With online shopping in Australia forecast to rise to $18 Billion by 2014, retailers need to understand what consumers like about shopping online in order to tailor their online store presence to deliver the perfect shopping experience. Understanding the consumers motivations to buy is the first step towards providing them with the right combination of product and offer to ensure your business is the site of choice.

Why Do People Shop Online?

There are several reasons that people shop online, here are just a few of the main ones:

• Price: People expect to get a better deal online than in a traditional store. The modern consumer is savvy enough to understand that the lower costs associated with the online marketplace should direct relate to lower prices to the customer.
• Convenience: There’s nothing quite like being able to browse your favourite items whenever the time suits you, or the freedom to spend as long as you like comparing items or looking for competitive offers without the pressure of the pushy salesperson over your shoulder. Give people an interface that allows them to do exactly that and they’ll keep coming back.
• Free Shipping: More and more, free shipping or deals on shipping are becoming the norm on the internet. Especially when you consider services like the Australia Post e-Parcel system, logistics companies are becoming better and more efficient at providing the logistics services to your enabled online store. Free shipping can be a good promotional tool to entice customers to complete that checkout.
• Demography: Those people for whom the internet wasn’t to be trusted in the last decade are slowing coming around to accept the ubiquitous nature of the internet. Thanks to trusted services like Paypal, people are gaining more trust in paying for goods online which is creating a bigger marketplace of online shoppers for vendors to sell their wares to.
• Mobile: 35% of Australians now own a smart phone or tablet device – that’s a whopping 7.7 million people!  Without a doubt, mobile is the next big thing and it’s here to stay. People are now price comparing items in-store on their smartphones and often abandoning in-store purchases for a more attractive internet purchase.

The same expected trend is shown for the unqiue visitors graph, this one a little more dramatic in it’s impact.

These graphics tell us one important thing – this site isn’t emailing frequently enough! We’ve watched the stats on this site for some time now and month in, month out, it’s the same effect from the monthly send. Your newsletter is an excellent vehicle for generating traffic, but it also much more strategic than that. The peaks demonstrated above clearly show the level of trust the newsletter has created among the customer base, this is perfect for sending a promotional offer also in the off weeks from the newsletter.

You will need to experiment a little with your customer base to understand what level of communications is right for you, however you should be sure to tell your customers how often you will be mailing them in the sign-up process – and stick to that committment! If you’ve promised monthly updates in the sign-up process and then start sending email communications every week, your subscribers could easily view this as a breach of trust and start unsubscribing or worse, filing complaints.

The most important part of any digital campaign however, whether it’s SEM, social media or email newsletters is to perform the analysis as shown above to see what impact your activites are having and adjust accordingly.

This is something that many businesses are obviously aware of as the average number of new and unread emails in a user’s inbox is now 300% higher* than it was 4 years ago. Now, imagine your newsletter in amongst this tide of content being displayed to the user, how do you stand out from the crowd? The importance of a subject line cannot be understated when considering this data, you’ve got to think like your a journalist, writing one great headline that will snatch your readers attention from all the stimuli in their environment and be drawn to buy your paper, or in this case, open your email.

However with modern email clients, users are now also being presented with preview panes to glance at the message prior to deciding whether to open them. These message previews are also becoming much more important, it goes without saying that your most important messaging and content should be visible in this preview window.

This isn’t to say that all your offers/specials should be here, your email newsletter should look to engage with your reader on more of a community level. Leave the offers to other emails, where it’s quite clearly an offer to the customer, with a nice clear single call to action. If you are including product information in a newsletter, it should be in the form of an article about how your product performed particularly well at a given task. Any real life testimonials and customer experiences will obviously enhance this effect.

The most telling statistic from Nielsen’s article is that 50% of users said that newsletters influenced their B2B purchases, but the influence was only occasional, when the timing was right. Newsletters are long-term investments, build trust with your customers through effective communications and if you’re sending engaging content in your newsletters your promotional pieces will also be welcomed when it’s time to send them.

*source found here

But let’s get back to the basics, to give you an understanding of exactly what is e-Commerce? e-Commerce is simply selling products or services through an online environment. There are some definitions out there that will classify any order you receive via email as an e-Commerce order, we tend to see this view as ‘a little ambitious’ a definition for e-Commerce. After all, if an emailed order fits the definition, why not a fax? They both arrive over a network as a binary packet of data, right?

But this is getting away from the point, which is, to shine a big ugly spotlight on the really important part of the term e-Commerce. Most people (vendors usually), will have you believe it’s the ‘e’. As in, we put the ‘e’ in ‘e-Commerce’. The fact that your order arrives via an electronic medium vs an ‘analogue’ one (ie, someone walking into your store) is irrelevant. To us at Outsourced EDM, this is like arguing over whether vinyl sounds better than cd, it’s the content that counts – always. Content is king.

It’s the Commerce part that is the critical factor in any successful e-Commerce venture, not the delivery medium. More and more, people are less impressed with the fact that they can be shopping from their PC, they expect the same levels of service, satisfaction and value as they would from any bricks and mortar operation. In fact, if you do have a storefront you can advertise in your online store, this becomes a valuable asset to your brand online and should be treated as such. Customers like to know that they are dealing with people in shops, it’s the psychology of the thing.

So, remember what’s made you successful as a business, in Commerce. The same values that were true 20 years ago in a shopfront are even more important in today’s digital marketplaces. Value, customer service, integrity, standing behind the products and the value propositions you make to your customers, these virtues are independent of the medium that business is conducted in. Too often we see that people get focused on the delivery mechanism of your value proposition, which is cheapening that proposition.

It’s insights like this, that allow Outsourced EDM to assist your business in generating the online presence that will stand out from the crowd and put you ahead of your competitors. Contact us today to see how we can help you open this channel and compliment your already successful business practices.

But, from a legal standpoint, what exactly is classed as spam? Thankfully, the anti-spam laws in Australia are quite strict and marketers must adhere to the conditions provided in the 2003 Spam Act when sending digital marketing material. The act covers more than just email (MMS, SMS and IM are also included) but since we love email at Outsourced EDM, you can just assume we’re discussing that medium.

An email message is said to be spam if it doesn’t meet any of the following three conditions:

• It was sent with your consent
• It contains accurate information about the person or organisation that authorised the sending of the message
• It contains an unsubscribe option.

The notion of consent becomes an interesting discussion point for marketers, as there are two types of consent – express and inferred consent. That word, ‘inferred’ consent is usually enough to make any marketer giddy with excitement and begin dreaming up any number of ways to get an inferred consent argument up. However, despite the somewhat vague sounding name, inferred consent is clearly defined in the industry guidelines. Read more about understanding consent here.

The regulator, ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority), has shown it’s willingness to act in this space as well. Check out some of the year’s media releases to see that they are active across all digital communication mediums.

That’s where Outsourced EDM can help, all of our email templates are written with the understanding of these guidelines and principles.  For example, did you know that simply adding a reminder to the users in your email footer about where they subscribed to the mailing list, can cut the number of complaints raised against your campaign? It’s creative tips like these that allow Outsourced EDM to ensure your business in can get your message to the customer with the minimal amount of complaints.