Customer satisfaction is the key to customer retention.
Creating buyer personas can help you understand your target audience and how they behave online. If you want to ensure that your eCommerce or other business is successful, you need to have a strong customer base. Creating buyer personas can help you understand your target audience and how they behave online, which will in turn allow you to better market your products or services to them.
Your business cannot grow without customers. Customers are what give your business life, whether they are online or offline.
A customer is invaluable to a business – they should always be treated as such. Well-known proverbs such as ‘a customer is always right’ serve to remind business owners of this fact.
Because customers are your greatest problem solvers.
One of the biggest problems for eCommerce businesses is poor customer retention.
If your eCommerce business has poor customer retention, it is likely to fail. However, with the right customer retention strategies, it is possible to increase customer retention significantly and make your eCommerce business more successful.
Top 9 Customer Retention Strategies For Your eStore
It is important to have a good customer retention rate for your eCommerce business. This can be done by interacting with your customers in a positive way and caring about their needs.
There are a number of ways to retain customers that have been proven to be effective. Let’s take a look at some of them.
1. Use Grandfather’s Way Of Communication
How did your grandfather manage to keep in touch with you after you moved to the city with your parents?
They sent regular letters and gifts to you.
We need to use the same methods that our grandfathers did to keep our customers interested and coming back.
Email is an excellent way to conduct customer retention campaigns because it is easy to use and allows for personalized interaction.
What special days does your grandfather send you letters?
You need to do the same with your customers.
Following types of emails can be sent for your customers to increase their engagement and avoid churn:
- Birthday email
- Festive email
- Reminder email
- Win back email
- Anniversary email
- Feedback email
- Thank you email
You should have a customer calendar to remind your existing customers about your products and services or to simply brand your business. Send out regular emails and newsletters to stay in touch.
It is difficult to send an email to each customer individually, however email automation can help make the process quick and easy with little to no error.
2. Be In Their Friend/Follow List Of Social Media
19% of small businesses rate social media as the most important driver for their business. Social media provides businesses with a great opportunity to reach their desired customers. There are 2.95 billion social media users and your customers are on many of these social media platforms. 19% of small businesses rate social media as the most important driver for their business.
It can be beneficial to keep in contact with your customers through social media platforms, as this can give you insight into their preferences and interests. The more you understand about what they want and need, the better equipped you will be to provide them with satisfactory products and services.
3. Loyalty Program – The Litmus Test Of Your Customers
A strong customer loyalty program results in a higher customer retention rate.
Here’s is a list of some benefits of having loyal customers:
- Loyal customers are more likely to purchase your product or services and hence they are more profitable than regular or new customers.
- They tend to provide frequent and positive feedback.
- They are more lenient and may forgive easily your accidental poor services/products.
- Loyal customers are the best word-of-mouth-referers.
- They directly help in branding your business.
- Loyal customers need less maintenance.
4. Give Your Ears To Your Customers
After using your product or services, your customers will develop an opinion based on their experience. This opinion can be positive or negative, and customers will often feel compelled to share it with others.
A happy customer will express their happiness, to which you can reply with thanks. A disappointed customer will voice their queries and dissatisfaction, to which you can immediately reply and sort out the issue, winning them back.
There are several other benefits of customer feedback for your online business which are listed below:
- Having customer feedback on your eStore makes your eStore look more authentic and engaging.
- The feedback reveals the in-field performance of your product and services. This information is very valuable for updating and improvement of products/services.
- Accepting feedback is an indication that you respect your customer’s opinions.
- Accepting customer feedback hence helps in boosting customer retention.
5. Be One Step Ahead Of Your Competitors
Ultimately, happy customers are the ones who are less likely to switch to your competitor. You need customer retention in order to keep your customers from leaving for your competitors. If your customers are happy, they are less likely to switch to another company.
You can virtually eliminate competition and retain your customers by updating your product and enhancing your services regularly.
It is best to either have an in-house research team or outsource to a third party in order to keep your products and services polished and refined. Innovation and creativity will make your products more engaging and useful.
6. Fulfill Your Promise
If you fulfill the promises you make to your customers, they will be more likely to stay engaged with you. This increases the chances that they will remain your customer and tell their friends and family about your products or services.
Therefore, avoid over-promising to your customer.
7. Keep Your Support/Customer Care Team Active
While every customer may face some problems while trying to use new products or services, what they really want is to be able to speak to an expert for support.
The company’s customer care services are designed to help customers resolve any problems they may have using the company’s products or services.
When you resolve your customer’s problems, they are happy and content, which prevents them from going to your competitors.
Therefore, providing good customer service will keep customers and prevent them from leaving.
Other benefits of good customer service:
- Increase the loyalty of your customers toward your company. The trust also increases.
- The customer may try your other products and hence help in increasing sales.
- Good customer service also helps in building a strong customer-company relationship.
