Build A Profitable Ecommerce Brand on Trust and Customer Happiness

The best brands seem to be timeless, like they’ve been around forever. Even when you think about relatively young ecommerce brands like Warby Parker (8 years), Dollar Shave Club (7 years) or Casper (4 years), their branding has been so omnipresent that it’s hard to remember a day where these brands didn’t exist. MVMT—recently got acquired for more than $100M—is only 5 years old.

So how did these brands accomplish so much in such a short space of time?

1. They focused on building profitable brands that engaged their customers with smart, personal conversations and interactions.
2. They were ahead of the curve or at least very early adopters of big trends.

When we think about building a profitable ecommerce brand today, a few emerging trends cause some concern:

• Consumers are being bombarded from all angles for their attention. Every day there is a Next Big Thing demanding their attention.
• Almost everyone suffers from email overload. Sending more email trying to engage you subscribers just worsens the problem.
• The cost of paid ads (on Facebook and Google) continues to increase, while impressions continue to drop. Pretty soon, relying on paid ads to grow your business might not be viable or sustainable.
• No ecommerce brand can compete against Amazon—who keeps on growing—on price, convenience or catalog size in the long-term. (Our friends at Smile.io recently said it best: In the future, you can’t be a vending machine.)

The next big ecommerce brands will stay ahead of these issues by building real relationships with their customers and crafting a brand those customers absolutely love.

All of their interactions with their customers will be smarter, richer, more personal, and better timed. Conversations will be kinder and rooted in mutual trust.

At CM Commerce, we’re building the tools to make every email, interaction, and customer count. We’re creating a platform for trust and kindness on which you can build your brand.

Build more trust with user-generated content.

Social proof is an integral component of doing business online. 85% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

The ability to show off your product reviews in abandoned cart emails have led to big jumps in the conversion and recovery rate for CM Commerce emails.

Today we’re ramping up our product ratings & reviews functionality with a whole bunch of new goodies:

Gather more user-generated content with photo reviews.

There are over 65,000 thousand Instagram photos posted every minute. And now you can tap into that user-generated content, too.

Your customers now have the option of adding photos (up to 4) of themselves showing off their newly purchased product when they add a review. They can do this via a post-purchase email sequence or any time directly on your website.

Adding a visual element to your product reviews increases the authenticity and the richness of your customers’ words and experiences. These are the elements that attract like-minded, happy customers to your brand.

We worked with a couple of our Shopify Plus brands to implement these tools. SpiritHoods (who switched from Yotpo) already has a strikingly visual brand and have been able to augment that with new photo reviews:

Product reviews (powered by CM Commerce) on SpiritHoods.com

“As a small business owner that is in charge of marketing, I like it when things work and work well. [CM Commerce] has made my job considerably easier. Eliminating individual apps from our workflow and using CM Commerce for all of our emails and product reviews has had a significant effect on our bottom line. We were able to cut our monthly costs by hundreds of dollars. We also simplified our workflow, saving us time and making marketing efforts more effective. It almost seems too good to be true. I’m here to tell you it’s not. The whole team here at SpiritHoods just loves CM Commerce. They are the real deal.”

– Marley Marotta, SpiritHoods

Get customer feedback straight on your website.

Make your customer’s experience as convenient and fun as possible and you’ll see conversions increase.

Your CM Commerce reviews widget now has the ability to collect new reviews from your customers right on your website. They don’t have to wait for a post-purchase email to request that review; they can just add a review whenever they are most inspired to give you feedback.

Here’s an example of how this works from another Shopify Plus brand, Colette & Lola:

You’ll also see that Colette & Lola sports a different layout to the one from SpiritHoods above. We helped them to this with only a few CSS tweaks.

Our widgets are designed to be superbly flexible and with a little TLC, you can create a unique look & feel that supports your brand.

“Product reviews are vital for our online cake shop and definitely help convert more visitors into buyers. We have switched from Loox to [CM Commerce reviews widget], because we want everything related to our emails under one roof. It’s great cost saving for us, but more importantly we no longer have to manage different apps. MUCH fewer headaches!”

– Arvid Yap, Colette & Lola

Be more transparent about the little mistakes.

These tools give your customers a lot of power. When the feedback and reviews are positive, it’s a great asset in your marketing toolbelt. But similarly, bad reviews could be damaging.

So we’ve built a new “Store Replies” feature that allows you to publicly reply to a review. This means your reply will be sent to both the customer who left the review as well as the widget itself.

Nobody expects perfection. Often, the impact of a mistake on customers isn’t the result of the mistake itself, but instead the result of how you fix things. With this feature, you can leave a reply as an update to the original review.

Say a customer leaves a negative review about receiving a damaged product. You can then leave a reply to say that you have already shipped a replacement free of charge. Your future customers will trust you more and appreciate that level of transparency and responsiveness.

Wrap up

Creating a brand experience that is omnipresent means that you shouldn’t just confine your customer feedback and product reviews to your website. Doing that is a missed opportunity to have smarter, kinder, and richer conversations with your customers.

Because CM Commerce has both emails and product reviews tools, there are ways you can improve your email marketing by building more trust and including social proof.

Here are examples of how some of our brands have improved their abandoned cart recovery rate with smarter, richer emails:

Has that sparked some new ideas for how you can use customer feedback and product reviews in your email marketing?

CM Commerce features:

• Pre-made conversion campaigns to recover revenue from abandoned carts
• Follow-up segmented and personalized emails for cross-selling
• Product reviews that spotlight your happy customers and build trust (and sales)
• Automated feedback to increase repeat revenue
• Ready-to-go templates or custom receipts, coupons, and rewards with your branding

Try CM Commerce today for free.