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How We Solve
Ep 129: How To Create a Standout Shipping and Packaging Experience with Kevin Marvinac
Problem: How can e-commerce sellers continue to impress after a customer clicks “order?”
Your work to impress a customer doesn’t stop once they place an order. In fact, that’s where the process of building customer loyalty begins.
It’s a hot topic for e-comm right now, given all the changes to the acquisition world with Apple’s privacy settings: we’re going to talk about differentiating your brand to retain consumers. So we’re going to talk about that whole experience that you have around loyalty marketing and customers returning to your site.
Deliver an Outstanding Shipping and Packaging Experience
Think about it this way: every single one of your customers will experience opening a package from your brand.
Unboxing is a loyalty marketing channel with a hundred percent open rate. You’re not going to get that on email. I mean, think about that. What marketer wouldn’t salivate at a hundred percent open rate of content?
Tip #1: Speed Up Shipping
For even a small e-commerce outfit, two-day shipping is no longer out of reach. It makes your customers happy, and it helps you compete against e-comm giants in the long run.
Two-day shipping before Amazon FBA was prohibitively expensive, right? It was always, if you wanted two-day shipping before FBA came and lit the world on fire on e-commerce, you were going to pay a lot for FedEx Guaranteed Services or UPS Guaranteed Services. But now, it’s table stakes.
Tip #2: Use ShipBob to Plug and Play With the Most Efficient Carriers
ShipBob offers unique insight into carrier efficiency. When you know who can deliver on time, you’re able to wow customers with confidence throughout the shipping process.
We have our own branded program that is a combination of shopping 35 carrier services that we shop in real-time for the best price and the highest deliverability rates. We have a data science team that kind of tracks deliverability rates by carrier service over time. So, for example, if FedEx in Southern California is not performing particularly well in the recent months, but UPS is really strong, we’ll take that into consideration.
Tip #3: Empower Customer Service Agents with Real-Time Information
Your customer service agents are on the front lines of building loyalty for your brand. Give them hyper-precise, streamlined information at their fingertips.
ShipBob real-time status information is extremely granular, like at 7:41 PM, we were picking this order and we hit a small snag where we didn’t have the right packaging size. So we’re going to put it in a slightly bigger box. The customer service agent has all the data at their fingertips and they don’t need to change systems.
Tip #4: Step Up Your Packaging Game
As Kevin says, unboxing is a loyalty marketing channel with a hundred percent open rate.
What’s inside the box? This is where I think you can make huge moves. And it’s not that big of a lift, whether you work with a 3PL or if it’s your own warehouse. I’ve seen customers have a lot of success with seasonal promotions where they put just like a little marketing, a simple printed thing probably costs less than 40 cents, 50 cents, to source. They keep it in their warehouse and they just treat it as a pick. So if they have some sort of OMS, the system automatically adds that pick to every order that’s happening within a certain timeframe. You pick it. Maybe it’s got a coupon. Maybe it’s got some other information about the brand in a newsletter format and you physically put it in the box. Another way I’ve seen people do it is gift notes, which are more customized. So if there’s a first-order trigger on a subscription, you might want to have a custom gift note for the customer say: hey, noticed this was your first order, please email us, use this coupon code. If you want to refer friends, let us know if you need anything. Here’s our direct line for our customer support team.
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This interview is part of the How We Solve podcast. To hear more from industry experts who are solving everyday business problems, check us out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and on our website.
About the guest
This episode features Kevin Marvinac
Kevin Marvinac leads Partnerships at ShipBob, a global logistics platform that fulfills e-commerce orders for direct-to-consumer brands. Previously, he led the Growth and Product teams at ShipBob and worked in growth marketing and operations at Tide Cleaners (formerly Pressbox) and Airbnb. He is a certified specialist in wine and lives in Northern California.
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