E-commerce Customer Retention Strategies

So you are doing well with your E-commerce business. You have many happy customers. Surely it means successful business with satisfied clients who love to keep coming back to your store every time they want to shop.

Most of the businesses begin with the uphill battle of appealing new customers towards the store to make their first purchase. However, in the process of building up an e-commerce business, most business owners neglect the client’s journey and satisfaction of existing customers.

Ensuring that the clients are satisfied is crucial for long term business. Furthermore, in the competitive e-commerce arena, thousands of similar businesses are targeting the same customers that you have worked so hard to acquire.

With the growing increase of e-commerce businesses over the internet, the customers’ online shopping experiences are enhancing. However, the process to maintain and keep up with the latest developments in the online e-commerce solutionsdomain is getting more complex for online store owners and retailers.

Retain Your Existing Customers

As important as it is to gain new customers, it is also vital to retain your existing customer base. Loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase. The key to retaining these customers is to ensure they’re happy.

Ways to keep your customers happy include the following: provide excellent customer service, email them exclusive deals/promotions, and produce useful content. By providing your customers with positive experiences they will become more likely to share their experiences with others – which in turn will increase your customer base.

“Customer acquisition is costlier than customer retention.”

This actually means take good care of your existing customers so as to spend less on customer acquisition. That’s because when you have satisfied customers you’ll automatically gain new customers through word of mouth.

So, better concentrate on customer retention using the best customer retention strategies. Albacross wrote an article about how to nurture leads and convert them into paying users. They have a great email marketing strategy to ensure they continue following up with every potential customers.

“Deliver exceptional customer service”

What matters most for a business are not its products and services but the quality of service it provides to its customers. An exceptional customer service can help a business stand out from the crowd.

In order to deliver such kind of a service, it is important to employ a well-tailored customer service strategy. This calls for: educating your customer service team on customer satisfaction, administering customer satisfaction surveys, make it easy & quick for your customers to contact you, have a well-trained customer service team in place available to customers via various channels: Chat, email, Customer service telephone line etc.

Get your staff on a productivity system that will ensure your team provides the best customer service at the right time, here are some examples;

1. Educating your customer service team on customer satisfaction
2. Administering customer satisfaction surveys
3. Making it easy for your customers to contact you
4. Having a well-trained CS team available to customers via various channels

Share knowledgeable content:

You need to become an expert in your niche. For this, you need to research a lot by spending time on Twitter, Facebook and other communities relevant to your niche so as to find commonly discussed topics that you can write about.

Once you are done with the research, you are all set to produce content which you, yourself would read and share with your friends. Now, you have to make efforts so that your content gains the required exposure. So, consider investing in the right marketing channels and leveraging their power.

Leverage CRM software:

CRM software, when used appropriately can do wonders for your business. You can use this amazing software to gather information regarding a customer’s purchase history.

Based on this information, you can determine what kind of offer will be most appealing to each individual. This will further help keep your brand on your customers’ minds. It also enables you to budget your time accordingly and make the most out of the available resources so as to boost customer retention.

Communicate:

Communication is the key to strengthening any relationship. So, you should not just focus on closing the sales but should also make efforts to be in contact with them post-sale. Consider being in touch with your customers through letters, events, phone calls, special offers, follow-ups, personalized cards and more. This makes your customers feel valued and improves customer retention.

Employ a proactive approach:

A proactive approach to customer service eliminates the act of waiting for problems to occur. It supports the idea of eliminating problems before they occur. Use a software like Retently which uses a Net Promotor score to survey your clients and start collecting, analyzing and acting on customer feedback.

Define and boost your customer engagement score: Adopt an on-boarding plan to constantly engage with your customers and achieve higher retention rates.

For starters – and if you are relatively new to this – you can use a basic strategy. You don’t need complex funnels and a million different alternatives of user behavior at this point. You just need to figure out how they interact with your product and if it gives them the thrill it is supposed to.

A high-level initial on-boarding procedure could consist of the following steps:

1. Outreach (cold emails, cold calling) : You can use tools like Prospect.io here to find emails of your prospects and then sent them a personalized campaign directly from your email MixMax — bonus points if you take advantage of its templates too.
2. Inbound Marketing activities : By taking advantage of Quora, Reddit and LinkedIn — which is literally a goldmine if used right.
3. 1st call: To showcase your product
4. Follow up material: That will emphasize again on your product’s benefits- a sales demo of your product would be just fine.
5. 2nd call: In case the user was convinced to try out your service this would be the moment to give access to a free trial and guide him on as to how to take advantage of it.
6. 3rd — and final- call or email after a few days: to see how the experience with the product had been so far and if the user is ready to commit
7. Guide the user through payment procedures.

The Key Takeaways:

When your customers are satisfied with your services, they are likely to refer them to their friends, relatives, and other social contacts. Small-sized and mid-sized businesses focus largely on this word of mouth promotion, creating a healthy and prospective consumer chain to kick-start higher return on investment.

Yes you can use marketing and advertising to continue growing your business at a fast pace but you’ll want to continue growing your customer service team to ensure you don’t lose out on valuable customers and their referrals. Please leave a comment below telling us how you’re currently retaining your customers.