With many online businesses wondering how to make it through the "sales winter" for the next couple of quarters, direct-to-consumer professionals look for ways to cuts costs and help retain customers without cutting consumer's online experience and customer service. Submerce answers the call by offering the following suggestions for any direct-to-consumer professional.
1. Stop Paying Transaction or Commission Fees for Online Sales
If you are paying a monthly hosting and a transaction fee for your online or direct-to-consumer sales, switch to an eCommerce provider such as Submerce which offers a flat fee monthly service that includes unlimited number of transactions. Most eCommerce solution providers charge anywhere from 1.75% to 5.25% above and beyond what you are paying your credit card processing fees.
For an average winery that does $40,000 a month in gross sales, that can range from $700 to $2100 in transaction fees alone. With Submerce, your monthly fee would not exceed $250 for standard eCommerce and $375 with club management. That's a savings of at least $5400 to $20,000 per annum by switching to Submerce. By following the philosophy of offering a flat monthly service fee, Submerce allows predictability of your operational costs. Whereas a competing service will charge you both a hosting and a transaction fee, reducing your profit margin for your sales success rather than reaping the full benefits of your hard work.
2. Renegotiate Your Existing Fulfillment or Shipping Carrier's Fees
Renegotiate your shipping fees with either your shipping carrier or your fulfillment house. Many wineries have not taking the time to review their existing rates or discuss options to cut costs with their fulfillment house or shipping carriers. Fulfillment houses are like cell phone carriers, they don't want to see you go and if approached, they may review your current contract and offer ways to reduce shipping costs. Also remember if your wine club has grown or your number of shipments has swelled past your original estimated colume, there may be an opportunity to discuss a new rate based on your new volume.
3. Shop For a New Fulfillment House or Shipping Carrier
If your current shipping carrier or fulfillment house is not willing to renegotiate, then it's time to start shopping. Many new shipping companies have launched in the last couple of years and may offer a more competitive rate to attract your business. If you ship in house, take a look at your rates and compare them against each other. If you have been using FedEx, take a look at UPS. If you have a lot of packages going to
4. Review and Renogotiate Your Credit Card Processing Contract
Review your current contract with your merchant and credit card processing company. With the recent turbulence in the banking industry, many banks have merged which means that you may be stuck with a new rate that is not competitive. Submerce recommends reviewing your contract at least once a year and possibly start shopping for a new processor or merchant bank that will offer a better rate or possibly better customer service. Just like shipping carriers, if your volume has grown like many of our customers after they switched to Submerce, you may be eligible for a better rate. Even a half percent discount can meet thousands of dollars over a course of a year. By powering your eCommerce site with Submerce, switching merchant accounts or processors can be done in as little as a couple of days once your bank has approved your application.
5. Offer New Frequency Options for Wine Club Shipments
If your company has a wine club and is starting to see a trend of attrition, ask your customers who are canceling for the reason why they are opting out. Recent customer polls have found that customers who originally signed up for a monthly shipment no longer want to receive wine every month, but would be more than happy to get a shipment every other month. By creating a new club that offers the same wines as a monthly club on a bi-monthly basis, you will be retaining customers which is far better than losing them.
By using Submerce, creating a new club can be done in under a minute and moving customers from one club to another can be done in just a couple of seconds. If a bi-monthly does keep the customer's attention, offer a quarterly club or place them on suspension or hold status for 6-8 months. This will allow them to continue to receive the montly newsletters while also offering them the continued benefit of wine club discounts.
Submerce can manage this easily through the online application and allows administrators to set vacations and hold statuses in just a couple of seconds. By contiunuing their discounts, you will keep the customers loyal to your brand and to your website. Others may frown on this, but remember, some sales is better than no sales and extending a discount even though the customer may not be getting the monthly shipments consumers see this as a way of your company having some compassion for loyal customers.
6. Manage Your Own Website
If you have been relying on an outside agency to manage your website design and maintenance, you have been spending anywhere from $75 to $200 an hour for someone to do work you probably can have anyone on your staff accomplish. Webmasters have had a long stranglehold on companys' websites and those days are changing quickly by powering your website with an eCommerce application that includes content management such as Submerce. You may have heard the buzz around Content Management Systems (CMS) as being inflexible and hard to work with, but Submerce has been hard at work for the past 14 months changing those reputations.
With Submerce v5.2, the software allows more control over your website with regards to navigation design, page design, product inclusion better than competing solutions such as eWinery Solutions, IBG and EVT. With Submerce anyone on your staff that has the basic understanding of a word processing program such as Microsoft Word or Lotus Notes can be building and maintain a website in just a couple of minutes, allowing instant changes to content without having to schedule an outside agency to complete it for you. Got a last minute sale or promotion? Not problem. Just log into the Submerce administration panel, make the content changes, build the promotion and in just a couple of minutes your site will be ready for the big sale and you just saved an average of $75 to $200 completing it in short order.
