On Wednesday 7
th April Guaranteed Irish hosted a webinar entitled “Using eCommerce to Drive Sales” as part of their tech themed month. Guaranteed Irish is a non-profit business membership organisation representing indigenous and international businesses operating in Ireland and its main aim is to encourage employment and the creation of jobs, and the support of fellow Irish businesses. Key speakers at the event were Dara Keogh, CEO of GeoDirectory and Michele Neylon, CEO of Blacknight with Bríd O’Connell, CEO from Guaranteed Irish, the MC for the event.
Bríd started things off by highlighting some Guaranteed Irish facts including the fact that it has 1500 members that employing over 100,000 people. She added that Guaranteed Irish “is associated and known as the national symbol of trust in business in Ireland and that an impressive 81% of people associate the brand with trust”. Brid added “Guaranteed Irish was always about jobs and still is about jobs and we are trying to bring it into a more modern setting”.
Brid directed the first question to Mr. Neylon who made his primary message about good communication and the importance of creating a clear online presence to drive sales and get the attention of consumers. He said “in a Post-Brexit World people are worrying ‘will that package get to here, or will it be stuck in customs with extra delays and costs?” He added “a lot of us are patient and understanding – but at the same time, we need to know what’s going on”.
On the topic of growing your business online, the Blacknight CEO said “when you’re talking about online presence I think you need to talk about owning your own online presence. While I’ve no issue with companies using social media platforms to promote their business; ultimately you need to own your own assets, you need to have your own website, with your own domain name and build everything up around that”.
Ms. O’Connell then invited Mr. Keogh to talk about the key crunch point in the online process. He said, “here in Geodirectory we have done research on this issue and we have found that it all points to one key breakdown point were - believe it or not -
3 in 5 people will abandon their basket at checkout”. He said it was vital to reduce the number of requests you make of the customer. Asking them to input a shipping address and a billing address and to do it all manually is asking for trouble. He said the solution is automated address completion and mentioned the many benefits associated such as the reduction in cart abandonment, increase in sales, faster delivery and greater levels of customer satisfaction and repeat purchasing.
He continued “over half the people who are going to interact with you will be using mobile phones, asking them to do a whole lot other than swipe and click, really irritates and annoys them”.He then touched in the issue of how a company measures it’s success on an E-Commerce site and spoke about the “Lead/Follow” principle. That is “the more queries we get the more sales we get, the more complaints we get the less sales we get”.
Ms. O’Connell acknowledged that the current climate we are in due to Covid19 has increased E-Commerce activity to such an extent that it truly is here to stay to which Mr. Keogh added that “Central Bank figures showed that €2BN was spent in store but €2.4BN was spent online; so you have E-Commerce outstripping in store sales in February”. He spoke about ways businesses could better sync their bricks and mortar and online presence to take maximum advantage of the opportunities available when the country finally gets back to normal.
At the questions and answers session at the end, topics touched on included the best tools a person can avail of to increase their online presence, making sure grammar is 100% correct on your website and how to make the best use of the Guaranteed Irish Logo.
If you want to increase your online sales, check out GeoAddress Checked here.