018 - 3 E-commerce Lessons: Metrics, Reviews and Customer Experience

018 - 3 E-commerce Lessons: Metrics, Reviews and Customer Experience

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Welcome e-commerce emphasis to this episode of Woman Powering Ecommerce. Join me every Tuesday and Thursday as I take you behind the scenes of my journey as a female e-commerce entrepreneur. Together, we'll explore the highs, the lows, inspiring you to take action and achieve your own business goals. So let's get started.

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Today, I want to talk to you about my July takeaways, e-commerce business lessons actually, I learned while on vacation. So yes, most of my month of July was spent on vacation. And that doesn't mean I wasn't thinking about business and where... You realize that the smallest things can make you think of how it can apply in business. And I just want to share that with you. So here's what I learned. I have three points.

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Point number one is actually not something I learned on vacation, but it's a realization I made coming back from vacation. So that point is that metrics are key. Before, I'd come back from vacation and went straight to the fires, asked everyone on the team, "How did it go, did I miss anything? What happened?" And maybe check our sales revenue. So that was about it. So that was not great for me, but I didn't know better.

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But now, I came back from vacation and the first thing I did, first thing, before even talking to anyone, I went straight to my numbers. So not my to-do list, not my team members, my numbers. So what did I look at? And I looked at revenue, I looked at site traffic, paid ads, performance, organic visits, total number of purchases, subscriptions, email signups, email revenue, AOV and more.

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So I usually... We always keep a scorecard of about 20, 30 important metrics that we follow on a weekly basis. And I have those added by someone on my team on a weekly basis, I don't even have to touch anything. Everything gets there for every Monday. Every Monday morning I come in, I can see my metrics. And since we're doing that, it's a really a big game changer. I don't have to try and look for them and then miss out on one. I can see trends that way. So it's much better. So when you come back from vacation, you miss a few weeks. Best thing to do, I find is do that. And the reason for that is just numbers don't lie. It prevents me from having a bias look at the company from the people that are going to tell me all these kinds of stories that in the end might not be very relevant as to the health of the company.

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Or it would be easy for me to just go straight to my to-do list. And yes, eventually of course, that's what I did right after I looked at my metrics, but to get things completed and done.

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But I just feel like to get a really good grasp of how things have went, metrics first thing coming back from vacation, number one. Number two now, and that's something that I really realized on the customer side of things. And let me explain. It's about reviews. How reviews can leverage your business. That's how I realized reviews can really help my business. And here's the story. We wanted to go try out a restaurant. So I usually Google the restaurant and I check for reviews. So we wanted to try out this Thai restaurant. It had like 11,000 reviews. It was rated 4.6 stars. So what happens when you see all those reviews?

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One for the quantity and two for the really good ratings, right? Well, you go in there, blind-folded, not physically, it's always speaking, but in the sense that you're just fully trusting the company because of the reviews.

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And when I thought about it and we went, had our experience... When I thought about it, would have I been there if there had been no reviews? Not at all, especially the look and feel of the restaurant when you first passed by, it was very authentic, but almost in a dark basement. Usually it's not a restaurant I would've gone to. And we waited like an hour to get a table. Would we have waited so long if there were no reviews? Not at all. And having done that, we tried something and experienced something we wouldn't have and would've missed out on. and that's number one.

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But we were also not disappointed. They stood up to the reviews. So that made me realize reviews equals certainty. We need certainty when we buy something. We don't have time for trial and error, especially with e-commerce, you order something and then it takes a few days to receive, and then if you're unhappy with it, you have to go through the refund process, return. So we need reviews. Reviews are so important. So it made me think of that. It really made me realize you can leverage your business with reviews.

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So the third thing is ask for the sale. Don't be scared for it. And here's the anecdote about a hotel gel shower. So we were in a hotel and usually... And what happened is that usually they'll have their little soaps and shampoo and all of that. And particularly, I don't usually love them very much. I try to bring my own stuff, but then I didn't have any soap or gel shower. So I saw they had put three beautiful bottles, big bottles of gel shower, shampoo and conditioner, and that's all they put. No little soaps and things like that. So I opened the gel shower, gel, no... I opened, how do you call it? The gel shower? Yeah. So I opened that up and I'm like, "Ooh, the bottle's new. That's so exciting. Wow. We're really well treated. They're actually giving me something new, it's big.'

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And I was, it smelled good. The bottle was nice looking. I was really happy. Came out of the shower and there was this little sign saying, "If you break, open any of those bottles, we'll just have to charge you."

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So I'm like, "Okay, okay." Well first it surprised me a little not to be lying, but then I thought about what they just did with me and I was actually very happy about it because I don't usually like the basic experience of hotel shampoos and soaps and all of that. [inaudible 00:07:32], I'm not into it, I usually just like to bring my own stuff. But I didn't have soap. They gave me the upgraded experience. Yes, they charged me for it, but in the end end, I was happy. I was very happy with that sale because they made it easy. They asked for it, they just put it there in front of me.

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I did not have to lift a finger. And if they didn't do that, would have I had as good as an experience? Sorry that we're talking about a shower. It sounds very basic, but the answer is no. It's just a small story, small anecdote. But it just made me think sometime we're shy to ask our customers, "Do you want the upgrade? Here's the upsell." We feel like we're going to be too much. That little story that I share with you might've seemed a little bit aggressive, maybe some people will find that. But on my end of things, I was happy in the end that they did that. They served me well. So it made me realize in e-commerce... I have sometimes my team members or some customers, they'll complain maybe, "Ah, you guys are a little bit too aggressive with your upsells. Are we really serving the customer?"

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And the answer is, yes, we're serving them. We need to let them know somehow that yes, you can buy the basic package with the one product, but do you want to upgrade your experience? If so, yes, of course it'll be at charge, but it'll make your life so much better. You'll get better results. So it made me think, I'm really happy that we're pushing with upsells, not too pushy, but we're asking for those sales. And in the end, it's just to really upgrade our customer's experience because we know, we understand the value of what we're offering. We're offering something that they'll get the value for their money. So those are just little simple things I realized during our vacation. And you can always learn things like that and make some realizations using real life examples to help inspire you and your business.

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Or just maybe on my side of things, being the customer for once on the other side of being the business owner and really stop and think, "How does it feel? How do I like my experience?"

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And then you can translate that to how you want to treat maybe your own customers. So that was my goal for today. I just wanted to share with you a few realizations I had during my month of July, especially during my vacation, which I feel is a great context to see things a little differently. And I wish I encourage you to try and do for yourself and your own business. Let me know how it goes.

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Thank you for being part of this journey with me. I hope you gained valuable insights and inspiration today to keep growing and taking action towards your goals.

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See you next time.