The MindfulCommerce Community is all about bringing talent and ambition together with expertise and enablement. We support a wide variety of amazing ecommerce entrepreneurs, by connecting them to a fully vetted lineup of expert apps, consultants and agencies.
If you’re looking to advance your ecommerce business, we understand that this doesn’t just mean boosting sales. In fact, quite a lot of groundwork probably needs to happen before that all-important revenue can creep up!
With this in mind, we thought we’d pull together a concise round-up of some of our leading community experts. They're all listed within the MindfulCommerce Directory, meaning they also aspire to the same eco-friendly, ethical standards that you hold your own business to.
We’ve broken things down into a couple of categories that we believe are essential to growing a healthy online retail business that will stand the test of time, and get you the results that you work so hard for.
Customer Retention
Gaining new customers is one thing - but once they’re across the line, it’s absolutely essential that you have a plan in place to keep them loyal and hanging around! When it comes to investment and resources, customer retention is a very sensible area of your business to focus on - we’ve written about this already.
Which wingmen can help you in your quest for sticky customers? Here are three of our favourite recommendations...
Customer Service: Opinew
If you’re looking to keep your customers loyal, next-level customer service is non-negotiable. Feeling listened to and respected is a huge part of keeping your customers happy.
A wonderful way to leverage this (which brings so many benefits beyond simply enhancing your customer experience) is to integrate an automated reviewing process. Not only will your customers gain a well-timed, perfectly structured opportunity to feedback on your products –you’ll also have the chance to communicate post-purchase, learning more about what they love and where you might be able to improve.
MindfulCommece experts, Opinew, offer a really great reviewing platform that factors in plenty of functionality and timesaving automation that can help retailers of any size get a great reviewing process up and running, quickly and easily. Plus, they have an integration with Loyalty Lion (dream team)!
Find Opinew on the Directory here.
Emotional Investment: GreenStory
Another great way to keep customers loyal? Give them a good reason to stick around - something that goes beyond their own personal gain! If you’re running an online retail business that aims to give something back or do a little good in the world, then you need to make sure that you’re clearly communicating this.
No one wants to be accused of greenwashing - but if you’re genuinely going out of your way to make a positive impact, then being shy about shouting this from rooftops places you squarely in the “green hushing” camp (where you fail to talk about the good you're doing - arguably worse than greenwashing)! By green hushing, not only will you not get rewarded with more custom and loyalty for your good deeds - you’re also failing to stand out as an example to other brands who should be raising their game.
We absolutely love GreenStory for its ability to communicate the good work that your brand is doing in an elegant and engaging way. By combining supply-chain sustainability analysis with informative graphics and marketing strategies, Green Story helps brands to show their customers the difference that they’re making - giving them plenty of motivation to stay loyal long into the future.
Find Greenstory on the Directory here.
Personalisation: Klevu
Personalised shopping experiences are, increasingly, an essential part of any successful brand’s retention strategy. If a customer is choosing to shop with you - and choosing to do so repeatedly - make sure you’re taking the initiative to learn from their interactions with your brand over time. By putting measures in place to actively improve their experience with each consecutive visit, you can build and build upon customer experience - and by extension, loyalty.
Klevu offers an unparalleled way to improve your customers’ experience of your store in terms of the way that it’s merchandised and presented to them. By applying advanced machine learning to the patterns of interaction with both product and internal search functionality, Klevu can help you to automatically optimize your store for superlative product discovery.
Find Klevu on the Directory here.
Business Growth
Keeping customers around is one thing – but you’ll also be keeping a close eye on the overall growth and profitability of your business, and this brings many other factors into play. When it comes to making sure your ecommerce business is firing on all cylinders, you don’t need to go into battle alone!
Here’s our round up of three MindfulCommerce experts who could have a transformational effect on the future of your business when it comes to reliable, sustainable growth.
Great branding: Spark & Bloom
Scaling your business means investing in the way you show up! If you’re planning on growing in the future, it makes sense to work on a look and feel that you absolutely love today - so that you don’t come up against the challenges of rebranding a larger business further down the line.
What’s more, taking some time to really focus on and nail down your brand can help in terms of visualizing what you want the future of your business to look like. You may have heard the phrase “dress for the job you want, not the job you have” – the same applies to an online brand. A professional, polished presentation can do wonders for your business.
