5 Ways Magento Enterprise Can Help Your Business Sell More Online

Apart from offering superior technical features and functionality, Magento Enterprise contains a number of powerful marketing tools to help your eCommerce business sell more online. And isn’t this what every online business hopes to achieve? In case you’re completely unaware of them, here are 5 extremely powerful marketing tools contained within Magento Enterprise Edition that can help your online business attract more sales.

1. Gift Registry – Setting up a gift registry on Magento Enterprise not only allows your customers to purchase gifts for others conveniently, but also allows you to capture information on potential new customers. You can then use this information in targeted email campaigns. Magento Enterprise’s gift registry feature simplifies the process of gift selection and purchase for both the givers and receivers. Visitors to your website can search for the gift registry by name, email or registry ID and purchase gifts in complete privacy. This feature allows you to tap into your customers social network which could result in exponential customer reach and acquisition.

2. Email Reminders – Magento Enterprise allows you to automatically send email reminders to anyone that abandoned their shopping carts mid-way through a visit to your online store. You can even send emails to visitors to your store who created a wish list but have not yet since returned to your store. These follow-up emails can be customised to target visitors based on a number of parameters, including cart value, quantity, and frequency, and can direct stray customers back to your store to complete their purchases. You can also include coupon codes to help sweeten the deal for them and get them to complete their purchases.

3. Private Sales – It’s also possible to restrict certain parts of your online catalog to specific customers with Magento Enterprise, and offer these preferred customers exclusive content. You can allow access to “members only” or certain segments of your customer base on an invitation-only basis. Set up invitations and create limited time events for specific customers and allow them to purchase things not available to the rest of your customer base.

4. Customer Attributes and Segmentation – With Magento Enterprise Edition, it’s possible to segment customers based on specific demographics (age, sex, location, etc.) or their purchase history, and then target them with certain promotions or products that they are more likely to buy. Not all your customers will be the same, and being able to differentiate between different segments of your customer base allows you to better target them for additional sales. This feature can help to increase your eCommerce store conversion rate as your promotions and product placement will be more relevant to your customer profiles.

5. Personalised Content Presentation – As mentioned above, Magento Enterprise allows you to segment your customers based on a number of characteristics. You can then personalise the way your content is presented to different customer segments to increase your order values, customer satisfaction and overall sales. Different products will appeal to different customers, and with Magento Enterprise it’s possible to create personalised banners that advertise products or promotions to certain customer segments.

Whatever you sell online, with Magento Enterprise you can take advantage of a whole range of included marketing and revenue generating tools that can take your online business to the next level.

Magento Commerce – Defining eCommerce

Maganeto commerce is changing the nature of ecommerce day by day. The nature of how small, medium and large business are ‘ecommerce enabling’ them selves is indeed being defined by Magento Commerce. Magento commerce is giving organizations of all shapes and size the ability to change the way they interact with customers, reach their customers, market and sell their products and services, full-fill orders, compete in their industry, even how they define ecommerce in their segment.

Magtento commerce is offering new start ups the ability to go live with a fully functional ecommerce presence, just like the bigger players in their industry, both local and abroad with minimum effort and investment.

Magento commerce is also allowing traditional brick-and-mortar business and retailers to establish on infrastructure that will give their customers a new way of doing business with them and new customers an impressive way of understanding them.

If you are new to ecommerce or have been doing ecommerce for a awhile and are looking for a better and brighter solution we encourage you to seriously explore Magento as it may indeed be exactly what you have been looking for.

Top 5 Reasons Why Magento Enterprise Should Be Your Go To eCommerce Platform

Magento Enterprise offers merchants unprecedented customisation and flexibility when it comes to their online stores. Not only does Magento Enterprise provide an easy-to-use catalog management system, powerful marketing tools, and top-notch security, but the sheer amount of functionality offered by the software is second to none. Whatever you sell on your website, using Magento Enterprise to power your eCommerce store is the best decision you can make. Here are 5 reasons why you should choose Magento Enterprise as your eCommerce platform.

1. All-in-one eCommerce solution.

Magento Enterprise allows you to take care of many aspects of your online business (e.g., content management, sales and invoicing, categories, marketing, etc.) all from the one interface. This not only makes things less time consuming for you, but the integration ensures that your online store works effectively as a whole.

2. Advanced functionality.

Magento Enterprise offers so much in the way of functionality that almost anything is possible. From customer segmentation, targeted promotions, and merchandising, right through to dynamic rule-based product relations, and an automatic email marketing reminder, Magento Enterprise can help your online business thrive. As an open-source software platform, Magento Enterprise benefits from the intellectual output of a large international community of developers. This means that more and more features will continually be added to this software in the future. There are already hundreds of extensions out on the market today, and this is only set to increase as more businesses get on board with Magento Enterprise.

