How To Use Order Tracking To Boost Ecommerce Sales

Making money online is a legit thing, after all, and starting off as an online merchant is one of the best ways to get your entrepreneurial career off the ground.

The only problem is, if you want to cash in big on sales, setting up a digital store will be far from enough. In order to make money online, you need to know how to market your goods and your store to “lure” your audiences in.

To say the least, there are several ways you can do that, and today, we are going to talk about an often overlooked topic, which is order tracking and its role in boosting eCommerce sales.

The Power of Post-Purchase Experience

Just like your brick-and-mortar shopkeepers, eCommerce marketers know just how important optimizing post-purchase experiences is.

For most retailers setting up a smooth and perfect delivery option and package tracking is just as important as any other stage of the purchase process.

On the other hand, the vast majority of online shoppers also expect retailers to help them identify and resolve package issues while the package itself is being delivered. Additionally, for a sizable chunk, the post-purchase experience will probably be the most memorable part of the entire purchase.

The point we’re trying to make here is pretty simple:

When optimized, delivery tracking and package handling can also be a profitable marketing channel, as a highly improved post-purchase experience channel.

As such, this article will focus on:

• What order tracking actually means and what its benefits are.
• Several tips and tricks to take advantage of order tracking and use it as a revenue-boosting channel.
• What real-life brands can do to optimize their efforts in marketing and improve user happiness metrics.

So, let’s get started.

About Order Tracking

Order tracking is no black magic or evil sorcery. In essence, it’s just a convenient online tool that offers buyers more info about the product they’ve purchased. It also allows your shoppers to see the status of the order. Whether it’s on its way to their address or it’s still in the warehouse. Lastly, it brings about greater visibility and transparency in the entire delivery process.

The Benefits of Order Tracking

Apart from being a handy little tool, order tracking also offers some sweet benefits for online marketers. Nowadays, it has become an essential component in the entire eCommerce marketing machinery and for solid reasons.

Lower Workload

When you automate the order tracking process, your CX team will have less work to deal with. On the other hand, they can use the time they saved up to devise strategies and methods for personalized services for disgruntled customers.

With order tracking, you can create a seamless customer experience by freeing up time and not compromising on quality.

Reduced Costs

Experts usually say that when you implement eCommerce order tracking, you will start receiving less customer inquiries. Additionally, your customers can self-serve their queries and address them themselves, which translates into reduced costs.

Better Control over Order Fulfilment

From a business perspective, tracking your outgoing orders and all related info is paramount. It allows your eCommerce business to address and resolve any issues and problems on the spot in real-time without delays. And as friction with your outgoing orders gets minimized, the value of your customers will dramatically increase which will obviously translate into sales growth as well.

Happier Customers

A proactive and streamlined tracking process can also obviously help increase customer satisfaction and it may also help you boost user engagement.

To enhance the entire experience, offer updates throughout the shipping process to improve customer loyalty, satisfaction, and happiness.

From these perspectives, order tracking offers a wide scope of benefits both for your eCommerce business and both for your customers. All in all, it’s a splendid thing to invest in that’s well worth the effort.

As such, looking into a third-party fulfillment center can also be a great option.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the strategies that will allow you to boost your order tracking and through it, your sales.

6 Strategies for Boosting eCommerce Sales Through Order Tracking

Here are our top tips to get your Order Tracking metrics off the ground.

Treat Shipment Tracking as Shipment Marketing

In most cases, eCommerce businesses provide their customers little to no visibility into the shipping process.

To solve this problem, online stores should identify the interactive touch-points throughout their delivery processes which they can use for marketing purposes. Collecting real-time data, like customer contacts, names, information, tracking numbers, and package movements can help you create opportunities later in your marketing efforts by sending the compiled data to your store’s email marketing platform where you can personalize the info.

Once you’re done, integrate the gathered data into your marketing efforts in the form of shipment tracking emails, live chat, SMS options, and such.

Tracking notifications, emails, and messages have great open rates and shipment marketing as a strategy can help you improve your market initiatives greatly.

Here are a few additional tips to make sure you’re following the best practices:

• Take a proactive approach and aim to provide detailed shipment updates, ensuring that your messaging is personalized.
• Use your tracking emails as a marketing tool to feature your new products, offer links to your social pages.
• Encourage your customers to post on social platforms with your brand’s own hashtag on the shipment tracking page.
• Offer expected delivery time estimates to ease your customers’ experience and reduce support inquiries.

All in all, with a few slight changes, you can reinvent your shipment tracking and transform it into highly personalized marketing channels when you can engage with your audience/customers on a more intimate level.

Use Live Chat for Solving Real-Time Tracking Queries

The problem is that most online customers tend to complain about not having to contact customer services about their ordered products in real-time. As a matter of fact, most customers nowadays look for real-time visibility on their order statuses.

As a solution, you can integrate live chat options into your website.

As such, this can:

• Help you troubleshoot problems on the spot and you can attend to queries instantly.
• You also empower your customers to self-serve.
• Gain insight through collecting critical user data, such as buying preferences, behavior patterns, and pain points, It also offers a great deal of insight into what your customers expect from you. Additionally, it also helps to identify different gaps in your user experience.
• Offer useful and relevant information to common questions.
• One-on-one interactions to make your customers feel special.

Simply put, live chat can pave the way to accurate and proactive tracking notifications which just translates into a pleasant buying experience and enhanced brand reputation management efforts.