We highly recommend speaking with Spark & Bloom if you’re looking for a refresh and reposition when it comes to your branding. If you’re looking for a creative talent with bags of experience, especially when it comes to building out brands for eco-friendly ecommerce operations, then you’ll struggle to find anyone more talented and conscientious than Jeanne.
Find Spark & Bloom on the Directory here.
Marketing & Positioning Strategy: AliceWritesCopy
If you’re going after growth, then investing in your marketing strategy is essential. And when it comes to ecommerce, you have so many options available to you that it can quickly become somewhat overwhelming.
A really solid marketing strategy, based on decent keyword research and experienced application of market knowledge is key to your ongoing success, and will always represent a smart investment.
If you’re going down this route, take some time to speak to our resident expert, AliceWritesCopy, who can whip you up a laser-focused strategy and provide you with a plan that feels both sustainable and achievable.
Find AliceWritesCopy on the Directory here.
Efficient Back Office: Business With Monica
Finally, growth is only beneficial if it’s manageable. Scale too quickly, and you might find yourself overwhelmed, unable to meet demand or expectations and haemorrhaging all of the benefits you worked so hard to achieve.
Process is everything in ecommerce - if you don't have efficient workflows in place, you’re going to struggle as soon as things start amping up and expanding. Foundations really matter. Your back office is incredibly important in this regard, as is the happiness and loyalty of your team. Don’t neglect either if you’re actively striving to expand your business – and if you're looking for some truly expert advice in this area, we cannot recommend Monica highly enough.
Find Business With Monica on the Directory here.
Customer Management
Without customers, you simply don’t have a business. Customer management is an incredibly important aspect of your ecommerce operation. Without measures and solutions in place to help you manage your customers, you’ll struggle to deliver the best experiences, learn from them and ultimately, thrive as a business.
Here are some of our top choices for MindfulCommerce experts that can help you to get a better handle on the way you interact with your customer base.
Attribute Collection - Okendo
As data and privacy laws tighten up and evolve, zero party data (i.e. information that your customers willingly hand over to your business with the view to achieving an improved customer experience) will become ever more important to online retailers looking to deliver on all levels.
Reviews can provide a great source of zero party data – freely given by shoppers, and helping to give you a much more nuanced understanding of their needs, habits and interests. We love MindfulCommerce experts Okendo when it comes to collecting this kind of additional data via the review process.
Their unique Attributes feature means that you can request detailed information with regard to specific demographics, interests and behaviours. Why is this so powerful? It’s dynamite for your segmentation strategy! The more you know about your shoppers, the more targeted and beneficial your communications and offers can be.
Let’s take a quick example. Perhaps you sell hair care products, and in your review requests, you ask your customers to fill in some details about their own hair type. Not only is this context extremely helpful for curious shoppers, looking to get unbiased information about whether a certain product might be a good fit for them (‘oh, other people with dry hair found this helpful, maybe I’ll try it...”) it also means that you now know, for certain and not via assumptions made based on purchasing habits, the hair type of your customer.
You can now add them to a relevant marketing segment and start to serve them super-targeted, helpful content and offers that you know will appeal to folk with dry hair. A positive outcome for everyone involved.
Find Okendo on the Directory here.
Deeper Insight - ShoppingGives
At MindfulCommerce, we love cause marketing for its positive, ethical impact – but an additional benefit that shouldn't be overlooked is the extra insight into your customers' motivations, beliefs and favourite causes!
By working with a platform such as ShoppingGives, an amazing MindfulCommerce expert app that offers streamlined, powerful automated donation and so much more, you can get a fantastic overview of the things that matter most to your audience, by tracking the charities that they select to receive the donations their purchases generate.
Again, this is information that should be carefully (and responsibly) leveraged - helping to guide your direction when it comes to marketing campaigns, collaborations and future donation drives. It all helps strengthen your brand position, by bringing your tangible, practical actions in line with the values that your business is built on.
Find ShoppingGives on the Directory here.
Sustainable Ecommerce: Let's Go Together?
At MindfulCommerce, we've always seen the move towards better sustainability as a journey - and definitely, it's not one you have to undertake alone!
Our Directory continues to grow, as we discover more passionate, talented and ambitious experts – all ready to apply their experience to your own business and help you achieve the success that we so desperately want sustainable brands to enjoy!
Explore the Directory, and if you like what you see, perhaps you'll consider joining our Community? Membership is free and you'll get access to a wide range of events where you'll be able to learn from our experts first hand.