Customer Retention Tips And Tricks For Your Ecommerce Business

As per Donna Fenn’s article, a contributing writer for Inc.com– acquiring new clients can be costly (five to ten times the cost of retaining an existing one), in fact the average purchases of a repeat clients is 70% more than the new ones.

If you are still not convinced, “The Law of the Vital Few”, “the 80-20 Rule” or even “The Pareto Principle”, named by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto; 80% of your sales are generated by 20% (or fewer) of your customers.

Expanding customer base for your e-commerce business is a need, however at the same time you need to understand how easy and profitable it becomes to retain your existing ones.

So, what are the best retention practices that you can follow:

1- Loyalty program

Gone are those days when customers became loyal to brands that allowed a seamless shopping experience. Apart from offering an ominchannel shopping experience, modern shoppers expect a give-and-take relationship in order to be loyal with brands. Infusing a costumer loyalty program in your retention strategies is the foremost thing you need to consider.

Trick: Target your potential customers on special occasions like birthdays, anniversary, festivals, etc. This will make them feel special, who will automatically spread a good word about your brand in their networks and invite new customers to opt for your brand. You can also announce special discount over reviews, social sharing, and referrals. By doing this, you will not encourage them to stick with you, but also increase your brand’s visibility.

2- Personalizing

Modern customers are no more attracted to traditional content, instead they are looking for something more specific and unique that would interest them. Personalizing with your customers will surely help you increase retention rates, but for that you need to have a system to collect data (refer point number 5) so that you can later use them to make recommendations and tailor promotions to each customer’s individual needs.

Trick: Personalizing via email is the simplest and most effective way to retain more and more customers. By having real-time access to your customer’s data, you can easily craft an email addressing them by name and offering content they like. This will automatically encourage them to become more loyal with your brand.

3- Engagement and excitement

Millennials are ruling, when it comes to online shopping. And, considering their passion for technology, adapting ways to engage them will create a unique excitement and make them stick with your brand. Gamification is the buzzword that you can adopt to encourage younger audience to complete actions.

Trick: Include gamification in your customer experiences and purchase processes that will not only excite your customers with a unique shopping experience, but also, help you stay apart from your competitors. You can infuse this strategy in your loyalty programs and personalizing too.

4- Anytime support service

With competition level rising in the ecommerce industry, it takes fraction of seconds for a customer to leave your brand, if they don’t find information they are looking for, on-the-go. Adopting a 24*7 customer service tool will help you fill this gap and immediately offer solutions to those lost customers, helping you to develop a life-long relationship with them.

Trick: Allow your customers an ability to reach you anytime, by incorporating a real-time communication tool for your website. This way, when a customer is looking for some information, but cannot find it, can directly send a message and get solutions, immediately. To make this practice a successful one, you need to ensure you are always available for them.

5- User management

Last, but the most crucial factor to Customer Retention, is to have a customer management system in place. It will allow you to collect and secure each and every customer’s transactions and interactions in one place. This makes it easy to offer the best customer experiences, as you can tailor your service according to their needs (the key for retention strategy).

Trick: Once you have a real-time access to customer’s data, you use them in your loyalty programs to mask the true value of what your are rewarding.

Goodluck!