3. Top-notch security.

Magento Enterprise offers a number of security features that are essential to running a safe, and secure eCommerce online business. For example, the software comes equipped with a Secure Payment Bridge and credit card tokenization – a necessary feature required by banks and credit card companies. If you accept credit card payments on your online store, then credit card tokenization is mandatory. Data is also encrypted using the AES-256 standard to ensure privacy and security at all times.

4. 24/7 support.

Magento offers license owners of Magento Enterprise around the clock expert support. Incredibly, 94 per cent of support calls made to Magento are completely resolved on the first call, and having a team of passionate experts at your beck and call is absolutely crucial in ensuring your online success. It’s also vital to providing your customers the best possible shopping experience online.

5. SEO friendly.

Being found on Google.com and other search engines is crucial to drawing more and more organic traffic to your website. With Magento Enterprise, you’re in the right hands. Magento Enterprise features SEO friendly URLs, a Google sitemap, and meta-information for products, categories and content pages. All of these features make it easier for your potential customers to find your store online.

Magento Enterprise is the “go to” eCommerce solution for your online business. This all-in-one platform is SEO friendly and features top-notch security and advanced functionality. The fact that Magento also offers around the clock support and assistance to customers means that you’ll be looked after every step of the way: from setting up your store, to making your first sale, and anything else you may need along the way.

Establishing a Loyalty Program on Your Magento eCommerce Store

There are a few things to consider when contemplating setting up a rewards point system for your Magento eCommerce store.  At a very high level there are a few types of rewards that can be set up to get some good traction on your website.

Below are just a few quick thoughts taken from a recent email I sent to some one to help them get a better understanding of how a rewards point system can be leveraged when starting of. I thought it may be useful so I am quickly sharing this information here also. This is by no means a comprehensive outline of setting up a rewards point system for your Magento store, but rather intended  to help you get started and thinking in this direction.

In the future it is my intention to share some more useful information on eCommerce store loyalty programs as I believe it is a very god way to grow your sales, broaden your customer base, retain more customers and increase (what marketers call) share of wallet.

Here  are a couple fundamental types of loyalty point structures;

– One type of reward program is rewarding people for their shopping behavior. This involves  giving points of direct economic worth for shopping activity undertaken that is directly based on generating economic worth for your website.

– Rewarding people for referring others who in turn go onto undertake shopping behavior – that is rewarding the referrer with direct economic worth when they refer customers that will go onto order (only). This is similar to the above point, the person making the referral is only rewarded when the person(s) referred generate economic activity on the site – make a sale.

Both these activities are rather safe as a starting point because rewards are balanced with economic return, that is, you you are rewarding customers based on a sale being made.

The other type of rewards that can be given on your Magento eCommerce website are for various types of user interactions;  such as simple referrals, social interaction, reviews, product reviews, likes, etc.

With this type of loyalty setup, business returns are very indirect. I consider this more of an ‘advertising’ investment on the part of the website owner back into his or her own business as it were, because they are essentially making an expense investment back into their business. Offering monetary value to your customers for non direct economic generating activity towards your business means that you are essentially paying customers or even non customers for helping to promote your website or contributing towards generating content, etc.

I think these activities should be managed and be sporadic subject to your advertising and promotional budget as there is a direct economic impact and expense to the business with no guarantee return. This is not to say that the outcome of such activity may not be economically beneficial or financially rewarding.

The last quick point I would like to mention that hangs over the entire program and strategy is managing risk – liability. This is the redeemable dollar worth value owed to customers. Some ways to reduce this include;

– limit the point expiry period
– reward only for return – as mentioned above
– carefully establish and discriminate the points currency value to ensure that the reward given is balanced with return – easier to do with points 1 and 2 mentioned earlier with regards to the types of rewards as this is easier to monitor.  As a rule of thumb I think 2.5-5% discount is ok and safe but this will depend on the situation and nature of your business. Sometimes offering even greater value back to customers maybe appropriate, this will depend on your specific case.

Lastly its important to think about the terms and conditions. It is important to define some terms and conditions around the loyalty program and include this on your website. These need to be flexible and you need to mention to people that you have the liberty to refine and change these at any time.

The is just so much that can be said about this area and I hope to share some more information in the coming months. If you have any questions please feel free to touch base. Thanks 🙂