All the work that goes into acquiring new customers goes out the window if you are not using the right ecommerce customer retention strategies. New data finds that the right retention strategy can improve annual revenue by 10% or more in the long run, as you increase your repeat customer rate.
What customer retention strategies can you put into place at your online store to secure long-term growth and saturation? Here are some of the most effective ones you can start using right now.
Take Advantage of Email Personalization
Email personalization has come a long way in recent years. The leading services providers, like Constant Contact and MailChimp, make it easy to keep in touch with your shoppers by giving you all the tools you need to create and send inspiring emails that help retain your customer base.
What is email personalization? It’s a way of making your emails more human and interactive. A good example would be a birthday email that you send out to customers that greets them by their full name and offers them a special deal in lieu of their special day.
You can take things a step further with email personalization and the numbers are on your side:
- Personalized email messages increase open rates by as much as 6%.
- Click-through rates go up by 14% or more when you personalize messages.
- Transaction rates can improve by 100% or more with email personalization.
- Interaction improves by as much as 50% with when you personalize emails to customers.
With the right mailing service in place, you can easily tap into the power of email personalization and add it to the list as one of your ecommerce customer retention strategies.
Integrate a Customer Rewards Program
One of the surest ways to improve ecommerce customer retention is by giving your shoppers a reason to return and buy more products, and by also encouraging them to spread the word to friends and family members.
You can do this by incorporating a customer loyalty and rewards program that helps you take relationships to the next level with new and existing shoppers.
Benefits of a customer rewards program:
- According to Accenture, loyalty and reward members spend as much as 18% more per year.
- A Loyalty Lion report finds that more than 75% of companies realize ROI on rewards programs.
- Think tank RJ Metrics reports that loyalty members are 50% likelier to make a third purchase inside of a year.
- A recent Help Scout article, culling information from Consumer Affairs, finds that loyalty customers have a 100% lifetime value over standard customers.
Consider this: about 80% of your business comes from just 20% of your customers, and the top 10% of your customers are 60% more valuable than all of the rest. Putting a loyalty and rewards program in place now is smart thinking that can help you increase average order value and improve retention rates across the board.
Convenience Wins the Day
Convenience is the primary reason why ecommerce is a retail trendsetter. Customers love being able to click and shop online with front door delivery. But if you don’t make the entire process convenient from order to delivery all the way to return, you’ll lose customers in the long run.
One of the surest ecommerce customer retention strategies that you can incorporate is a two-day shipping option and hassle-free returns. New studies find that when you make returns easy, you appeal to 80% of your customer base.
When you combine fast, free shipping with easy returns, you can improve product purchase and customer retention according to a Science Daily report. What’s more, new reports find that when you do make returns easy, there’s a 44% chance of the customer making a new purchasing after processing a return online at your store, giving you a powerful way to secure more second-chance sales.
Tap into the Social Journey
Social commerce has changed the entire ecommerce game forever. One reason is because the average person spends more than 2 hours per day logged into a social media site of some type.
With more than 70% of shoppers opting to shop online versus in a brick and mortar store, and with 71% of them making socially influenced buying decisions, it’s easy to understand how social media plays into your long-term retention plan.
The most recent social commerce statistics are encouraging, too, finding that:
- YouTube has tendered $1 billion to influencers in ad revenue to date.
- Facebook generates 64% of buy button referrals in the US.
- Twitter has 241 million active users that love to tweet about products.
- Social media usage has increased more than 400% since 2006.
- Instagram drives the highest referral value, estimated at about $65 per order.
If you’re not yet using these sites to retain existing customers, maintain strong relationships and tap into new customers—hopping on the social commerce bandwagon now is one of the best ecommerce customer retention strategies you can use.
Through boosted or sponsored posts, buy now pins and other methods of showcasing your products on social media, combined with timely reaction to social inquiries, you can easily maintain relationships and secure retention with more than 50% of your customers.
Still not convinced? Did you know that the average social shopper shells out nearly $2,000 per year on ecommerce purchases?
Guarantee the Lowest Price
Customers shop online for a variety of reasons, many of which we’ve already covered above. By and far, though, it’s the competitive pricing in ecommerce that wins the day for most consumers. It’s one of the reasons why 88% shoppers webroom to compare prices between different online stores, with 75% of them doing so to find the lowest price.
If your online store isn’t competitively pricing products, you won’t be in business for very long. But shoppers want you to take that a step further by also guaranteeing them that they’re getting the best deal at your store after the fact with a 30-day price match pledge.
If you do this, it can help you tap into the 29% of shoppers who webroom to find price-matches and the 38% of shoppers who don’t whip out their credit card until they know they’re getting the best deal.
As you can see, customer retention can be a tricky affair in today’s ecommerce jungle. By putting the right strategies in place now, you can ensure that today’s customers stay on board well into the future.
