In this article, we asked successful professionals in retail to share their top online tools that they use daily and can’t live without. Many are well-known tools, but there are some more obscure suggestions that might be exactly what you needed.
Prevent lost sales and cart abandonment
“We use Receiptful to manage our receipts, customer feedback, cart abandonment, and remarketing. This tool allows us to send custom discount codes to customers and follow-up emails in designated timeframes. Receiptful has generated us almost $10K (USD) in revenue from follow-up emails (idle customers, 90 days after purchase, and unused coupon reminders)! Because of Receiptful, our store has a 5% cart abandonment recovery rate which has generated almost $6000 in sales.”
“By deploying address verification we discovered that not only had the solution streamlined our checkout process by making it much faster but conversion rate metrics indicated a staggering 40% increase. Admittedly we had made a series of enhancements to our checkout process but I personally feel that the introduction of PCA Predict’s address verification tool was the main reason for the increases in conversions reflecting significant improvements in profit margin. Address verification reduced cart abandonments as well as completely tightening up the postal delivery process mitigating shipment failure.
The cost of redelivering the returned orders resulted in huge postal charges as well as the valuable admin time spent in rectifying the errors. In addition, there are more unquantifiable negative impacts that delays in customer deliveries cause such as reputational damage. After all, customers that have a bad experience are unlikely to recommend Candy Club to friends and family. We really got a speedy ROI as in the first month of the deployment of PCA Predict’s addressing solution it’s actually paid for itself by saving us literally thousands of dollars. On top of that, we’ve significantly improved customer user experience.”
Easily check out competitors’ prices and offers
“We highly recommend Intelligence Node as a tool for retailers. Its multilingual feature provides us with a centralized view of competitors in a single language accurately, enabling us to make day-to-day pricing decisions and better plan overall strategy. Gaining real-time, accurate pricing and merchandising intelligence no matter the geography is a major benefit of Intelligence Node’s platform, especially as country boundaries disappear with the rise of global e-retail.”
Combine analytics for advertising
Retarget your advertising through Facebook
“This is more of a strategy than a tool, but we’ve seen a lot of success with our retail clients who use this technique. Many retail stores have an email list of customers. You can take that list and upload it to Facebook, and Facebook will match up those emails with actual Facebook profiles. This is incredibly helpful for re-targeting existing customers with new products or promotions, but you can also create lookalike audiences. Facebook will take that customer list of profiles and then create a whole new list consisting of Facebook users who have incredibly similar interests, demographics and behaviors, so you can target a much broader audience who, theoretically, is similar to your customers.”
Schedule your employee’s shifts hassle-free
Another more obscure yet interesting solution is RotaCloud, which is an online employee scheduling platform to plan your shifts and track working hours. “Using iOS and Android apps, employees can see their upcoming shifts wherever they are, so long as they have an internet connection” explains James Lintern, Co-Founder of RotaCloud. “If they need to request time off, this only takes a few clicks and changes are instantly visible. Whenever new shifts are scheduled, any affected employees are automatically notified by email, SMS or push so now there are no excuses for forgetting a shift or turning up at the wrong time! You can instantly generate a comprehensive report looking at any of the data in your account, making it easy to spot trends and optimize your schedule. People are your most expensive resource, so if you’re not scheduling effectively, you’re throwing money on the fire!”
To sum this up, online tools are your great ally in retail business. They can help automate processes and save time and money, both precious when working in a globalized market.
Feel free to share your favorite online tools in the comment section below. And if you liked this post, don’t forget to share it on social media!