Being a seller on eBay, in order to sustain your business model in the long term, it is of critical importance to turn eBay customers into buyers. This is considered one of the biggest motivations for sustainable revenue growth. Here are 10+ effective ways to turn your customers into buyers.
1. Why need to turn eBay customers into buyers
Firstly, before jumping in with some tips to improve your customer retention, we need to understand the long-term benefits your business can reap from turning eBay customers into buyers.
According to the statistics of customer retention, lowering your customer churn rate is highly likely to boost your profits between 25% to 95%. So why is that?
When you successfully turn your eBay customers into buyers, they are 50% more likely to try new products than new customers. Besides, on average, they are likely to spend 31% more in months from 30 to 36 with your eCommerce store on eBay than in the first period from 0 to 6 months. In addition to that, a 10% increase in customer retention will result in a 30% increase in value and profit to the company.
Another noteworthy point is the power of word-of-mouth marketing. Once you can turn a large number of your eBay customers into buyers, you may not have to put a lot of effort and investment into marketing your store to the public. Your loyal customers will play that role for you. And it is proven even more effective and money-saving than traditional advertisements and email marketing because new customers will tend to believe more in your buyers. Your eBay store will get a stable revenue flow as your loyal customers will be a great source of new buyers.
2. 10+ ways to turn eBay customers into buyers
So what are some efficient ways to turn eBay customers into buyers?
2.1 Find out the reason why customers do not repurchase product
First and foremost, the most important thing you have to do before implementing any strategy to turn eBay customers into buyers is to find out their pain points. In other words, it requires you to find out why they do not repurchase your product or even revisit your eBay store.
Let’s utilize some analytic tools to track users’ footprint, see your sales funnel in the whole picture, and figure out in which process or step your eBay customers are unsatisfied with, what they often do when they visit your store, and how often they revisit it. It also may be that your marketing advertisements are targeting the wrong customer group or that your products have not solved customers’ problems successfully.
Or you can create a feedback form and send it to your customers to see why there is a decline in customers retention rate.
Once you identify the root of the problem can you start to build a comprehensive strategy to turn eBay customers into buyers by solving exactly what they have trouble with, strike in the right place, at the right time? Your plan may involve improving customer service or coming up with another pricing strategy or marketing approach.
2.2 Speed up Transaction Time
The second aspect you have to pay a lot of attention to in order to turn eBay customers into buyers is to speed up your transaction time. It is recommended to invest in upgrading your payment systems, allowing a diversity of payment methods, and increasing transaction time. In other words, you need to focus on both quantity and quality to make customers feel as comfortable as possible.
Speeding up transaction time will definitely increase customers’ satisfaction, avoid unnecessary troubles, and make the transaction period seem to be more transparent. That’s another idea to turn eBay customers into buyers.
2.3 Build Omnichannel Strategy
Another essential strategy worth investing in is to build up your omnichannel strategy. Building an omnichannel strategy for your eBay store will make a great contribution for your customer retention rate to surge as it can significantly boost your customer satisfaction. You are offering an online service, therefore, you have to ensure a smooth and seamless customer journey and optimize their engagement with your store to turn eBay customers into buyers.
Let’s dig deeper into how to create an Omnichannel strategy.
- Ensure a friendly-to-use website interface. This is the first impression and the first step in your customer journey
- Map out a step-by-step customer journey on different platforms. Think of what you have to do to provide timely support, assistance for your customers not only on your eBay store but also through email, social media. And all of these need to cooperate perfectly with one another
- Create specialized content for each channel. It is important to make sure your content marketing matches the type of platform you are using and the customers who use it.
- Provide cross-channel customer support 24/24. An online store is expected to reply and assist your customers any time as only after one bad experience can lead to poor performance. Your strategy can include supporting customers on different platforms such as email, social media, etc
Here is some basic guidance on how to build an omnichannel strategy. It is recommended to take this into serious consideration.
2.4 Launch Promotion & Coupon Code
In addition to that, in order to gradually turn eBay customers into buyers, your store needs to constantly launch creative, unique promotion campaigns to remind your customers and emphasize the great experience they have with your service. Frequent email marketing or any type of promotion on social media, if they are attractive enough, your customers are likely to be persuaded completely. However, you have to consider their experience as well, you need to know what is the best time to launch a campaign exclusively for loyal customers.
Another way to turn eBay customers into buyers in this part is to use coupon codes. Building some types of automated discounts for only already-purchased customers will be a good way to encourage your customers to visit your eBay store more frequently. However, this also requires serious consideration as you can not always apply this coupon code for any type of purchase or product. Just carefully calculate your sales and profits before launching any automated discount.