Utilizing Business Intelligence Tool to Save

Most eCommerce businesses constantly have to deal with a constantly widening gap between their logistics management and delivery processes which also ruins profitability and productivity efforts.

As a solution, you can take advantage of an eCommerce delivery tracking management software that enables you to track shipments and parcels throughout the entire customer journey.

Apart from that, you will also get:

• Automatically assign pickup and delivery tasks to your agents and help with collecting e-Signatures from your customers.
• Improved visibility from start to finish.
• Seamless and hassle-free delivery operations with real-time tracking and improved management features.
• Improved turn-around time and reduced delivery delays.
• Smart live tracking devices, like disposable GPS stickers for tracking packages.
• Reduced costs because of optimized end-to-end delivery tracking optimization.
• Better route planning for potential cost reduction and better resource utilization.
• A better overall view of the entire tracking/delivery operation, which translates into better overall transparency and scalability opportunities.

Considerations when selecting a shipping software:

• Take a thorough look at your existing logistics system and look for options that will integrate seamlessly. You want the improvements happening fast, without any delays.
• Look for safe and secure options. Especially in terms of cyber-attack and data breach protection.
• Look for solutions that display critical information during the tracking process. Things like humidity, temperature changes, and even product damage.
• Look for easily scalable software with multi-channel support and a UX-friendly interface and a contemporary design.

As far as tools are concerned, you have a myriad of options of which you can take advantage of as a marketer, and some of them offer a great deal of automation to take the weight off of your shoulders even more. With a great piece of software, you can save up time and resources, not to mention effort (which you can allocate into other areas of your business and improve those as well).

Use Small Gestures to Show You Care About Your Customers

Research data suggests that a large chunk of choppers want online sellers to reward their loyalty by offering them a more personalized experience when it comes to product delivery.

Generally, nowadays, the lack of personalization can mean the downfall of every digital store.

As such, the solution could very well be in utilizing different personalization tactics like offering freebies such as free samples in the order tracking email, especially for new or long-time, loyal customers.

This approach can open a great number of possibilities that can help you improve customer experience and your online rep as well.

• For instance, you can choose to integrate a “progress bar” and gamify the tracking process.
• Offer flexibility when it comes to receiving order updates. Enable your customer to choose where they would like to see their notifications.
• Offer personalized product suggestions and reviews to help your cross-sell and upsell efforts.
• Take the time and send out thank-you notes to your customers as a way of prioritizing customer retention.
• Consider integrating Google Maps for greater order visibility.

Apart from all this, you have a myriad of ways you can personalize the order tracking page, as long as it helps you get useful customer data, feedback, and helps you improve customer loyalty.

The idea is to use the gathered info and use it to add value to your communication through small gestures and features that can hold great significance to some customers and improve their loyalty even further.

Target Repeat Purchases with Discounts and Customized Offers While Leveraging the Power of Google Analytics

In reality, most eCommerce site owners have problems with issues such as cart abandonment, converting on-the-fence customers into purchasing visitors, and they also often have problems with properly engaging with their existing customer base.

As a matter of fact, there’s data out there that shows that eCommerce brands can lose a whopping $18 billion in sales revenue a year due to cart abandonment alone.

The solution to this problem can be as easy as using a multi-purpose analytics tool like Google Analytics.

With it, marketers can:

• Learn more about how their customers shop, how they behave on their website, and can help them create relevant deals and coupons for them to close purchases.
• Offering discount codes in the order tracking email to fight card abandonment,
• Collect coupon information from the website and feed it into the CRM software.
• Track and analyze the coupon usage to answer user questions.
• More insight into where users redeem coupons.
• Which products they view more when using their coupons.
• Pinpoint coupons with the best ROI.

The general idea here is that people like free stuff.

However, it’s not as simple as that. The trick lies in targeting the right users at the perfect moment. For these purposes, using a web analytics platform can be a great boost to your bottom line and can greatly improve the way site visitors engage with your platform and products in general.

Use User Feedback to Your Advantage

Lastly, one of the biggest mistakes eCommerce marketers often make is forgetting to actively collect feedback from their customers to better understand what are the moves that help improve their brand image and which are sabotaging it.

Being unable to track customer-centric data in today’s day and age is a crucial problem because it disables brands/stores to improve their overall customer experience.

As such, marketers should look for chances of collecting user feedback and look for touch-points in the buyer journey to improve every step of it.

• For instance, allowing the customer to rate their shipping experience can be a great way to look for improvement opportunities.
• Showcasing customer testimonials is a great way of providing “social proof” and improving customer trust and confidence.

Also, marketers can gather a great deal of info that are related to different topics, like:

• Preferred shipping method
• Preferred shipping time
• Overall shipping experience

All in all, gathering real-time user feedback is pivotal for online marketers to have a better understanding of where they might be lacking in the customer and shipping experience and bridge those gaps with ease.

Businesses online should always strive to gather insight from customer feedback and analyze the gathered data to create powerful marketing campaigns that will provide tangible results.

Putting it All Together

Marketing tactics and different interactions around shipment tracking can be integrated seamlessly to help your eCommerce brand stick out from the crowd.

Improving the post-purchase experience can give you a competitive advantage through personalization and real-time data usage.

Lastly, a power order-tracking strategy can open up new marketing possibilities, enable you to make even better use of your channels, and harness the power of new ones.