8. Keep Your Users Experience Pleasant(Don’t Just Sell, Educate Them)
Everyone desires to have a pleasant experience. People spend a lot of money to visit places such as mountains, beaches, and picnic areas, all in hopes of having a good time.
A poor customer experience on your eCommerce site may discourage them from returning.
If customers have pleasant shopping experiences, they will spend more time and money.
Some ways to make the customer experience pleasant are:
- Eliminate the complexity of the buying process. Keep the product/service page simple and informative and design an easy and trustworthy checkout flow.
- Don’t always sell. Care for your customers by providing them with free knowledgeable resources and some extra-features.
9. Accept Your Mistakes And Apologize
Even if you plan very carefully, you will still make mistakes. It is possible to reduce the amount of damage these mistakes can cause by recognizing them and taking action to correct them.
A few of the most frequent errors in eCommerce businesses are lagging behind in terms of service, delivering products that are damaged, and failing to provide timely customer support. Many of your competitors are making comparable mistakes, so everyone is struggling with the same issues.
Saying sorry for your mistakes and then fixing them can help you keep your customers. It can also make them trust and bond with you more.
4 Customer Retention Strategy Examples
Example 1: Offer Omnichannel Customer Service (Nike)
Bad customer service is the quickest way to turn a loyal customer into an angry ex-customer.
If you want to have a good customer relationship, you need to be where your customers are.
Nike is a big brand that wants to offer its customers a good experience no matter where they are.
Nike has created a system where the real world and the digital world work together to keep customers happy. Its apps offer a lot of features, and use things like a person’s location to give them personalized recommendations and help them find the nearest Nike store.
While the company offers customer support in the traditional ways, it also offers help articles and live customer service chat on its website.
Nike operates a dedicated support account on Twitter to answer questions, offer customer service, and respond to customer complaints.
A strategy like this will definitely improve customer satisfaction and retention rates because it gives a better experience to many users who are already on Twitter. They would rather tweet at Nike’s handle than have to go searching for support information on the website.
The message is that you can improve customer lifetime value by always being accessible to them. Build an app or be active on social media so they can easily find you when they need assistance.
If you increase your visibility across different channels, you will attract new customers and increase the purchase frequency of your existing customers.
Example 2: Create Interactive Educational Content (Ikea)
The key to success in acquiring and retaining customers is to focus on customer success, not just customer support.
To create a customer base that is truly loyal to your brand, you cannot simply rely on support. For every complaint or inquiry that you receive from a customer, there are likely other customers who have had issues with your product but have not contacted support. You need to make it easy for customers.
Ikea is an example of how customers can be loyal to a brand because it is easy to understand how to choose furniture that will fit their room, and how to assemble it once it arrives.
The company has design tools on its website that allow you to see how an item would look in your own space and get a better understanding of the amount of space it would take up.
Ikea produces video tutorials, which can be found on Youtube and elsewhere, to help people who learn better visually to understand how to assemble popular items.
Tools like these help customers choose the right furniture for their room and put it together with minimal hassle. The goal of the program is to turn unique customers into repeat customers by showing them it’s easy to succeed when you buy this brand.
Example 3: Collect and Use Feedback (Nordstrom)
If you want to keep your customers, it’s important to know how they feel about your brand and products. The best way to find out is to ask them.
If you’re looking to get a more detailed understanding of your customer’s expectations and how to prevent customer churn, you might want to consider sending an email asking them to rate your net promoter score on a scale of 0-10.
Nordstrom is one example of a retail chain that actively collects customer feedback. It does this in a few different ways, like most other e-commerce sites. For example, it actively encourages users to leave reviews of its products. Additionally, when users are simply browsing the site, it may prompt them to answer a feedback survey.
Nordstrom can improve its customer service by understanding the customer journey and what motivates customers to return.
Nordstrom employees are able to improve the customer experience and generate loyalty by being able to see and understand customer feedback.
Think about Nordstrom’s customer retention strategy when you are creating your own. They focus on collecting information and then sharing it widely so that improvements can be made.
Example 4: Incorporate Subscriptions (Amazon)
So far, we have focused mostly on how to make customers stay by giving them what they want and going above and beyond with customer service. However, you can also use psychology to keep them around.
If you can get a user to subscribe to something, you’re more likely to keep them in the long term. This is because of human psychology.
We tend to stick with things the way they are because of something called status quo bias. It takes a little push or inspiration to get us to make changes.
If a customer subscribes to your service, they’re likely to stay subscribed until they have a negative experience that causes them to change.
People tend to feel more negatively about losing something than they feel positively about gaining something. In other words, people are more motivated by avoiding a loss than by achieving a gain.
This is why even retailers who sell mainly physical goods, like Amazon, have started to offer subscriptions as a way to keep customers coming back.
Amazon increases its chances of making sales by signing customers up for Prime, as the subscription fee generates additional revenue, and Prime members are more likely to take advantage of free shipping when making purchases.
Please remember that customer satisfaction is key to keeping customers coming back.
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