Have you taken advantage of the new support options available for your M.O.M. software yet?
Check out our infographic that explains some of the exciting new benefits you’ll receive when you come back on support for your M.O.M. software:
Learn more about our support options or contact us to find out how you can become more competitive with better support.
Courtesy Pixabay | Pexels
Attend our Regional Customer Meeting or book a One-on-One Session!
Freestyle Solutions will be attending IRCE in Chicago from June 25th to the 27th and we look forward to meeting our customers, partners and prospects at the show. If you will be in Chicago, please consider spending time with us.
We’ll be holding a Regional Customer Meeting on June 25th, and will be booking One-on-One Meetings throughout the show.
Learn about the exciting improvements we are planning for MOM and SiteLINK.
Tell us about your vision for your business.
We’ll be happy to discuss how Freestyle can be a part of your success.
Learn more about Freestyle at IRCE and to reserve your space at the Regional Meeting or book a One-on-One Meeting
Courtesy Pixabay | 905513
Over the past year, we have fielded hundreds of questions from our customers and prospects on the evolving State Sales Tax Nexus challenge. They want to know:
In response, we’ve published blog posts, added information to our web site and held Webinars to inform the M.O.M. user community, yet there is still confusion and doubt about the potential impact of Sales Tax Nexus on the eCommerce business community.
So, we’ve taken an additional step to inform you, our community, about what your sales tax obligations are by collaborating with our partner, TaxJar, to publish a comprehensive list of frequently asked questions (FAQs)…questions about what sales tax for eCommerce really means.
We hope this will be the eCommerce industry’s one-stop resource to learn about State Sales Tax Nexus compliance.
Visit our new, live Sales Tax Nexus FAQ page and let us know what additional questions you would like us to answer. You can also ask us how Freestyle and TaxJar’s solutions can help your business meet its sales tax obligations by contacting us at sales@freestylesolutions.com.
GUEST POST BY WISEGUYS MARKETING’S BRUCE GREGOIRE
Courtesy Pixabay | Geralt
Veteran marketers may remember The Doors – with lead guitarist Jim Morrison and band, one of their biggest hits was “Love Me Two Times…”
“Love me two times baby / Love me twice today / Love me two times / girl I’m goin’ away…”
Now stop humming for a moment – this isn’t time for Karaoke! It’s time to discover how often your customers are loving you just one time, and never again.
If you suspect you have way too many one-time buyers, you are not alone.
Throughout our 20 years of experience browsing customer data files, it still often shocks us to see the prevalence of one-time buyers. In fact, as many as 80% of all customers fall into this category.
Not a pretty sight.
It’s no secret that customer retention rate is one of the best measures of customer loyalty. A wise marketing consultant once said that you can’t really call a first-time buyer a “customer” until the 2nd purchase. Up to that point, they may just be a “tire kicker.”
Who Loves You, Baby?
There is! Let’s calculate your Lifetime Customer Retention rate, by browsing your M.O.M. CUST table.
Lifetime Customer Retention Rate Calculation:
Lifetime Retention: Is that helpful?
The Lifetime Retention calculated above is simply the percent of all customers who became multi-buyers in their lifetime.
This may be valuable to you, or not. As we pointed out in our Near Term Value blog in April, most marketers cannot wait a lifetime to establish the profitability of a customer. Thus, a shorter window of time is much preferred. Which brings up a discussion of buying cycle.
Buying Cycle: It gets complicated
If a lifetime is too long, perhaps you prefer “average buying cycle”?
Knowing the average buying cycle of your customer base (e.g. 2 years) can give you a point in time beyond which a customer could be considered “at risk to lapse.” And from that milestone, you can calculate your “Buying Cycle retention rate.”
Two predictable buying cycles come to mind – consumables and seasonal products.
For consumables, think about selling dog food to a customer, on average, every month. Would a one-month buying cycle be appropriate for measuring repeat dog food buyers? Likely yes – and those consumers could be easily tracked when they lapse over time.
