New Essentials to drive the New Normal

In the last few weeks since the pandemic hit the world, people have come to terms with the new routine. Customer behavior changed drastically and the businesses are evolving as per their needs.

Due to the enforcing of social distancing across boundaries, many retail stores closed their doors and that traffic is rerouted to the e-commerce websites. However, all businesses who are seeing sudden influxes of traffic aren’t necessarily prepared.

Many brands are coping with this crisis by developing unique online strategies in the least amount of time possible. Being able to quickly and efficiently transition to e-commerce is instrumental in conducting business as shoppers in self-quarantine turn to their phones and computers to make most of their purchases online.

Tips to Optimize Marketing Strategy to meet Online Demand:

If you are wondering on how to cope with this crisis and boost your revenue, below are some vital implementations you need to adopt using your existing resources. These strategies help brands with heavy influx of traffic in customer retention and the ones with marginal traffic in enhancing their customer engagement. 

Reassure Your Customer

It’s a no-brainer that the customer confidence is dropping from an economic standpoint. This is the time you reassure your customers by continuously engaging and informing them as to how you as a business are raising to the current situation. Elaborating on the safety measures taken all through the order process will address the fears and apprehensions your customers may have. As a result, the customer can stick to their favorite brand and not change their loyalty.

Intensify Digital Presence

Due to the available time at hand, people are constantly active on social networking sites like Instagram and Facebook. Capitalizing digital presence and effectively posting updates will establish a communicative channel with your user base. It will not only allow you to disseminate information effectively but also helps in signaling to your customers that you are actively making efforts to cater their needs with minimal disruption.

New Essentials – Revenue Boosters

These days all products are categorized into either of the two groups, essentials or non-essentials. Initially experts estimated the spending to decline across categories due to the impact of covid-19, but reality suggests differently with all businesses adapting to the situation.

Though priority is still given to basic living essentials, people are also looking for alternatives (non-essentials) to ease their additional physical efforts, both work and personal. For example, customers are required to resume their work remotely along-side managing household chores – having a product or service to ease up some of the work will offer a respite and become an instant hit.

Businesses should identify among their products which ones best fit the current need and look to promote it rigorously.

Manage Inventory

Some companies are quickly running out-of-stock for the essential items, either due to increased buying behavior or due to interruptions in the supply chain. But, as these are the essential products in current demand, their entire effort should be redirected to address the customer needs.

This will not only keep their existing customers happy but also help with attracting new customers.

Redesign Upcoming Campaigns

Evidently this crisis has altered all the marketing plans, strategies and quarterly goals, hence affecting players across industries. However, the same can be converted into an advantage if you put your resources to work and maximize this downtime.

Get an edge by quickly reviewing your past customer behavior and their current response, to project future sales and redesign campaigns. Also deploy your digital presence to conduct surveys and polls to confirm your hypothesis.

Essentially take inputs from your customers to serve them better.

Prioritize the Site Performance

All things said, website performance should be a priority for every e-retailer right now. Poor performance can simply destroy your business. E-retailers now more than ever, need to provide faster and easier shopping experience and has become the essential thing now.

If your site is taking too long to load or feels slow, then the customer is forever lost. Studies suggest that Google also considers the site speed in their ranking algorithm, which means having a slow site will put you at a disadvantage compared to your peers.

Evaluate your revised website traffic volume and behavior to identify pain points and address them on priority. Current times demand newer measures and have upped the importance of digital shopping experience more than the product itself.

Communicate Shipping Expectations

With the unprecedented international and domestic travel bans and lock-down in major parts of the world, logistic planning has become tricky. Though the customers need you now, they are also empathetic to the side-effects of the lock-down when promptly communicated.

Being transparent and managing the expectations correctly will take you a long way in maintaining your customer relations. Also, having functional local warehouses and shipping through them will help overcome this challenge.

Though this pandemic has disrupted the lifestyles and livelihood of many, it has also presented us with an opportunity to re-define and re-prioritize our needs. With minimal functional changes and adoption of certain practices outlined above, one can easily come out victorious from these trying times. Investing your time and effort to better address your customer needs will take your business a long way. 

Content research for this article has been contributed by Spoorthi Duggi