For ecommerce businesses, returning customers matter a lot. Since the cost of acquisition of a customer keeps rising, customer retention becomes even a bigger battle than customer acquisition as that is where your direct-to-consumer could go to die. To help try to prevent that ghastly reality, we will look at some of the ways you can build customer loyalty for your business.
Personalized shopping experience
Ecommerce businesses that excel in customer loyalty understand the significance of personalization. When your customers feel like you know them and cater to their preferences, they are more likely to return. You can do this by collecting data on past purchases, browsing history, and demographic information to better understand your customer’s preferences and behaviours. Another way of personalization is through personalized offers and emails. If a customer was on your website, placed a product in the cart but never finished the checkout, the next time there’s a discount on that product, you can send an email to the customer to nudge back into the funnel and finish the transaction. And all these efforts are dependent on an excellent and responsive customer support team to be able to delight customers at all touch points.
Loyalty programs and rewards
Creating a loyalty program with useful pointers on what someone can win for doing a certain action can help improve retention. Just creating a loyalty program for the sake of it doesn’t really matter to the consumer unless there’s an emotional connection on why they should care about the program.
That’s where rewards come in. Making consumers care about your loyalty program is hard enough, the next part is communicating what they get out of being a part of this program that is vital. You can add an element of gamification to your loyalty program and to show the progress of a consumer towards the intended reward.
Building trust and social proof
After you have personalized the shopping experience and rewarded the loyal customers, you then need to continuously build trust and social proof of why they should keep coming back. Since you don’t operate in a vacuum, there will be other players who try to get the attention of your customer, hence building trust by implementing rigorous quality assurance processes and encouraging customers to leave positive reviews will go along way in giving your customer the peace that they are dealing with the best provider of the service or good on the internet.
Building a lasting business
As more competitors enter the market, the cost of paid acquisition also goes up. This simple fact shows that its deathly important to treat your current customers as VIPs so that they can rave about you out there and earn some well-deserved word of mouth goodwill in addition to those glowing reviews that go a long way in giving new users confidence of dealing with you. Hence, starting revving the customer retention engine and see your business grow.