You may think this would also be true for seasonal buyers – perhaps lawn products in the spring, or gifts over the Christmas holidays. For certain product lines, this may be workable, but the seasonal + non-seasonal mix of purchases would distort your overall retention tracking.
Unfortunately, for strictly random purchase scenarios, we have also found that calculating an “average buying cycle” is not helpful. When we plot buying intervals (X axis) versus frequency (Y axis), what we typically see is not a bell shaped curved – which indeed would be helpful in establishing an average. Instead, the number of short purchase intervals is disproportionately higher than longer intervals. This makes an average buying cycle meaningless.
Solution: Keep it Simple
We recommend a scheme shown in the display below.
Summary: Invest in retention reporting
Your M.O.M. database has all the data necessary to calculate customer retention. Turn the data geeks in your organization loose on this project. If necessary, hire the right consultant for this important project. Our staff at WiseGuys Marketing are at-the-ready if you need help.
Next up in our series, we’ll discuss how to boost your retention rate to maximize your profits. If you are ready to learn more about calculating purchase frequency, smile.io has a great piece on the topic.
Bruce Gregoire is Founder and CEO of WiseGuys Marketing, based in Falls Church, VA. He is also a guest speaker on CRM in the graduate marketing department of the Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University. Since 1998, Bruce has assisted more than 100 clients – many with the Freestyle platform – with their database marketing needs.
WiseGuys Marketing
Cell (703) 282-5774 or office (703) 941-8109
BruceGregoire@WiseGuysMarketing.com
Courtesy Pixabay | geralt
GUEST POST BY WISEGUYS MARKETING’S BRUCE GREGOIRE
Customer LTV, simply put, is the net dollar value of your average customer over his/her lifetime, and it’s a subject marketers love to talk about but rarely implement. The reasons for this disconnect could be many:
Why LTV
Every shrewd CEO reserves the right to demand ROI from your marketing efforts. LTV is one important metric to track marketing success (as well as customer loyalty).
In terms of ROI, in the world of digital marketing, consider your PPC keyword charges as your customer acquisition cost. What if you could do your pay-per-click bidding with LTV values at hand? Goodness, what a concept!
What if your bidding was based on the ultimate LTV of a converted customer, rather than just the value of their first purchase transaction?
What if you found that you can actually justify higher bids on certain keywords – i.e. keywords that represent conversion of high value customers with multiple repeat visits!
How to Get There From Here
To begin your journey toward calculating LTV, the first step is to start with an integrated database – sometimes referred to as a CRM application.
Of the many platforms that our WiseGuys staff has encountered, the Freestyle Solution’s Multichannel Order Manager (M.O.M.) platform has the most straightforward solution. Simple is almost always better, and MOM supports that approach.
Freestyle M.O.M.’s Order and Inventory Management Software
For Freestyle M.O.M. users, the 4 digit year portion of the “EntryDate” field can be cross-tabbed against the “Net” field. From this display, users are encouraged to ensure that your dollar amount in the Net field are close to covering your acquisition costs. Any excess, as they say, is gravy.
With LTV, start simple and get faster results – you may be surprised with what you see. From there, you can do additional filtering to see variations in your results based on your inputs. But you should leave with this takeaway: “The LTV of our average customer is $X.00 – and here is what that means to our company moving forward.”
Be sure to check back for part 2 where we discuss the stepchild of LTV, Near Term Value (NTV). If you’re looking for help finding ways to improve your customer LTV, reach out to Freestyle today to learn more.
Bruce Gregoire is Founder and CEO of WiseGuys Marketing, based in Falls Church, VA. He is also a guest speaker on CRM in the graduate marketing department of the Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University. Since 1998, Bruce has assisted more than 100 clients – many with the Freestyle platform – with their database marketing needs.
WiseGuys Marketing
(703) 941-8109
BruceGregoire@WiseGuysMarketing.com
Want to learn more about how Freestyle’s industry-leading M.O.M. software can help solve all your order and inventory management needs? Reach out today to learn more, or email us at: marketing@freestylesolutions.com
Courtesy Pixabay | mohamed_hassan
2018 was an eventful year in eCommerce, one that presented both opportunity and disruption.
