Tag Archive for: consumer

What is customer loyalty and how to maintain it

Customer loyalty is the success of a business in maintaining a long term relationship with the customer. When a customer is loyal, they are likely to return to the brand to make purchases. It can also be described as ‘brand loyalty’. With 82% of adults loyal to brands and 84% loyal to retailers, building up brand loyalty is integral for revenue creation.

Below are six ways in which you can win loyalty from your customers:

Get to know your customer

By getting to know your customer, sending out ‘Happy birthday’ and other personalised emails, your customers feel as if they are worth more than a single purchase. Furthermore, a study showed that personalised emails deliver 6 times higher transaction volumes, an incredible opportunity for savvy eCommerce stores. Remember, it is easier to maintain an existing customer than it is to find a new one.

Reward loyalty with a loyalty program

Discount coupons, sent through email or text can ensure that existing loyalty from your customers is rewarded. As well as this, by making your loyalty points are not transferrable to other sites, your customers are more incentivised to make purchases on your eCommerce site.

Make it easier for your customers to remain loyal

This refers to your eCommerce store making it easier for returning customers to make purchases. One method in which to do this could be to store your customer’s payment details within your website (or in token vaults), ensuring that your customer no longer needs to input their credit card details every time they make a payment.

PayDock can help you here, offering a PCI compliant token vault to help you save payment details.

Encourage customer feedback

Sending out email reviews to your existing customers can provide invaluable feedback for your eCommerce stores, alerting you of problems that you may not previously have known about. Apart from being a great learning opportunity and a chance to further improve your site, it also allows your customers to feel more valued, further increasing their loyalty towards your brand.

Be transparent

If something doesn’t go as anticipated, instead of hiding and covering up, you should aim to communicate this to your customers. An open relationship is likely to lift trust, which in turn, promotes loyalty within your existing customers.

Communicate to your customers

Providing a live chat tool on your eCommerce website, or even ensuring that a physical person is easily contactable can make a huge difference in improving customer loyalty. Great customer service make a large difference, with research finding that people who had bad experiences with customer service were 50% more likely to talk about it on their social channels than those who had good experiences. Ensure that your eCommerce store has a good reputation.

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How to use SMS notifications to expand your business

SMS (Short Message Service) is one of the most reliable and influential communication mediums in the market today, with around 82.1% individuals saying that they open every SMS text message they receive.

How you can take advantage of the trends in SMS messaging?

SMS messages have an overall 98% open rate, compared to a 20% open rate for email. The large reach of these messages mean that they could offer many advantages to business who are able to exploit them:

Improved customer engagement:

High cart abandonment rates is a challenge for any eCommerce store owner. This can be reduced by integrating SMS into your website and texting a discount coupon to a customer who has abandoned a cart to attract them to complete their purchase.

Furthermore, by keeping your customers engaged via SMS, you increase customer acceptance towards future messages, increasing future marketing opportunities.

Increased transparency:

The prevalence of internet and ATM fraud means that SMS notifications is a great safeguard to stopping criminals and protect victims. The ability to instantly alert on payments and withdrawals means that SMS messages increases security. Individuals are then able to verify their transactions creating an additional layer for legitimacy.

Better customer service:

The ability to send out instantaneous notifications regarding transactions provides a smooth and hassle free experience for your customer. 77% of consumers have a more positive perception of companies that communicate via SMS, relaying reminders, confirmations and transaction monitoring.

How can Paydock help?

With over 64% of consumers believing that businesses should use SMS messages to interact with them more often than they currently do, the potential of using SMS notifications is endless.

Working with Paydock will allow you to automate customer engagement with event-triggered (e.g. “transaction success”) customised notifications, providing you the ability to notify your customers through email, SMS or webhook every time a transaction event occurs. As well as this, through Paydock, you can personalise messages sent to customers to improve engagement.

Unlock your SMS potential with Paydock!

How do I get started?

Paydock offers a sandbox for testing, as well as excellent developer docs for you to use and test out.

You can also talk to one of our friendly payments advisors at [email protected]

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How do Australians pay?

A recent survey by the RBA (Reserve Bank of Australia) detailing records about every transactions individuals made for a week, as well as value, payment method, channel (online or in person) and type of merchant provided key information about Australian payments preferences and attitudes.

Cards

Australia is among the top-ten non cash markets in the world. The market share of card payments is increasing, from 9% in 2013 to 52% in 2016. However, mobile payments only accounted for 1% of the number of Point-Of-Sale (POS) transactions over the week of the survey (around 2% of in person card payments).

Cash

The use of cash is slowly decreasing, accounting for only 37% of all transactions, compared with 47% in 2013 and 69% in 2007. However, cash is still used for smaller transactions, being the most common payment method for transactions of $10 or less. In particular, older Australians and lower income households still make a substantial share of their payments in cash. Yet, even this figure is declining, with older Australians increasingly adopting non-cash transaction methods.

Cheques

According to the 2017 World Payments Report, Australia will be phasing out of all cheque payments in the near future. Using cheques as a form of payment in itself is declining, accounting for only 0.2% of payments made by participants in the 2016 survey, compared with 0.4% in 2013.

Digital currency

Digital currencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, are slowly gaining traction in Australia. In March 21, 2016, the Australian government announced that it would address the “double taxation” of digital currencies under the GST. This refers to the fact that if you used a Bitcoin to pay for coffee, you would be charged GST for both the coffee and Bitcoin. The new policy has removed some of the frustrations of the fintech community.

What does this mean?

