Tips for Membership Based ecommerce Success How to help your membership based ecommerce business thrive Running a business that relies on membership can be both an exhausting and exhilarating task. You constantly have to be in the know, figuring out what your customers want and need from your business and providing that before they decide to go elsewhere. Creating the right business plan and using proven techniques will help keep your customers coming back for more while attracting new clients. Below are eight ways to help your membership based ecommerce business succeed. Create a Flow Diagram for Handling Different Customer Scenarios One way to help you and your team better plan for and handle your business and customers is to establish a flow diagram for possible scenarios that could occur. For example, your diagram could include situations such as customers choosing to renew at a lower level or not renew because they have switched to one of your competitors. Your flow diagram would then list ways to deal with the situation as well as ways that you could improve your business’s performance in that area. Establish Your Marketing Automation Platform Another way to help your membership based business succeed is to establish what tools and resources your team will be using to help market the business. You need to select what marketing automation tools your will be using and what they will be specifically used for. The same goes for AB and multivariate testing and email campaigns. You also need to have a plan for how these two will be incorporated with one another if they are two separate resources. Ensuring that all of your marketing tools and resources are integrated and able to share information helps give you a better view of your marketing efforts and their success or failure. Free Products to Enable Email Drip Campaigns If you choose to use email drip campaigns for your membership based ecommerce, it is important to set it up correctly. One of the top ways to help your campaign be successful is to give before you take. After all, everyone likes something that is free. Offering a free membership trial for a certain period or giving a free product helps push those new customers into the sales funnel. Promotional Products Offering promotional or lower cost products to your members in order to get them to continue their membership or encourage them to buy a certain product is another excellent way to keep your members and gain new ones. Like I said before, everyone likes getting something free. Using this to your advantage, offering promotional products and discounts helps peak potential customers’ interests and encourages them to try your products and membership services. Handling Cart Abandonment Finding the right way to handle cart abandonment can be challenging for any business. Reminding customers that something is left in their cart, offering similar products, and incentivizing customers by offering discounts or promotions are all tried and true ways of trying to get customers to revisit their carts. Catering to your customers based on their demographics will help you learn what works and what doesn’t work when dealing with cart abandonment. Renewal Processing One of the biggest parts of running a membership based ecommerce business is getting your customers to renew and making that renewal process as easy as possible for everyone involved. Try setting up the renewal agreements in a way that helps your attempt to process renewal payments ahead of the expiration date. This way, if the payment doesn’t process as expected, you can reach out to the customer before the renewal expires. Get to Know Your Customers Getting you know your customers through their interactions with your service teams help them learn more about your customers and what they prefer. Making note of issues that individual customers have had and services that they are using helps customer service interact better with them and help them resolve later issues quicker. Knowing each customer also helps you sell more efficiently. Use Feedback Constructively Gathering and using feedback to help improve your business and your service or product offerings helps make sure that your business is still offering something that people need, want and are satisfied with. Employing customer support and engagement tools such as UserVoice and Zendesk help you better aggregate data to establish business cases for users’ wants and project areas where value should be increased. Clarity Can Help At Clarity, we know how tasking running a membership based ecommerce business can be. We have worked with numerous ecommerce businesses helping them implement a custom membership ecommerce solution that fits their needs. Our team of experts has helped them optimize their businesses to keep their customers happy and satisfied. To get more tips about how to help your membership based business succeed and to find out more about Clarity, call or click to contact us today!