Posts filed under ‘Address Geocode’
How Technology Can Help Close Online Sales and Keep Customers Coming Back
Not another marketing theory: Read how technology works on the issues that may be limiting your sales and/or damaging your online reputation.
Successful e-commerce companies have three things in common: Good online reviews, reasonable delivery fees and prompt delivery of goods. Web services can help you streamline delivery rates and assure your products are delivered on time: key ingredients for keeping customers in your online sales process and inspiring them to leave positive feedback in return.
Streamline Rates
Has this ever happened to you?You find the perfect product at the right price, only to find out that the shipping rates nearly double its price? If you’re like me, then you click out and search for another place to buy your product. We’re not unique in this. Some studies estimate that up to 75% of all shopping carts are abandoned before sales are closed, and report that the #1 reason is high shipping rates.
Why are some shipping rates so high? Location is the first thing that comes to mind; but then there’s that dreaded “handling” fee that often inflates the cost.
Companies can often keep people like us in the sales process by simply tightening up on distance calculations, thereby reducing “handling” in the sales and shipping process. This is something that can easily be done by integrating a hosted Web service that provides them with the information and automation needed to make it happen.
Take, DOTS Address Geocode, it’s a Web service that pinpoints customers’ exact locations the moment they’re typed into online forms; companies can use this information to offer delivery rates based on actual distances rather than geographic zones.
Assure Deliverability
While DOTS Address Geocode pinpoints customers’ locations, it also cleans up their addresses, fixing things like ZIP codes and left-out apartment numbers, for example. It can also push the clean customer data into sellers’ CRM systems. That means less “handling” via no re-keying efforts and fault-free delivery.
Undeliverable mail accounts for billions of dollars of waste in the US alone, and some of that comes back to you and me, combined in “handling” fees associated with reprocessing bad deliveries.
Undeliverable (or late-arriving) purchases also account for the majority of online complaints when it comes to rating customer experience.
To sum it up, pinpointing exact customer delivery locations and cleaning up addresses to assure deliverability help you not only in your efforts to reduce handling fees, but also in building and maintaining your online reputation.
Offering better value and better customer experience drives more loyalty and ultimately more revenue to online companies. Good reviews attract people like me to initiate business with online companies in the first place; reasonable handling fees inspire us to stay the course and complete sales processes; and quick deliveries on our purchases gets us to leave positive feedback in return.
DOTS Address Geocode Pinpoints customer location and assures address deliverability while instantly updating the seller’s CRM system. It’s a simple solution to help online sellers offer better bottom-line prices; streamline sales and shipping processes and keep customers coming back and/or sharing their positive experiences.
January 31, 2011 at 5:46 pm serviceobjects2001 Leave a comment
Address Geocoding—a Big Tip for Delivery Businesses
All over the country businesses have popped up to bring quality sit-down restaurant meals into our homes. In the Pacific Northwest, Dinner Delivery Plus is one such business. Serving the Greater Eastside of Seattle area for the past 16 years, Dinner Delivery Plus offers the 400,000+ residents and businesses a variety of national and local restaurants with more than 80 choices. About 4 months ago, Dinner Delivery Plus decided to make some changes to their business model. Using DOTS Address Geocode℠ from Service Objects, they have redefined restaurant delivery in their market.
Delivery services, whether it be for restaurants, flowers, or groceries, often charge customers Delivery Fees on a Zone-based model. Zone-based models typically put the onus on the consumer to figure out how much their delivery charge will be by manually plotting their location on a map in relation to the business they are ordering from. To calculate a delivery fee the customer has to figure out which zone their desired restaurant is in and which zone their home or business is in, then they have to calculate the delivery based on a complicated grid or map. Some restaurant delivery services only offer consumers the option of choosing from restaurants within their specific zone. All in all, not the best customer experience—usually at a higher cost to the consumer.
Dinner Delivery Plus saw the opportunity to do things differently and to redefine their market. Their goal was to offer a better value and more restaurant choices to their customers. By employing distance based delivery pricing instead of Zone-based delivery, customers would pay a delivery fee based on the actual distance from the restaurant they were ordering from to their location.
Here is where address geocoding comes in. Using a real-time address geocoding web service, Dinner Delivery Plus is able to pinpoint the exact location of the customer when they register and input their address into the web form to place a delivery order. The geocoding service validates the address and determines the latitude and longitude coordinates. With this information Dinner Delivery Plus is able to tell the customer the exact delivery charge based on their distance from each of the 80 restaurants. Their website makes recommendations for restaurants that are the closest, but leaves it to the consumer to decide where they want to order from–creating a better customer experience.
Offering better value and a better customer experience drives more loyalty and ultimately more revenue. Address geocoding services can be a game-changer for businesses providing delivery as a service to their customers.
What are you doing in your business that is redefining your market?
Service Objects—the leading provider of real-time contact validation solutions—offers Address Geocoding for both the US and Canada.
Posted by: Gretchen N.
