Earlier this year, I wrote about how we increased traffic to 3A Composites’ SAP Integrated B2B eCommerce Webshop by over 850%.  We did it by simply “coaxing” SAP to send hyperlink embedded Order Confirmation emails upon receipt of a faxed order from Esker’s Sales Order Processing service.

That increased the value of customer self service activity on the 3A Composites’ website by over 1400%!

Dramatic results for little effort.

Inspired by those results, we embarked on a similar effort for another one of our clients, PARI Respiratory Equipment.  On this project, we helped them send a hyperlink embedded email to their customers upon what SAP calls a “Post Goods Issue”.  This essentially became an Advanced Shipment Notification (ASN) when part, or all, of an order had left the warehouse.

And I thought 3A Composites’ results were dramatic.

I aggregated, and separated into two, all of the daily Google Analytics data for 2013 before and after September 1.  These were the periods “before and after” the ASN email went into production.

Here are the results:

Metric	% Change (After vs. Before)
Website visits	+69
Goals Accomplished	+66
Invoices Downloaded	+116
Orders Placed	+35
Average Order Size	+80

 

The first observation is that we clearly have driven more traffic, +69%, to the website.  (Maybe not as much as 3A Composites 850% increase, but in PARI’s case, customers were already coming to the website to place orders, in 3A Composites’ case they only use the website as a Customer Services portal (no order entry).  In PARI’s case, our goal was to increase the use of the website by existing customers.  In 3A Composites’ project our goal was to increase the number of new website users.)

It stands to reason that if people are coming to your website more often, they will accomplish more business goals overall (place orders, check status, download invoices and bill of ladings etc.).  That is clearly reflected in the 66% increase in Goals Accomplished.

In particular, the number of daily invoices that are being downloaded has more than doubled (+116%).  Since Invoices are always related to ASNs, that certainly makes sense.  The value to PARI is that not only are CSRs spending less time resending invoices that have been “lost” by customers, but more than likely they are getting paid quicker.  (Next step is to implement our WebAR feature so that payment can be received at the speed of a click of the mouse).

Here is where the story transitions from interesting to fascinating.

I fully expected an increase in web traffic thanks to the simplified user experience…click a link in an email versus find the bookmark, remember your userid/pw, copy and paste order number and hit search.  Furthermore, it came as no surprise that the increased web traffic would produce an enhanced level of customer services.  But what blew me away was that we were now generating more revenue!  More orders were being placed (+35%) AND their average size had grown by 80%!

The goal of this project was not to produce more revenue on the website.  It was designed to improve customer satisfaction by giving them simpler visibility into the status of their already placed orders.  Lo and behold, we delivered the “triple bottom line”:

1. Greater customer satisfaction (increased web traffic)
2. More process efficiencies (increased Goals accomplished)
3. Increased revenue (bigger and more orders placed)

I guess it’s true that happier customers are better customers :-).

Moral of the story?

Make it as easy as possible for customers to be drawn back to your website.

The easier you make their lives, the more they will reward you with their business.

Sam

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