You’ve put a great deal of effort into acquiring customers for your eCommerce business and now you want to concentrate on keeping them. Why is this important? Because acquiring a new customer can cost 5 times more than retaining an existing one. Moreover, increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by up to 95%.
Having a solid eCommerce customer retention plan can help you increase customer value. Here are 5 ideas you can apply to improve customer retention.
1. Leverage SEO
Many eCommerce website owners already use various SEO tactics to increase organic traffic and attract new customers, but SEO can also play an incredibly effective role in customer retention.
For instance, you can use your web analytics data to understand the behaviors of your existing customers. You can find out which pages they visit the most, how long they stay on them, which customers are visiting your website most often, etc. Understanding this will help you proactively direct customers to content designed to engage and retain customers and increase value over time.
Combine your web analytics data with keyword research tools to discover customer search behavior and trends. Understand what your customers are looking for and incorporate related data and targeting into your marketing strategies. For instance, you can include the keywords in your PPC campaigns and ad copy.
However, don’t forget about your content’s quality. Design your landing pages to engage customers by providing actionable assets such as webinars, videos, etc. By providing useful information to help your customers solve their pain points, you can increase customer value and retention over time.
If all this has left you feeling overwhelmed, consider using eCommerce SEO services. A professional SEO agency will help you get on the first page of Google for hundreds of keywords that are related to your eCommerce business and reach your customer retention goals faster.
2. Send Engaging Emails
When it comes to customer retention, email is one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal as it allows you to continue building a relationship before and after the customer’s initial purchase. However, you need to make sure that every email you send adds value to your CX.
You can start with follow-up emails. One week after the first purchase, send your customer a message that thanks them for making a purchase. This type of acknowledgment will make the customer feel good about the decision to buy from your store while at the same time making your brand appear more approachable.
To make this first email even more effective, add product recommendations. Later, you can also include customer reviews to increase the value of the recommended products, as well as the customer’s desire to buy.
After the follow-up email, be sure to send personalized emails on a regular basis. For instance, you can send personalized messages that offer sales or new products every 2-3 weeks.
Finally, make sure to remind customers of why they bought from you in all of your post-sale communications. Your ability to demonstrate why more purchases are worth their money and time is the key to getting customers to come back.
3. Start a Loyalty Program
Also known as customer retention programs, loyalty programs are a great way to boost buying frequency because they encourage customers to buy more often in exchange for rewards.
Encourage your customers to continue participating in the loyalty program by awarding them some welcome points immediately after they’ve created an account. Once they realize that earning rewards is very easy, they will feel excited about returning to your online store.
You can also reward customers after their second purchase or after they’ve spent a certain amount of money in your store. In addition, you can use automated loyalty apps that can reward your customers for a number of different actions they take in your e-store.
4. Improve Your Customer Support
Nowadays, customers expect nothing less than an effective and consistent service. Having a help desk or live chat tool can turn a customer’s query into a sale or a complaint into a resolution. And oftentimes, an effectively resolved problem can turn an angry customer into a loyal one. Not to mention, this allows you to get valuable customer feedback that can help you improve your offering, as well as your overall shopping experience.
Depending on your product mix, margins, and niche, consider sending a small gift to your best customers as a way of reminding them to come back. This adds the element of delight and surprise which, in turn, can increase customer satisfaction. You can also send them a handwritten thank-you note to show you care and encourage them to buy from you again.
5. Use Failed Payment Recovery Service
Did you know that 50% of all churn is caused by failed payments? What’s worse, more than 85% of customers never respond to automatic dunning emails.
There could be a number of reasons why payments fail – spending limit on customer’s card inaccurate information, insufficient funds on the card, etc. Avoiding failure of payments altogether is impossible, but it can definitely be minimized. There’s a number of tools and strategies that you could use, and one of the most effective ones is using a specialized failed payment recovery service.
Specialized payment recovery agencies will help you recover payments that would otherwise be lost and provide clear reporting, thus helping you grow your revenue and save the invaluable customer relationship.
Final Thoughts
While it is true that effective customer retention strategies take some time to implement, they’re definitely worth the effort to increase your CLV (customer lifetime value). With the right marketing tools, you can introduce new customer retention strategies that improve your online store’s reputation and increase your revenue.