How Payment Option and Customer Habit equals Cost Effective Strategy

Providing an ideal payment option for online customers could potentially save cost and grants extra sales. While this method is usually incorporated with competent research on customer’s shopping habit, it could also be extended as part of your marketing strategy.

I would tell to myself or anyone else to do a small research about the current customers before implementing any strategy for their business (for both online or offline). It is a cost effective alternative before implementing any solution to any customers. One easy way to understand customers is to know the demographics of customers. Although there are businesses that do not have access to this information, it would be crucial to know which incentives are effective for which customer tier.

If the business cannot tap into these information, the four points below are the most probably information you may get for any online business. Other alternatives may include:

1. Customer's Birthday

Brilliant businesses know that customers spend more on their birthday date. This is crucial because a business can decide to implement specific deals on customer’s birthday to potentially increase sales activities.

2. Customer Activity Timeline

This metric provides business with the perfect time frame to distribute their discounts or vouchers, which displays when users are most active.

3. Customer Buying Pattern

What kind of add-ons do you provide to your customers. It could be as simple recommending a coffee grinder to the customers who bought your coffee.

On top of that, you should know the top selling products in your online store and give incentives on users who did not buy that product to actually buy it. Finding these relationships are critical in to sell more products.

4. Returning Customers

Returning customers a huge value for any business because it follows the theory that they are the ones contributing to the profits of the company in the long term.

Encapsulating the 4 factors above with the ideal payment option, credit, debit card or cash is critical in determine an effective marketing strategy for any business.

Based on The Financial Brand, people choose Credit Card because it is associated with its rewards and a wider payment option. On the other hand, Debit Card is associated with the ability to deduct directly from their account. Last not the least, Cash is chosen because of its safety and convenience.

Checking the payment option is as simple as clicking on your dashboard and harvesting the aggregated data to understand the pattern of payment.

After deducing the payment preference, it is easier to determine which marketing strategy your business shall decide to implement. Decide on the payment preference and package that with the pattern inferred from the above 4 points.

This may not be the best marketing solution for your online business. However, this will provide a cost effective strategy for young and new businesses that are cash strapped.