to a specific website or product catalog. A sales funnel intends to provide a comprehensive outline, in the form of a flow diagram generally, of the processes shoppers will experience on your platform. It also allows marketing teams to determine the effectiveness of their user journey and how they can optimize consumer touchpoints along said journey. 

How to Create a Profitable Sales Funnel

To create a profitable sales funnel, business owners and their marketing teams need to follow these simple steps to success:

1. Audit the Existing User Journey

You’ve likely had your eCommerce store in business for quite some time but maybe have not yet categorized and defined your sales funnel. Therefore, the best place to start is to audit your existing sales funnel and visualize it. To do this, take stock of every consumer touchpoint and how they filter from one to the next. For example, a consumer sees your ad on social media. They click on the ad and are taken to your website where a pop-up encourages them to sign up for your newsletter. After doing so, they receive an email notification. If they choose not to, they close the pop-up and continue to browse. This creates a split in the sales funnel, effectively generating two sales funnels, or user experiences, depending on their action. You need to visualize every possible sale funnel avenue from awareness to the consumer buying a product and map them out on flow diagrams. 

2. Distill the Sales Funnel

Once you have your sales funnels mapped out, you can begin distilling the user experience. Consider the importance of every touchpoint and begin to remove certain consumer touchpoints that create a cumbersome sales funnel. You want the user journey to be as efficient and seamless as possible, with minimal distractions limiting the shopper’s time from browsing to buying. A pop-up is important as it can entice sales through discount offerings and build your email database, however, multiple pop-ups can quickly become distracting. After distillation, your sales funnel should only include the most important and profitable touchpoints.

After some time, you can repeat this simple two-step process until you have developed an optimized sales funnel for your audience. 

How Online Financing From ChargeAfter Supports Your Sales Funnel

Online financing from ChargeAfter ensures that consumer checkout is as efficient as possible, supporting your sales funnel and improving your sales rates. With this integration embedded into your online store, consumers can receive zero-interest repayment solutions at the push of a button and shop their favorite products without having to seek financial support elsewhere. This streamlines the online financing process, promoting a quicker time to sales and a more profitable sales funnel.

Want to learn more? Reach out to us here.

Personalized marketing is proving the modern eCommerce strategy to unlock revenue generation, and customer segmentation plays a critical role in experiencing the crucial benefits of said strategy. In this article, we discuss customer segmentation in more detail and provide recommendations on how to leverage segmentation alongside online financing options to improve eCommerce sales. 

What is Customer Segmentation?

Customer segmentation refers to the process of grouping your customer base into several categories that present different key characteristics. These groups, or segments, combine customers with similar shopping behaviors for online retailers to tailor personalized marketing to each consumer group that makes up a company’s segmentation profile. For example, customers within a specific age group and earning bracket may lean towards considered purchasing behaviors that require more thoughtful marketing to win over their attention. Another customer segment may categorize impulsive buyers that consistently return to grab various products across a company’s catalog. These customers may be swayed by discounts, coupons, and loyalty programs that support their on-demand buying behaviors. With a better understanding of one’s customer segments, eCommerce platforms can integrate strategies to improve sales. 

Using Online Financing to Improve Sales

Online financing options are a relatively new and powerful tool that the best eCommerce brands on the market integrate to expand their customer segment portfolios. ChargeAfter is a leading provider of multi-lender online financing for merchants that provides opportunities to improve sales through greater consumer financing support. The platform is an easy-to-integrate and affordable plugin that businesses can incorporate into any online retail platform, including Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, and more. Once embedded into a website, the platform gives consumers immediate access to consumer financing at the push of a button and without having to leave one’s store to seek third-party financial aid. Whatsmore, consumers are given access to zero-interest loan plans that require no credit checks and connect customers to lenders who have been sufficiently vetted for reliability. Then, customers can easily purchase the products in their carts with little concern over hefty repayment plans, improving an eCommerce platform’s sales as a result. 

What are the Benefits of Customer Segmentation

The key benefits of customer segmentation are the ability to craft personalized marketing, integrate additional tools such as online financing, and leverage the unique buying behaviors of each subscriber group new to or returning to your online store. 

eCommerce platforms can use customer segmentation to eliminate general marketing that can become costly. For example, pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns that are driven by broad consumer marketing profiles provide a far inferior return on investment than ad campaigns with hyper-targeted consumer profiles. With a greater understanding of your customer segments, you can target audiences that mirror the customers you are already having high success with. This will result in compound sales growth with a significant return on investment as you have to do little additional target market research when developing new campaigns. 

