You are doing everything you can to get your e-commerce business reaching out to a new audience; you are hot on the heels of your competitors with a stringent social media campaign, your content is both varied and relevant, and your pay-per-click campaign is bearing the fruits of your labor. You may be overjoyed with the numbers of unique visitors to your site, but aren’t you forgetting someone? What are you doing to retain your current customers? You get a greater ROI on keeping customers rather than attracting new ones. Here are 5 ways to keep your customers returning to you.
Customer Accounts
Your customers will be able to repeat purchase from you far quicker if they have a customer account; however, some people just don’t like the process or thought of creating an account. One way to overcome this hurdle is to give your customers the option of creating an account after they have purchased as a guest – give them the incentive of a discount to encourage them to sign up. If they purchase from you as a guest, you can always approach them after the transaction is complete so that they don’t see it as an obstacle to making their purchase.
Make it Simple
You know the importance and benefits of ensuring that your website is easy to navigate, but often this gets forgotten when it comes to making payments. Your customers may have regular products that they order from you, and so you need to make the payment and ordering process as simple as possible. Subscription payments provide an easy way for payments to be sent and received – your customer can specify the date that they wish for payments to be taken from their bank account
Reward for Loyalty
People like rewards. You can create a loyalty scheme for your customers to sign up to that rewards them for making repeat purchases. If you don’t want to have a section within your customer account pages, you can automate this process via email so that customers receive a discount once they have hit a certain target.
Thank for Custom
How often are you thanked for being a loyal customer? Very rarely? Yet, by thanking your big spending customers, you are building on your reputation and reminding them why they spend with you! It doesn’t have to be a huge gift, just a gift; perhaps a gift certificate or discount code – anything that will be surprise and delight!
Offer a Discount
You don’t want to get into the habit of giving regular discounts across the board because customers will wait until the sales begin before making their purchases, but you do want to give a discount code to customers that haven’t bought from you in a while – the dormant customers need a little kick start to begin buying from you, and a discount may just be what they need.
The great thing about returning customers is that every time they purchase from you, you can gain further information from them that you can use to generate sales further. Never underestimate how making a customer feel valued can ultimately bring value to your business.
