Are you wondering what the best customer retention strategies are for eCommerce stores?
It’s easier to sell to your existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. However, many ecommerce businesses focus too much on acquiring new customers. Instead, it’s important to understand the importance of investing in marketing to existing customers and encouraging repeat purchases.
In this article, we’ll share our top eCommerce customer retention strategies that’ll help you boost your returning customers and repeat sales.
4 Key Customer Retention Strategies for eCommerce
1. Leverage Personalized Email Marketing
Email marketing is an essential strategy for building and nurturing a relationship with both your potential and existing customers.
In fact, according to Growcode, conversions via email outperform both social and organic search traffic, and they’re even twice as high as organic search.
After collecting email addresses and building your email lists, you can start strengthening your relationship by sending emails to welcome new customers and help them learn the value of your products.
Then, as your relationship grows, you can promote your products and offer incentives to encourage repeat purchases.
Sending personalized emails is the secret to driving email conversions. A few examples of personalized emails include:
- Emails using the recipient’s name
- Emails using the recipient’s location
- Happy Birthday emails
- Customer loyalty programs
- Abandoned cart emails
- Latest products viewed
- Re-engagement emails
You can track onsite behavior of your customers and send personalized emails based on that data, or have your customers choose categories to subscribe to, or ask certain questions during signup.
And always remember to track and analyze your email campaigns after they’ve been sent!
Unless you track your email campaigns, you won’t be able to identify what works to drive sales and what doesn’t. To determine the best performing email messages, use trackable URLs in your emails and analyze the performance of your campaign in Google Analytics.
Learn more about how to find your most profitable email campaigns in Google Analytics.
2. Eliminate Registration Barriers
Just like email marketing, persuading people to register for an account on your site is a great strategy to boost your repeat sales rate. When you require users to register for an account during checkout, you get essential details about them that you can use to display personalized onsite and offsite marketing campaigns.
You can also use those details to personalize their shopping experience by suggesting products that they’re more likely to buy.
Although forcing account registration can improve repeat sales, the downside is that some customers see it as a barrier, which makes them leave your site without even purchasing a single product.
To fix this, you might want to enable guest checkout on your eCommerce store for those who are in a hurry or don’t want to sign up yet. Then, with MonsterInsights, you could enable logged in customer tracking and compare guest checkout against logged-in checkout.
That said, emphasizing guest checkout wouldn’t be a good strategy in the long run for customer retention.
To improve your registration rate, you should avoid asking for too much information while registering. Not only will that encourage users to create an account during checkout, but it’ll also help you to provide a personalized shopping experience for individual customers.
If you want to collect more customer details, make sure to explain why each field is required, and make sure it’s beneficial to the customer.
For instance, JCPenney asks for a phone number when signing up for their rewards program. You can hover over the question mark in the form field to get an explanation of exactly why they need your number.
Using WPForms is the easiest way to create a customized registration form that you can embed anywhere on your site. Plus, it also helps you automatically add your customers to your email list, so you can send a welcome email right away.
3. Keep an Eye on Analytics
You need to know what your customers are up to on your site in order to understand their wants, needs, and interests.
There are a few different ways to accomplish this.
First and foremost, you need to track all activity on your site with Google Analytics. One of the default reports is New vs. Returning users, so you can segment your traffic to find out what those different audiences are doing on your site.
To dive even deeper, there are a few different reports you can set up.
Logged in user tracking can be used for gaining deeper insights about your users who log in. For example, if you’re an eCommerce shop owner, you can create reports to see data like top pages or revenue of your logged-in users. This way, you can personalize the shopping experience of your customers based on what kinds of preferences you see in the reports.
User ID tracking can give you detailed insights about visitor interaction and the preferences of logged in users. Check what content they’re interested in to send them targeted email marketing messages, for example.
These IDs are randomly assigned to your visitors. When you set up the custom dimension with MonsterInsights, we’ll replace that ID with your users’ unique IDs, for even better tracking.
Both of the above reports can be set up using MonsterInsights in WordPress. Learn more about how to set them up using custom dimensions!
4. Reengagement is Key
About 25% to 30% of customers return to your store to make a repeat purchase. That means that a majority of your first-time customers will never return to your site after their first purchase.
This is quite normal, because chances are most customers look for filling an immediate need, and are not interested in an ongoing relationship with your website. However, you can still work on encouraging reengagement and repeat purchases.
Email is the best channel for reengagement. Check out these couple examples:
Another great way to work on reengagement is by asking customers who’ve lapsed why they stopped engaging with you. Use a short survey, like this example:
This way, you can understand what makes people leave your site. You can make use of these insights to weed out the loopholes in your retention strategy. If you’re selling a service, try a cancellation survey.
We hope these customer retention strategies help you keep a few more of your customers around longer.
If you want to retain your customers with remarketing, read these remarketing best practices to boost your bottom line.
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