Accept Telephone Orders to Increase Reach and Revenue
As an online store owner, assisting customer with additional ordering channels can help increase reach and sales. Allowing your customer to book order over the phone is a good first step in that direction. Phone orders provide your customer with an alternative choice to order, while giving them the flexibility to “shop online” even when they are not online.
In this article, we highlight process, benefits, and tips to promote phone orders on your website.
How Do Phone Orders Work?
The process is simple:
1. A customer, who has registered with your store previously, informs you about the product that he or she wants to purchase.
2. You, as the online store administrator, take the customer’s orders over the telephone and then submit the orders through the administration panel of your online store.
3. The order invoice is created.
Please note: Many ecommerce solutions do NOT support placing orders by the store administrator. (GoECart provides robust support to accept & process phone and mail orders. See “Know Your GoECart” in this month’s eNewsletter.)
Key Benefits
The greatest benefit of offering an option to order via Phone is the increased flexibility provided to online customer. Other benefits include those listed below:
Customers can decide to buy at a later time
Customers are not forced to decide and place the order in a single visit. A customer can copy down your phone number, ruminate and place the order at a later date. This allows you to target research-oriented customer who might want to consider things carefully before buying a product.
Customer and Merchant can engage in a lively two-way dialog
Ecommerce does not typically allow for “live” interaction, directly and in real time. Ordering via phone allows customer to interact with a representative of your store. Questions can be immediately resolved ensuring that the order gets placed faster. This level of interaction with customers also provide an excellent opportunity to cross-sell or up-sell the products —and increase order value.
Customers can place orders without being on the Internet
Customers often make impulse buying decision. Offering a phone number to place an order ensure that you’re ready to take the order whenever customers are ready to buy —even from a location that may not be web-accessible.
Promoting Ordering through Phone/Mail at the Web Storefront
We suggest following ideas to promote this functionality at the storefront:
Display the Telephone Number at a prominent location on your Website
The telephone number should be displayed at a prominent location to generate the required attention—like the header of the website or the bottom navigation. Also, through basic web analytics, you can identify pages with high exit rates and place the phone number on such pages.
Display the Telephone Number during marketing communications
Mention this option in all communications send out to your customers like marketing collateral, promotional emails and response to the questions through emails.
Advertise your phone number via search engines
You can also market the functionality to book orders via telephone in search engines. Many search engines now offer a service working on the principle of “cost per call.”
Ecommerce need not necessarily depend solely on online sources. You can develop your business effectively by utilizing offline mediums as well. Ordering via phone or email is one such example of how offline and online channels can co-exist harmoniously and in a way, is a win-win situation for both merchants and consumers.
