In the eCommerce industry, customer retention marketing is one of the most powerful strategies any company can invest time in. If you aren’t currently focusing on customer retention, it will be hard for you to grow your business. For businesses, the act of discovering, targeting, and reaching new customers is always a top priority. However once a customer makes the first purchase, many businesses tend to forget them. Even though the building of customer relationships begins here. Smart businesses know that the first purchase is just a beginning and the real virtue is about to come and business value lies in retaining that customer.

Customer retention is something that businesses need to strive a lot of attention towards if they want to succeed in the long term. Once you get customer loyalty, you have knocked on the jackpot. 

“Customer retention is a byproduct of customer service and experience. Create a good experience, that’s consistent and predictable, and you have a shot at customer retention”.

Luckily, retention marketing has the ability to make positive impacts on both your brand and your customers, allowing you to set your business up for long-term success.

What is retention marketing? Why do businesses need retention marketing?

 

Retention marketing concentrates on repeat purchases from past customers. The main intent of retention marketing is to make repeat customers purchase more often with larger order value, maximizing the lifetime value of your customers. Remember that, customer retention marketing is an important component of eCommerce marketing. let’s dive into why customer retention marketing should be your key focus. 

Why does customer retention matter?

In the past few years, we’ve seen how aggressively the cost of the eCommerce ad market has increased. In fact, “customer acquisition costs have increased by 50% over the past five years”.

Retention marketing is the passkey to deal with these problems. When you’re able to uncover the balance between acquisition and retention strategies, you’ll start to witnessing more customers returning over time. This will allow you to gradually reduce the amount of acquisition marketing you’re doing and focus on retention strategies that will help you make money instead of spending it!

Effective Retention Marketing Strategies

Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and discuss some tactics to build an emotional connection with customers and make them your loyal customers.

1. Know your customers to build an emotional bond 

Collect all kinds of information about your customers like emails, birthdays, gender, color preferences, number of orders through forms, popups, surveys, and onsite displays. You can use this information to create personalized marketing messages. For example, if you gather information about what kind of products your customers like and then they send them custom content based on their preference will help you to build a relationship with your customers. 

2. Send automated follow-up email series

When a customer makes a purchase from your store, this is the beginning of building relationships with customers, not the end of the road. You can use email marketing to greet and welcome your customers after purchase. You can also take this opportunity to ask for a review or highlight other products they might be interested in.

Use email marketing to let your loyal customers know about upcoming product releases, sales, or special offers. This regular flow of email communication will help you stay top of mind for your customers.

3. Give personalized discounts

Personalization is a game-changer. Personalized content based on customer’s purchase history or their important milestone dates, like their birthday and anniversary helps you make your customers feel valued. Use these dates to send a special complimentary message and a discount. This will go a long way to building a bond with your customers.

4. Introduce loyalty programs to encourage shopping with your store

A customer loyalty program helps push customer loyalty by providing reward points to customers that frequently buy from your Shopify store. Through these programs, you can give your customers: discounts, reward points, free shipping, coupons, or access to unreleased products.

Loyalty programs work well for brands that have a lot of competitors in their category. Rewarding your customers for loyalty can help you stand out from the competition, ultimately increasing the lifetime value of each of your customers.

5. Amazing customer service

Using customer service as part of a retention marketing strategy helps improve overall customer satisfaction.  This encourages more referrals because customers like to share their experiences with friends both online and offline. Terrible customer service reflects poorly on your brand. Live chat and email support are critical to creating a memorable customer service experience.

Summing Up

 

For eCommerce merchants, customer retention marketing is a constraint. If merchants spent their efforts to keep the customers they already have, their sales would skyrocket. The more you know about them, the better you’ll be able to serve them. Use onsite displays like pop-ups, emails, rescue abandoned carts, ask for customer feedback, introduce a loyalty program, or alert customers about upcoming products, special offers, or sales. This will help you to remain engaged with your customers. Repeat customers are so critical to the success of your business. They are more inexpensive than new customers, they are loyal, and they spread the word by telling friends and family about you. So give them some love and focus on retaining them.