7. Use Stock Photography
With regards to content, you can cut the costs associated with building webpages, brochures and collateral materials by using stock photography than hiring a photographer. Long gone are the days of having to use the clip art included in your publishing program, over the course of the past 5-7 years, thousands of royalty free stock image and photography sites have popped up all over the internet backed by very attractive pricing models. Sites like http://www.shutterstock.com/ offer flat monthly fees to gain access to millions of high resolution images from over a hundred thousand photographers from around the world online 24/7. So by mixing stock photography with some of your own images, you can deliver a stunning website, brochure, sales sheet and more all while cutting your costs to a fraction of purchasing rights-managed photos that can cost anywhere from $400 to $1200 each.
8. Use Free Mailing List Management and Newsletter Tools
Slash the cost of sending email-based newsletters by switching to Submerce which allows unlimited mailing list management and the ability to send targeted email blasts in just a couple of minuties. While 3rd party mailing list management tools can be very attractive by offering easy-to-use templates, in the long run these cost you anywhere from $.01 each and on up costing hundreds if not thousands of dollars a year. Submerce has many customers that send email blasts of their latest product offerings and promotions about every 2-3 days which attracts thousands of dollars of revenue per message.
By taking the old rule of 5% conversion, that's a lot of customers you need to communicate to and by not worrying about a per message fee, your company can now tap into the market of sending targeted messages. Submerce has recently released their Customer Preferences and Targeting Tools that allows administrators of a Submerce-powered website to build mailing lists in just seconds based on query results of their database. Queries such as "customers within X miles of store", "customers who have purchased a type of product (red wine) or specific product(s)" can be generated and turned into a targeted mailing list.
Those lists can then be managed and added to as customer purchasing trends or demographics change over time. By using Submerce you are not only saving money, your company also has the tools to send precisely targeted messages rather than blasting an entire customer list. Doing so will drive customers to opt out or refrain from purchasing products from your site in the future. Like many of the Submerce features, mailing lists are great tools as long as they are used properly and take into consideration of the respect for your customers' privacy.
9. Create and Manage Your Own Search Engine Optimization
One of the most advertised internet service offerings (beside the adult-related and low-fee mortgages) is Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short. Now SEO is very important for any site, but there's very little black magic or science behind the process that prevents the average person to program their own keywords and metatags. Now as with any service, hiring someone will deliver results, just don't fall for the "I'll make your site the #1 in search results" as they will promise this to you and your competitor. You'll have to ask yourself how they do this, right? Well in the end it's a sales pitch and no SEO or SEM company can guarantee results.
By powering your website with Submerce, you don't have to be an SEO expert or a programmer to get the right keywords into your website. Submerce offers far better SEO management tools than the nearest competing service at no additional cost. Once a customer, Submerce even offers your tips and tricks on how to get your SEO up to speed and how to manage it after launch. Just one of the many benefits of becoming a Submerce customer.
Submerce recently brought on a very large, well established website over from a competing service and within three weeks, the Submerce-powered version was already pushing the company's internet search ranks up the chart. This was accomplished by just switching to Submerce and using the included tools to populate the SEO fields at the site, webpage and product levels- and without the help of an SEO export.
10. Streamline Work Processes with Consolidation of Services
Based on a recent study, one of the biggest areas of operational expenses was on managing internal processes such as lack of data flow automation or broken systems' integration which also typically leads to increased cost related to customer service. By switching to Submerce, your company will not only have access to a robust and scalable solution today, you will also have access to a system that will grown with your company- not govern its success. Submerce offers automated systems integration with many different third party systems such as FedEx, UPS, Oracle's JD Edwards, SAP, QuickBooks, ShipCompliant, New Vine Logistics and more are added just about every other month.
By automating these processes, your internal IT staff can focus their time on tasks that will be a better use of their time. Switching to Submerce will also allow you to outsource your website hosting by bringing in Rackspace Managed hosting as part of the Submerce Total Solution package. Rackspace is a top tier network that offers 100% network uptime and 24/7 support at no additional cost to you, saving you thousands of dollars a month staffing the required IT resources needed to keep your servers running.
By Switching to Submerce, you will not only be able to incorporate the top ten featured recommendations, you will also be trained on hundreds of other ideas that will help you streamline your workflows, boost sales, provide better customer service to your customers, build a more engaging website and much more. To ensure success, each Submerce customer receives hands on training on and consultation by one of our Submerce Specialists that has the experience and personal committment to get your new site up and running in 30 days or less. So what's stopping you from saving thousands of dollars each month while increasing your sales? Call Submerce at (707) 255-4393 or visit their website at http://www.submerce.com/
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