2.5 Free Shipping
Furthermore, besides promotion and discount codes, offering free shipping is also a promising option to turn eBay customers into buyers.
Everyone loves free shipping and it is even more wonderful to be offered both coupon codes and free shipping if you are buyer.
But still, this strategy takes a lot of careful consideration as it is impossible to provide this special service for every repurchase. Again, you can not risk your financial budget just to turn eBay customers into buyers. If not, the profits from these repeat purchases can not compensate for your financial loss.
2.6 Be in stock
In addition to that, to turn eBay customers into buyers, increase their satisfaction and keep them stay longer with your store, it is crucial to always be in stock.
Customers do not want to see their favorite products be marked as out of stock, especially on important occasions. They tend to assume your store lacks resources and do not really take their demands into serious consideration.
However, this also has to depend on certain types of products. You have to track your customers’ behaviors carefully so that you can have a firm grasp of which products you need to stock frequently and which not. That’s how you can create a better image of your brand in customers’ minds and turn eBay customers into buyers.
2.7 eBay email marketing and follow-ups
A really critical step of customer care service to turn eBay customers into buyers is continuous email marketing and follow-ups. This way can be really effective in reminding customers of your products, giving them a frequent update of your services, and urging them to come back and pay a visit to your eBay store.
In this process, market research and marketing analytics are also integral parts as they will predict your customers’ needs and wants. Based on that you can build a suitable email marketing strategy so that your customers can feel related to the content and are happy to receive your emails. If not, this can do more harm than good and customers will feel annoyed and your email will land in the spam box the next time.
Therefore, it is advised to tailor your content marketing to certain customer segments, strike at the right place. That’s how you can create a good impression and turn eBay customers into buyers.
2.8 Be unique
The term “unique” seems to appear many times when discussing branding and promotion.
In order to win customers’ trust and turn eBay customers into buyers, it is even more important to always be unique and exceptional.
Firstly, your services and products need to have certain unique selling points that customers can not find in other online stores. This can win your customers much more efficiently than investing in a lot of marketing but neglecting product development.
They are likely to revisit and rebuy your products without serious considerations after several times.
Secondly, a booming marketing campaign is a must-have strategy to turn eBay customers into buyers. You will create a sense of curiosity or FOMO in your customers, and those who do not want to be left behind will revisit and, you can successfully turn eBay customers into buyers.
2.9 Be reliable
Reliability is also another remarkable concept that every seller needs to take into serious consideration if you want to turn eBay customers into buyers and create a sustainable base of loyal customers who rely on your service.
Let instill a sense of reliability in your customers’ mindset every time they use your service, buy your products at every step. From the time they come to visit your eBay store to the transaction process and shipping method, each of these requires a high level of transparency and trustworthiness. Your customer care service also needs to be active 24/7 to solve any urgent problems.
Even your marketing campaign also should not exaggerate your products too far from reality as this can do more harm than good. They can rebuy this time, but never come back again and the bad reputation can spread much farther and faster than you think.
So to turn eBay customers into buyers, one of the best images you want to build in your customers’ hearts is reliability and credibility.
2.10 Make customers feel valued
Furthermore, making customers feel valued also plays an important role in winning their attention and encouraging them to rely on your products.
Customers can feel valued in any step such as your marketing email, your follow-up, and the customer care service. In order to express that your business is based on customer-centric principle, it is important to invest in a lot of market research and analysis to predict your customer’s behaviors, identify their pain points and what value you can create for them, how you can sustain their demand in the long term and what they expect from an eBay store.
Only by having a thorough understanding of customer persona, can you bring them exactly what they want and turn eBay customers into buyers.
2.11 Use analytics tools
Last but not least, the utilization of analytics tools is the key to the success of every advice mentioned earlier. Without analytic tools, it is impossible to identify your potential repeat customers and come up with an effective strategy.
Analytics tools will assist you in correctly figuring out your target customer, then predicting their behaviors in the future, which definitely great resources to build up your marketing strategy including branding, promotion campaign, email marketing, follow-ups and upgrade your products and services, optimizing customer care process and improve customers’ experience on your eBay store.
So, analytics software is a must-have weapon if you want to win customers’ trust and turn eBay customers into buyers.
3. Final thoughts
Here are 10+ tips you can use to turn eBay customers into buyers. These recommendations need to be done together smoothly in a process as all of them are a critical point in a chain to ultimately increase customers’ purchase behaviors. There is no one good way to turn eBay customers into buyers, it requires a combination of different strategies and courses of action.
Therefore, it is highly recommended to take each of these ways into serious consideration and apply something suitable to your business model.
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