I'm "thinking out loud" a bit in this post today, so please bear with me...
Since I've been involved with E-Commerce and the Internet in general, there has always been this school of thought that you need too make your site "sticky". This can mean many things to many people, but in terms of selling on-line, you typically want to build long-term relationships with your customers, and provide content to keep them on your site longer. The obvious net result is that repeat visitors buy more often and have a higher AOV. And certainly the longer you can keep them kicking around on your site, the more opportunities you have to merchandise relevant product to them and ultimately increase your conversion.
Sounds simple, right?
Wrong. The two biggest problems that I have encountered are that:
1, ) Not all of your customers really want a relationship with you. They may be very loyal to your brand, and they could be frequent shoppers on your site, but the vast majority of them probably choose to express their loyalty in a very simplistic way: they are buying from you instead of someone else. Yet, there are no shortages of E-Commerce sites that are designed only for their own definition of a customer relationship: you either have to be a part of their loyalty program, or choose to submit yourself to building some flavor of "My Something", which is typically nothing more than profile building.
There's certainly nothing wrong with this approach, except that while it works great for the roughly 20% of your customers that choose to participate in this process, it's typically done at the expense of the long tail of your customer base. What are you doing to foster a "relationship" with your customers that don't want one? Pounding them over the head with your loyalty program or repeatedly asking them to build a profile isn't the answer.
2) Your customers probably don't trust you as much as you think they do. No matter how powerful your brand equity or market share is, there's very little that the customer will take at face value. One of the biggest hurdles that any on-line retailer has to face, is building trust with the customer at every inflection point in the shopping process. We can't really communicate with the customer while they shop, so all that we can do is try to anticipate potential problems and address them as often as possible on our site.
Enter the concept of community-driven commerce and word-of-mouth marketing. While your customers may not trust you all that much, their trust in the collective opinion of other consumers is on the rise. According to an Edelman study earlier this year, consumer's trust in "a person like me" has gone from 20% in 2003 to 68% today.
“We have reached an important juncture, where the lack of trust in
established institutions and figures of authority has motivated people
to trust their peers as the best sources of information about a
company,” said Richard Edelman, president and CEO, Edelman. “Companies
need to move away from sole reliance on top-down messages delivered to
elites toward fostering peer-to-peer dialogue among consumers and
employees, activating a company’s most credible advocates.”
(And just to beat someone to the punch on this....yes, the irony of quoting Richard Edelman on the subject of trust is not lost on me.)
I'm a long-time proponent of this trend myself. We have been displaying very rudimentary customer ratings and reviews on our site for several years. This year, we handed off the management of this functionality to BazaarVoice, as it had grown far beyond our ability to manage it effectively in-house, not to mention our inability to truly measure the impact it was having on our site.
While I think that it's imperative to harness the voice of your customer, and I believe that this is arguably the best approach available today, it's still based on predictive behavior. You have to encourage your existing customers to rate products and write reviews, and then place that content where it will have the most impact on future customers.
As I was reading this post on TechCrunch today, it struck me that there could be an application here for E-Commerce. In short, Geesee is an embedded chat service, that allows consumers to chat about any subject, across multiple sites.
The social marketing implications of this concept aside, it immediately struck me that perhaps this could be the next step in community-driven commerce. What if there was a way for your customers to communicate in real-time with other customers who are also shopping your site, in a relatively controlled environment?
Shopping on-line has always been a fairly solitary exercise, but that doesn't mean that it has to be. It's clear that consumers value the opinion of other consumers, so wouldn't the next logical step be to remove the lag in putting them together?