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5 tips to help you deliver on time this Mother’s Day
3 mins
Each year, the media is littered with stories naming and shaming brands who’ve failed to deliver goods in time for this important date in the retail calendar.
Whether it’s gifts, cards or perishable items like food or flowers, the time-sensitive nature of celebrations like Mother’s Day puts huge pressure on retailers to make sure deliveries are made on time and to the right location.
And then there’s the emotional value to consider. With customers essentially using your goods and services to express their love on this special occasion, the demand for a seamless online experience and slick delivery is considerably heightened.
So, how can retailers avoid costly faulty deliveries, and instead delight senders and recipients with gifts that arrive promptly? And what can they do to ensure that customers never even consider the possibility that a delivery will arrive late?
Without an address capture solution, capturing a customer’s address accurately isn’t as easy as you might think. Whether it’s a lapse in concentration, a slip of a finger on a mobile device, or a missed field, customers often accidentally provide incomplete or inaccurate data. And this faulty data impacts on your ability to deliver to the right address, leading to delays, customer frustration and costly redelivery fees.
A real-time type-ahead address capture solution allows you to collect accurate customer addresses at the point of entry in your online forms and checkouts. Not only is it the quickest and easiest way to capture address data, it’s also the friendliest solution for mobile commerce.
One retailer making sure they always deliver on time for special occasions is Hotel Chocolat. By implementing address capture, the chocolatier brand has been able to ensure that all customer, gift recipient and prospect contact data is accurate, clean and up-to-date. As a result, the company has reported an increase in sales conversions and improved database quality.
Fuzzy matching is the term used for matching two searches that are not 100% the same and is the reason you get relevant results, even if there’s a typo in your address search.
A fuzzy matching tool detects missing letters, spaces, transposed letters, misspellings and abbreviations and automatically finds the correct address to provide cleaner, more accurate data.
For example, a customer might type ‘raod’ instead of ‘road’ or abbreviate Boulevard to Blvd. Fuzzy matching recognises these common mistakes, identifies the address the user is looking for, and returns the full, valid address.
This tool is particularly useful for mobiles and tablets, which may produce more typos, and for customers sending gifts directly to others if they don’t know how to spell the recipient’s address.
Speed and convenience are key driving factors when buying online, particularly when using mobile devices. In 2021, smartphones were used to make 66% of online shopping orders and it’s forecast that in 2024, revenue from m-commerce will rise to 105.28 billion British pounds.
With this in mind, it’s crucial that retailers create mobile experiences that are as frictionless as possible. One way to do this is by implementing a geolocation tool at the stage of customer address entry. Using single-tap technology, geolocation allows users to click a button and their current location is found, eliminating the need to even enter an address.
As well as minimising cognitive load and reducing address entry errors, geolocation reduces friction, resulting in happier customers, higher conversion rates and improved data quality – all in a single tap.
Still not convinced? Find out how leading womenswear brand, Hush, uses geolocation to create an enhanced mobile experience for its customers.
A UDPRN, or Unique Delivery Point Reference Number, is an eight-digit unique numerical code that identifies delivery points for individual premises on the Postcode Address File (PAF).
By assigning this number against an address, delivery drivers are assured of accurate and enhanced address data, making it easier to find the destination property. And that results in reduced delivery times, lower emissions, increased delivery success rates and happier customers.
Data quality is the foundation of any business. Without it, your business efficiency, customer management strategy and reputation could all be compromised.
eCommerce businesses naturally accumulate a considerable amount of customer data. But with data decaying at a rate of 20% per year, key information such as address data can quickly become outdated.
Data cleansing involves reviewing all the data within a database to either remove or update information that is incomplete, incorrect, improperly formatted, duplicated or irrelevant. In doing this, you enhance customer communication, comply with legalisation like GDPR, and avoid costly errors such as late or failed deliveries.
Want to know how your data measures up? Take our free data health check and see how accurate your data is. You can decide afterwards whether or not you’d like the data cleansed.