Now that we’re in a few weeks into 2019, we wanted to take a moment to share some popular initiatives and concerns we helped our customers address during 2018.
Sales tax was by far the biggest disrupter the eCommerce industry has faced in several years. If you’re not familiar with the story behind this change, you can read our blog posts from last year about how sales tax regulations changed once again and the historic South Dakota v Wayfair ruling.
In every conversation we had with customers and prospects during Q4 of 2018, sales tax was a concern. With the uncertainty surrounding virtually everything regarding sales tax collection, reporting & remittance, we expect these conversations to continue to dominate eCommerce in 2019.
Freestyle will be making a major announcement regarding a partnership with one of the largest solutions providers in this space, so keep an eye on our blog for more details.
Once you move past disruption, the idea of growing revenue was a huge theme last year. There were several topics that received a lot of attention from our customers:
Controlling Shipping Costs – Controlling is only one part of the story. The other aspect is leveraging shipping as an advantage. When every one of your competitors uses reduced or free shipping to entice and convert new customers, how do you respond? Our customers have Shippo, our partner process built right into M.O.M. to provide:
Seasonal Stations – Many eTailers see a spike in orders during the holiday season or other times of the year. If you want to add seasonal employees but not the cost of permanent infrastructure, then opting for short term use of seasonal M.O.M. station licenses is a great advantage.
Adding a New Brand – Quite a few of our customers decided to add new product lines last year, and some were different enough that they required separate inventory and/or business rules. The solution to this problem for many was our Multi Company Module. We’re proud to have assisted the successful launch of many new lines last year through the flexibility of the rules within the multi company structure.
Amazon – Need we say more? Whether you consider the eCommerce giant to be a friend or foe, you still need to address how your company responds. No matter what your strategy is, we cover the bases by helping you optimize your processes to compete or with Amazon-specific modules that make it easy to sell on the marketplace.
Mobile is the Standard – For customer experience and business growth going forward. All the predictions about the growth of mobile shopping heading into 2018 came true, and if you haven’t addressed the usability of your commerce site for mobile devices, there is little doubt that you’ll quickly be left behind. Take it from our SiteLINK customers who introduced responsive site design: the return on the effort is significant, and a responsive site is becoming table stakes.
With so much to look forward to this year, we hope that sharing these lessons from last year will offer examples of how you can meet your goals in 2019.
To learn more about these topics and many other ways Freestyle can help you, reach out at marketing@freestylesolutions.com
Courtesy Pixabay | purplegillian
Are you planning on attending NRF 2019? Once again, the National Retail Federation (NRF) is hosting the world’s largest show for retailers, and it is literally right around the corner.
Will we see you there?
This year’s show promises not to disappoint, with Magnolia Co-Founders Chip and Joanna Gaines highlighting their success as they take the main stage at Retail’s Big Show, and a host of other industry experts lend their thoughts on the world of retail in 2019.
From Brandless Co-Founder Tina Sharkey, to Levi Strauss’s President and CEO Chip Bergh, to Poshmark Founder and CEO Manish Chandra, and many more, these are the voices you want to hear to gain insight about the retail world you’re trying to conquer.
Don’t miss out on this opportunity to connect and grow your brand. Need some more convincing?
Last year, by the numbers:
NRF 2019 is January 13-15th at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in gorgeous NYC…register today – special rates through Friday, January 11.
Email us at Sales@freestylesolutions.com to let us know if you would like to meet with us there!
Freestyle’s Multichannel Order Manager (M.O.M.) is the industry-leading inventory and order management software solution for small to mid-sized businesses.
Synchronize inventory and orders between M.O.M. and the most popular eCommerce stores and marketplaces with a turnkey integration that doesn’t need any extra programming or software.
But don’t take our word for it…check out these M.O.M. features.
Top 9 M.O.M. Features You’ll Love:
Ready to learn more about Freestyle’s industry-leading M.O.M.? Sign up for a free demo today.
From all of us at Freestyle Solutions…we wish you a very merry season and a bright future.