With more knowledge of your customer segments, you are also able to provide solutions through cost-effective marketing channels where these segments are most likely to respond. Assessing the analytics, some of which can be provided via ChargeAfter’s online financing platform, eCommerce owners and their marketing teams can develop better sales funnels and a wider range of sales funnels, each one targeting a specific customer segment in their audience profile. These sales funnels should improve sales as they are tailored to the unique shopper, providing an experience that aligns with their distinct online shopping expectations. 

In summary, the use of online financing alongside a clear customer segmentation portfolio can help eCommerce brands improve their sales and stay ahead of the competition in the competitive online retail marketplace.

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Every tech company should have a clear marketing plan in place before taking the eCommerce world by storm as profitable marketing relies on a comprehensive understanding of one’s industry, competitors, and a clear strategy or multiple strategies guiding creative, budgeting, and publication decisions. In this article, we discuss how to develop a marketing plan for your tech company and how you can integrate electronics financing to ensure successful and profitable marketing following the rollout of your strategic plan.

What is a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan, in the context of a tech company, refers to the digital advertising strategy that will guide the marketing decisions from concept creation to channel distribution, targeting options, budget decisions, and advertising publication. The plan intends to ensure that all marketing decisions are built with a specific target audience in mind, align with business goals, and will achieve successful results based on selected marketing metrics. A solid marketing plan is essential to the success of an online tech store, and business owners should consider updating existing marketing plans that are already in place to ensure they coincide with the latest tech marketing trends. 

Successful Marketing Strategies for Your Plan

Below, we explore some of the most popular modern marketing strategies for tech companies to utilize when developing a marketing plan from scratch or amending an existing marketing plan:

Leverage Video Content

Tech companies should be at the forefront of modern marketing as they represent their products and services represent the future of the world. Video content is proving a critical marketing avenue and one that should sit at the core of an online tech retailer’s strategy. Video content allows tech companies to tell stories that appeal to the tech-savvy consumer, create buzz around new products and services, share positive reviews that encourage purchases, and provide explainers that help customers make informed shopping decisions. 

Market with Influencers

Influencers have tremendous power over the modern shopper, hence the name. Influencers should feature as a part of a tech company’s marketing plan as their opinions hold enormous weight over the products and services that tech companies offer. Often, individuals base their tech purchasing decisions on online reviews and testimonials as opposed to hardware or software capabilities. Influencers big and small can have a positive impact on one’s marketing initiatives. 

Provide High-Value Content

Tech companies need to provide high-value personalized content to their consumers to stay ahead of the competition. Content that is information, engaging, and value-based will win over fluff content that offers no tangible value to the lives of the consumer. Think of high-value content as content that answers a searcher’s intent, helps them navigate the endless list of tech products available on the market, and offers some sort of perk in the form of a coupon, bundle, or discount. You could release a comprehensive product review video with a coupon code linked in the description, for example.

Integrating Electronics Financing for Success

You can level up your marketing plan through the integration of electronics financing at checkout. ChargeAfter offers the most comprehensive multi-lender electronics financing solution that will give your shoppers access to financial support at the push of a button to encourage greater sales at checkout. This financing comes with no interest rates and requires no credit checks, ensuring that your marketing efforts attract the widest audience possible for the greatest return on investment. 

Developing a comprehensive and clear tech marketing strategy should involve leveraging video content, influencers, and high-value content alongside electronics financing that all work to benefit the consumer, encourage sales, and ensure profitable partnerships between the audience and tech company. 

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Choosing how to price the products that you sell on your eCommerce platform is more complex than you may have originally believed. Pricing strategies are significant pieces of your marketing puzzle that it would be wise to consider thoughtfully as you hope to outshine competing companies within your industry. Smart pricing is intentional, powerful, and can drive significant sales, ensuring that the best eCommerce businesses remain at the forefront of their industries. In this article, we explore how an enticing pricing strategy with consumer financing will help your business leverage new and existing customers for more profitable returns and suggest several strategies to model your pricing after. 

Pricing Strategies with Consumer Financing

Developing a pricing strategy alongside the integration of consumer financing is one of the fastest ways to see an increase in sales as a result of appropriate and attractive pricing. This is because consumer financing ensures that your pricing strategy remains competitive when customers require a loan to purchase your products. How does consumer financing do this exactly? Well, the best consumer financing platforms, like ChargeAfter’s multi-lender solution, allow shoppers to apply for zero-interest loans on the websites that incorporate the plugin. This is an almost immediate process that requires no credit checks on behalf of the consumer, ensuring that a wider consumer base can shop your products regardless of their price. Implementing this kind of consumer financing tool ensures your pricing strategy is competitive, consumer-centric, and encourages greater sales. 