The movement from paper based methods such as cash and cheques towards electronic payment methods creates a huge market for the provision of payment services. Stores, both physical and online, are incentivised to deliver a number of payment services for the ease of their customers. This doesn’t include just merely offering a range of payment methods, but also payment services, such as recurring billing, anti-fraud technology, SMS notifications and the ability to track payments.

This is where Paydock comes in. By offering an easy-to-integrate RESTful API, Paydock is able to help you. Whether you are an eCommerce platform, a developer or an integration specialist, we will allow you to make the most out of your payments ecosystem.

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A Quick Guide to the Advantages of Recurring Payments

What are recurring payments?

Recurring payments are automatic payments deducted from a credit card or bank account on an agreed schedule (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly). Recurring payments are useful for a wide range of payments – such as subscriptions for magazines, membership clubs and utilities bills.

What are the advantages for merchants?

  1. Decreases late or missed payments: As recurring billing happens automatically, there is a reduced risk of delayed or missed payments. Furthermore, budgeting is made much easier as payments are expected at regular intervals for customers.
  2. Improve customer relationships: By signing customers up to subscription arrangements, business are able to reduce the risk of churn and build stronger, sustainable customer relationships over time.
  3. Saves time and money: Business owners no longer need to manually manage all billing cycles. This frees up time so they can focus on their core business.

What are the advantages for customers?

  1. Saves time and effort: By setting up automatic payments, customers no longer have to manually input payments for their subscriptions.
  2. No more late fees: Previously, if a customer forgot to input a payment manually, they could potentially be hit with a late fee. The automatic nature of recurring payments means that such scenarios will no longer happen, saving money and effort for the consumer.
  3. Keeps information secure: Recurring billing allows customer information to be managed securely. The lack of paper bills means that the risk of duplicating and circulating sensitive information is minimised, as is the risk of employee error.
  4. Environmentally friendly: Each year, more than 3.6 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions are created by transporting paper bills alone. There is no longer a need for physical bills to be sent out as almost everything can be done online in this day and age.
  5. Leverage the growing demand for subscription services: Research has shown that there is an increased demand for the convenience and ease of subscription services, especially within younger generations. As of 2017, 70% of millennials have a subscription to a product and 89% have a subscription to a service. As a business, offering recurring payments can greatly improve customer experience, and help differentiate your business from others.

How can Paydock help?

Paydock is a smart payments platform that allows merchants to connect to various payment gateways such as Stripe, Braintree, Paypal and more. We offer a recurring payments engine that overlays on top regardless of payment type, gateway, or frequency. Our clients are able to automate flexible customer subscriptions, increase revenue and reduce time spent with managing customer billing.

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How to Combat Cart Abandonment Rates Effectively

According to Statista, the global average cart abandonment rate for the second quarter of 2016 was 74.52%. This means that out of 100 potential customers, 75 are leaving for reasons such as “extra costs too high”, “the site wanted me to create an account” and a “too long/ complicated checkout process”. Yet, the high cart abandonment rate is no cause for despair. Approximately 63% of abandoned sales is potentially recoverable by savvy online retailers.

 

So how can merchants reduce the cart abandonment rate?

  1. Offer free shipping. Savvy online consumers are looking for ways to save money. If you are unable to offer free shipping completely, promotions such as “Free shipping for orders over $75” or even making shipping costs clear and upfront have been shown to increase sales.
  2. Create a guest checkout process. Shoppers are reluctant to provide private information upfront, but are happy to create an account after they have purchased a product to track shipping and delivery times.
  3. Reduce the amount of steps taken to checkout. Conversion studies have shown that the less clicks to checkout there are, the lower the cart abandonment rate. If many pages are needed, it is a good idea to provide a progress bar or another visual indicator.
  4. Improving the security of transactions. Adding a security logo such as Symantec can increase sales by up to 42%
  5. Increasing the amount of payment methods. Offer common payment processes such as PayPal, VISA, MasterCard, AMEX, as well as alternate payment methods (APM). APMs (such as E-wallets and mobile payment methods, transfers, digital currencies etc.) will account for more than half of all transactions by 2017, up from 43% in 2012. In a time where payment methods are becoming increasingly varied and complex, online merchants risk losing sales if they are unable to offer their customer’s preferred method.

 

How can Paydock help?

We aren’t saying that we can offer all solutions to high cart abandonment rates, but Paydock can definitely increase conversion rates by connecting your e-commerce store to multiple payment gateways and allowing access to new payment methods. We allow you to future proof your payments ecosystem in a time of rapid change and development.  

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Paydock provides more value for both customers and gateways

We love solutions where everybody wins

Building Paydock we noticed many of us typically experienced gateway discomfort when, with our existing (or proposed) payments provider, the functional set didn’t fully meet current or emerging business needs.

The juggling of many different criteria and the looking for the ‘uber’ service we actually needed without creating too much disruption or cost was hard. Very hard. And waiting for our current gateway to release the feature we needed could also take more time that we had.

Many reasons to stick existing/preferred gateways

Beyond this, other factors not just the ‘transaction’ component also formed part of the decision making scenario. These factors could be:

  • the convenience because we already banked with them
  • really good fees as a result of long term relationship with the existing bank/gateway
  • amazing support team and service
  • …or that ‘particular admin feature’

These are all good reasons, but what none of us wanted to find was that the gateway we finally engaged with (or currently used) had some unexpected limitation or drawback we didn’t realise.

Don’t switch gateways – just add value

Our gateway friends might even have ticked 80% of the boxes but because they didn’t have ’that’ critical feature (e.g. multi-currency or direct-debit processing), though all the other things were great, we couldn’t move ahead. Read more

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