Customer Retention Strategies For Ecommerce Stores
“Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends” by Walt Disney.
This quote effortlessly indicates why customer retention is important. Today businesses are losing up to $ 1.6 trillion every year by losing customers to their competitors. After all, a successful business has a happy customer base.
What is customer retention?
Customer retention is simply strategies implemented to increase the return of customers on the sites/stores. Even though bringing new customers is good for e-commerce, retention of existing customers can help chances of conversion. Moreover, stats indicate that the probability of selling a product to an existing one is high as 60-70% while selling the same product to a new customer is as low as 5-20%. In addition to that, it is also affordable to hold on to an existing customer than to obtain a new one.
Why is it important to have customer retention strategies?
Numerous large-scale e-commerce businesses believe that they have a strong customer retention strategy just because they have a great brand value. However, sooner or later customers will leave. This is where strong customer retention strategies come into the role. These strategies help you to increase the rate of repeating customers and also add more value to them.
Other benefits of customer retention strategy include:
- Builds Brand Loyalty
- Build Brand Awareness
- Cost-effective
- Increase Recall Rates of your customers
- Helps improve sales and conversion rate
When to focus on creating retention strategies?
Customer retention strategies for a start-up company can be very different from a company whose brand value must be high and have been running for years.
If you have just started your company then you should definitely focus on getting new customers. This point of your company is crucial for the company to attain new customers to find out the loyal customers and build a strong customer base. Of course, the company can focus on retention strategies, but the strategies can be minimum to none.
Now if your company is getting periodical sales then it is the stage where you can start introducing more of your retention strategies. This will encourage your customers to stay as well as spread more about your company. Personally, retention email campaigns can be encouraging at this time.
After running your company at a periodic sales rate, you reach a point where the sales are consistent. Although you are not an established e-commerce store yet, you still have great growth. This is exactly the point where you should focus more on customer retention strategies than acquisition efforts. Here you can start a referral or even a loyalty program.
Lastly, with due time when you become a well-established e-commerce store then you have made it past all. You have created the right strategies and automation in place. Just apply the strategies timely and create a stronger strategy than ever as this will bring you, new customers, with the help of old customers. It will also help you to have regular sales and stay a well-established lifetime.
List of timeless customer retention strategies you need to know
1 . Learn about Loyal customers
Learning about your loyal customers and working on improving your products and services for them is very essential. It establishes the way you want your loyal customers to behave whenever they drop by your e-commerce store. If your customer is not been buying from you for a long time then it is important to check on them. You can do that by just sending them an email regarding the latest products. You can also use social media to reply to queries and suggestions.
2. Create Loyalty Programs
a) Buy 1 get 1 free: We all must have seen ads pop up that reads “Buy X and get Y free”. Everyone has a special place in their wallet for this. It is a simple method that helps you to reward your customers and get their loyalty pulled towards your store.
b) Point system: One can reward their frequent purchase customer by this method. One can set up a discount coupon after a certain no of purchases in their store or set up some reward as points where they can buy things from your store with the help of those. Your store could also offer free shipping.
c)Tier System: Some e-commerce uses the tire system where the customers could unlock each level and get long-term benefits. You could also make them a plus member or a special member. With this special membership, they might be able to get access to free shipping on every order or even get special discount coupons.
d)Refer a friend: Refer a friend is also a common method used today. A large no of customers uses this method to get rewards. This reward might be simple as 10$ for referring one friend.
e) Reward Customer Feedback: Customer feedback is really important. Especially genuine customer feedback can help you improve more where it is actually needed. They also help your store to gain more for the new consumers and also know the perspective of the customer.
The only thing stopping a customer from giving feedback is just their willingness. So, to encourage feedback from customers, you can give them a reward for their feedback. The reward can be a voucher or some credits in exchange for their feedback.
3. Art of gamification
Adding fun to anything is always exciting. Customers who can interact with your store effectively are most likely to return back. Gamification can be applied in digital marketing strategies too. This includes giveaways and spin-to-win.
Just use the gamification technique to engage customers and make them feel such a way that they deserve the reward you give them. The positive side of gamification is that it ensures every customer participating gets something out of it.
Other elements of gamification are:
- Competition
- Compiling gaols
- Achieving social status
Some methods of gamification that work well for e-commerce stores might not be the same as the others. The goal is to figure out which one can go well for you.
4. Spike up Personalized Shopping Experience
Satisfying your customer fully means that knowing what they want before even them knowing. This way you will be able to give them exactly what they need which will make them return for more. 65-70/% of customers love a personalized shopping experience.
For example, the top brand Amazon does this. Each time you make a purchase, it remembers your history and offers you personalized products based on it. This personalization has heavily improved their sales. One other thing which you can do is give recommendations to other products they would want to buy in the checkout mail. This is will make stay for more.
5. Social media presence
90% of the businesses are using social media as a marketing tool to sell their products. This is a great tool to get ahead as social media allows your store to reach the targeted customers within no time. In addition, it allows you to interact with your customers and make them aware of your brand. Through social media, you can also host campaigns and post ads.
You would also be able to reach your audience with the right hashtags, mentions, and even polls. You can also ensure that you have a social media team that can directly respond to people for their queries and suggestions. You can also learn from other companies, do collaborations, and many more to keep it engaging.
Closing up
Customers are a really important base that needs to be built in any business. Having a loyal customer base can help your business to grow. Although e-commerce is tricky, the right strategy helps you to gain control of your audience and grow your business faster. Always remember that one business strategy might not work for the other. So make sure that you experiment with all of the strategies and come up with a solid plan. Hope this article has helped you with planning some.