Below are a few suggestions to help you create an enticing pricing strategy that aligns with your business and accompanies powerful consumer financing platforms:

Product Pricing Differentiation

Analysis paralysis affects consumers when there are too many decisions for them to make on a particular platform. When this happens, consumers become overwhelmed and decide to seek business elsewhere, causing many eCommerce platforms to lose potential customers in the process. It is important then, to differentiate your products and the prices that you offer. Rather than including several similar products within a similar price bracket, distill your catalog so that you have a few options within a low-tier, mid-tier, and high-tier price range. Giving customers fewer pricing choices helps them navigate your shop quicker, encouraging greater sales. 

Bundling Similar Products

It may be wise, if you offer several products within a similar category or complementary products that work with one another, to adopt bundling options for your consumers. Bundling options reduce the number of choices consumers have to make while providing greater value through bulk buy discounts. If you are unable to bundle products, then you can adopt cross-selling and up-selling strategies at checkout alongside consumer financing features. Plugins will allow you to sell similar or related products at checkout, encouraging consumers to create their own bundles before making a purchase. You can bundle and cross-sell at small discounts to support a stronger pricing strategy for your popular and less popular products. 

Price Anchoring

Another popular pricing strategy is to anchor product prices against more costly offerings. By placing products alongside more expensive products, pricing strategies create a consumer perception of the value of each product. With a greater understanding of the differentiating between the products and their prices, customers are more inclined to sway towards the less expensive products that they will consider a bargain. While it may seem counterproductive to improve the sales of less costly items, a greater volume of monthly sales will drive profitable returns in the long run.

With the integration of consumer financing at checkout, eCommerce platforms can create competitive pricing strategies using the aforementioned models as a foundation and drive greater sales within a business month. 

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Consumer trust plays a massive role in the success of one’s online store. After all, customers that do not trust a brand are unlikely to buy from the website, share recommendations with their friends, leave positive reviews for other shoppers to see, and return to browse new offers and deals. The need for strong consumer trust is paramount, however, becoming increasingly difficult as a decline in consumer trust according to reports is sweeping the eCommerce industry. Now more than ever, companies must find new ways to establish and build trust with their customers. In this article, we explore consumer financing and its impact on consumer trust with particular reference to ChargeAfter’s leading multi-lender financing solution.

1. Consumer Financing Adds Value

Added value sits at the core of consumer trust as shoppers hope to find stores that go above and beyond to satisfy their online buying behaviors. ChargeAfter facilitates an added value consumer experience through the integration of consumer financing with the best eCommerce platforms in the marketplace. How does it do this? Well, the multi-lender platform provides shoppers with access to on-demand zero-interest financing solutions as they shop for all sorts of products. Customers experience the benefit of paying off their purchases over long-term loans that do not become costly with time. In a nutshell, consumers that shop with eCommerce platforms using ChargeAfter’s consumer financing get more bang for their buck. This establishes trust with shoppers who are skeptical of extensive repayment options through third-party websites and other online stores. 

2. Consumer Financing Simplifies the User Journey

Customer trust also rests on how easy and simple the consumer journey with a particular retail website is. For example, customers are more likely to trust a company the facilitates a seamless user journey from browsing products to adding them to the cart, applying coupon codes for discounts, paying for the purchase, securing affordable delivery, and receiving products in a timely fashion. The entire journey can be made simpler with the integration of consumer financing from ChargeAfter. The integration ensures that shoppers can apply for financing on the fly, without having to leave your store. This eliminates the need to seek consumer financing from other sources, aiding in establishing trust among shoppers that seek efficient services from eCommerce platforms. 

3. Consumer Financing Makes Expensive Products Accessible

A large part of establishing consumer trust boils down to how accessible an online store’s products are. Shoppers browse many online platforms before they select their products as prices range from one store to the next. With consumer financing from ChargeAfter, an eCommerce platform can provide comprehensive financing for expensive items. This enables customers to shop all products on one’s catalog, increasing the availability of products in one’s store. Customers that shop with consumer financing are more likely to trust the website, specifically because ChargeAfter provides a network of reliable lenders with upfront financing plans. 

4. Consumer Financing Validates All Shoppers

Customers that shop with eCommerce stores using ChargeAfter’s consumer financing feature does not have to submit credit checks to receive financing. As a result, all shoppers can buy from one’s website. This broadens a retail store’s available audience as well as showcases a commitment to easy shopping for all customers. Having this feature builds trust with shoppers from all walks of life. 

ChargeAfter’s consumer financing solution can help eCommerce platforms build trust with their customers. By adding value, simplifying the user journey, making more products accessible, and validating all sorts of shoppers, eCommerce platforms can support their shoppers and promote long-term relationships that foster profitable business growth. 

Want to learn more? Reach out to us here.