In e-commerce, your existing customers are often your best growth tool. Developing and nurturing ongoing relationships with customers can be more powerful, more effective, and more profitable than any other business growth, lead generation, or customer acquisition tactic you implement in an effort to move the needle and continue scaling your business.
While it can be easy to get caught up in the excitement of landing new customers and connecting with new prospects to grow your business, it’s the relationships you develop with existing customers that can ultimately make or break your business in the long run.
To survive, you have to commit to building loyalty and transforming one-time customers into lifelong advocates (and repeat buyers) for your e-commerce business.
Here’s the problem: Developing and nurturing these types of relationships can take a lot of time and hard work. What’s more, there’s really no right way to do it — it’s different for every business.
So the question is, where do you start?
This quick guide will provide you with the resources, tips, and tools you need to put a plan together for your business.
The numbers
- Loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase (Source)
- It’s six to seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one (Source).
- The average repeat customer spends 67 percent more in their 31st to 36th months of their relationship with a business than in months zero to six (Source).
- Lowering your customer churn rate by five percent can increase your profitability by 25 to 125 percent (Source).
As shown in the numbers shared above, existing customers can play a pretty significant role in terms of growth and profitability for your business. Again, landing new customers is exciting — but convincing one-time customers to buy again and investing in loyalty can often make the bigger impact over time.
The reading materials
- Increasing Customer Loyalty by Harvard Business Review
- Evergreen: Cultivate the Enduring Customer Loyalty That Keeps Your Business Thriving by Noah Fleming and Alan Weiss
- Loyalty 3.0: How to Revolutionize Customer and Employee Engagement with Big Data and Gamification by Rajat Pahari
- The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi
- The Ultimate Guide to Customer Retention by Sweet Tooth
- Back on the Yellow Brick Road: Getting Customers Who’ve Strayed To Re-engage by Marketo
- The Art of Customer Loyalty by HelpScout
- 7 Customer Retention Tactics to Get Current E-commerce Customers to Purchase More by Shopify
These resources (among others) can help put you on the right track toward developing the right loyalty strategies and tactics for your business.
The best practices
Tip #1: Don’t sell products, sell experiences – The first thing you have to do is get out of the mindset that you’re selling products — you’re not. People aren’t giving you money for your products — they’re buying from you because they’re looking to make their lives easier, better, or more fun. When you focus on selling experiences to people rather than products, you become a partner in improving the lives of your customers, as opposed to a business they’re simply buying products from.
Tip #2: Understand your customers better – To retain your customers and keep them from leaving you for competitors, you have to understand them better. You need to know with certainty who your customers are, what they’re looking for, what their pain points are, how they use your products, and what their opinions about your business and products are. To gather information, send email surveys, make phone calls, post social media polls, and encourage customers to leave testimonials and provide reviews of your products and their experience interacting with your business.
Tip #3: Be more available and helpful than your competitors – One of the best and easiest ways to build loyalty is to provide better customer service than any of your competitors. That means being available whenever your customers need your help, and being present to help customers wherever they feel most comfortable—through email, via live chat, in the comment sections on your website, or on social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.
Tip #4: Help customers understand who you are – Differentiate from your competitors by helping your customers understand who you are, why you’re in business, what makes you different than everyone else, and why they should do business with you and not anyone else. You can achieve this by sharing your story on your about page, sharing photos and updates about your company and employees on your social media pages, and by including personalized messages from you or members of your team in order confirmation and thank you emails.
Tip #5: Personalize every interaction – In e-commerce, personalization can also help you differentiate from competitors and build relationships with customers. There are a number of tools (see below) you can use to add personalization to your emails, landing pages, and product pages. When you add personalization to every interaction you have with your customers, you’re able to illustrate the fact that you value them as actual human beings as opposed to merely dollars and sales. In an age when online interactions are increasingly over-automated and de-humanized, personalization can be an incredibly effective way to stand out from the crowd and transform passive one-time buyers into supportive and engaged repeat customers.
Tip #6: Champion lifecycle emails – As we’ve mentioned before on this blog, your job doesn’t end when you make the sale—it’s only just beginning. A big part of boosting loyalty and driving repeat business involves making communication with customers a priority throughout the entire buyer journey. The best way to do it is by building a lifecycle email program for your business. Lifecycle emails allow you to communicate with prospects before they buy (emails that include special offers), immediately following the sale (thank you emails), and on an ongoing basis after (reengagement emails).
Tip #7: Make it easy and exciting for people to buy again – The final best practice I want to mention is pretty straightforward: in order to drive repeat business, you have to make it easy and exciting for people to buy again. You can do this in a number of ways, such as providing an excellent mobile experience for people who visit your store, sending coupons and other offers in emails to past customers, sharing updates about new products on your social media pages and in your blog posts, and always thanking your customers for supporting your business.
The tools
- For personalizing transactional emails, try Spently.
- For creating lifecycle email marketing campaigns, try Rejoiner.
- For driving more reviews about your products and company, try Yotpo.
- For putting live chat on your e-commerce site, try Olark.
- For developing a customer loyalty program, try Sweet Tooth.
- For telling stories about your business and employees, try Instagram.
- For unifying your personalization across various marketing channels, try Listrak.
- For personalized product recommendations, try Unbxd.
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