HOW OPTIMIZED CUSTOMER RETENTION TECHNIQUES BRING PROFIT TO ONLINE STORES?
When it comes to an e-commerce website, the possibility of an existing customer making a purchase is 60-70%, and it is just 5-10% for a new customer. The stat clearly defines the importance of customer retention, especially when it comes to an online store. Customer retention is a genuine approach made by an e-commerce business that involves customized strategies relevant to its business that helps in saving the existing set of frequent buyers. Here in this blog, we will be looking at some of the important customer retention techniques for an e-commerce website.
Customer Retention Techniques
1. Focus on Website Optimization
When it comes to online customer retention for your e-commerce business, the first and foremost thing to be done is to focus on optimizing your e-commerce website. To be more precise, a mobile-friendly e-commerce website will always perform better when compared to other usual e-commerce websites.
- It takes just 0.05 seconds for a customer to form an opinion about your e-commerce website.
- The UI/UX designs contribute 75% of users’ decision-making on the e-commerce website.
If the UI and UX part assisted with SEO is taken care of properly, then there is a high probability of retaining your customer since your website is the face of your business. Few important factors that might make or break your customer retention when it comes to e-commerce website optimization:
- Ensure your site gets loaded in 0.02 seconds.
- Implement only exit pop-up that minimizes visitors’ abandon rate.
- Deploy a simple check-out process.
- Reduce the steps involved in purchasing a product.
- Never hesitate to mention impressive and business-generating content.
2. Run Email Campaigns
- 500% is the user engagement post receiving a welcome from an e-commerce store
- E-mails with subject lines convince 50% of customers to open an e-mail.
Email marketing and its related campaigns are always the go-to approaches for customer retention of your e-commerce website. Today, we can find more tools that help an online store to send personalized emails to customers that highly helps in the retention process. One can use these tools more progressively by following the e-mail marketing techniques:
- In the email campaign of your e-commerce website, you can do a survey that gives extra information about your customers and helps to retain them.
- Sending emails during working hours increases the chance of customers reading them.
- Frame your emails mobile-friendly so that it reaches the maximum.
- Customer retention chances get boosted further by fixing a call-to-action button at the end of your email, where the customer might reply to that.
- Make your customer feel special always by wishing them on occasions like birthdays.
4. Build your own Social media strategy
- 52% of Twitter users say that they bought the products online when they saw them first on Twitter.
- 81% of Twitter users say, that they give high preference to Twitter ads of e-commerce stores than the one given in TV commercials.
Using social media platforms to the fullest will be highly helpful for any e-commerce website for customer retention. Here are a few tips that elevate your e-commerce website in social media and help in customer retention:
- The first thing to be done is to select the right suitable social media platform, there are numerous social media sites present out there, and it is essential to choose the right one where their customers get highly engaged.
- Working on social media is not about creating regular posts, it’s all about building a brand. Create your brand persona that forms a specific group of customers and retains them.
- Create relevant hashtags and posts to your products it not just help with customer retention but also brings in new customers.
- Sharing customer reviews organically builds trust over your brand and generates a solid base for customer retention to your e-commerce website.
4. Know about your customers
To segment, position, and target the right product on the right customer, an e-commerce website needs to learn about the specific customer in and out, RFM as an analytical tool, does that with ease for your online store. It includes three factors for evaluation:
Recency: The last time a specific customer visited or made a purchase in the online store.
Frequency: How often a specific customer has visited the e-commerce website to surf or to purchase a product?
Monetary: The intent of a customer to spend gets reflected here, and it is gauged based on the products purchased and surfed.
Based on these three key factors a customer’s purchase behaviour is evaluated, and the customer gets slotted in a specific rank and then targeted according to their niche, which helps in customer retention in a broader perspective.
5. Cross-Selling – the underrated approach
- 4.5X times is the average difference between the normal purchase when compared with cross-selling-based purchase.
- Cross-selling contributes 30% of the overall sales of an e-commerce store.
Cross-selling is a highly underrated but powerful approach in retaining any customer for your e-commerce website. Cross-selling is all about suggesting a similar product to a customer based on their previous purchase history, this approach simplifies the purchase efforts of a customer and eventually helps an e-commerce website in retaining them.
The online store can give suggestions using analytics, which helps them find the data about the customers, and it can be sent through SMS, emails, and push notifications.
6. Engage your customers
- Retained customers spend 67% more than the new customers
- 71% of the world’s adult population across 12 countries has taken subscription-based e-commerce services in different categories.
E-commerce websites and online stores can practice several customer engagement methods that help with customer retention. Here we will be looking at some of the notable customer engagement approaches:
Rewards: The reward points that a customer gets while purchasing can be redeemed in their next purchase or also can be redeemed in other stores’ purchases, where your e-commerce store has tie-up, like getting a discount in food delivery.
Loyalty Programs: Loyalty programs are all about providing personalized discounts and gifts, if you are looking for the best method to pull back and retain a customer who abandoned you, then this is the right approach.
Delivery Options: Strengthen your supply-chain network and provide one-day delivery for feasible products and customers.
Referrals: Customer retention can also be attained through referral programs, where you can provide discounts and offers to exist, customers when they refer new ones.
Subscription models: This approach gives a win-win situation for customers by saving money and for e-commerce website holders by earning more customers.
Trial Period: Giving a maximum of one month (depends on product) will help customers to build trust in your e-commerce website and the product eventually.
7. Customer support
1 in 26 customers will speak out about their bad experiences in online purchases.
The worst part is the remaining 25 people who keep mum. Providing uncompromised customer support is a sheer mandatory element that helps an e-commerce website in customer retention. Addressing the difficulties faced by the customers at the right time and providing the required information regarding products indicates top-quality customer support. Adding a customer advisory board can also be preferred here, where this committee involves customers who are involved in purchasing products from your e-commerce website for a longer period, and their suggestions healthily impact customer retention.
8. Gamification
Introducing play always brings in fun and engagement, and it is no exception when it comes to a customer’s experience in an e-commerce website. Customer retention can easily be attained by fewer approaches when it comes to e-commerce and gamification is one in it. Gamification involves almost zero risk for the online store and it doesn’t require the e-commerce website to take the blame game for the customers not getting prizes or expected prizes, spin-to-win is the best example of e-commerce gamification that leads to customer retention.
Endnote
Maintaining a successful e-commerce website in today’s digitized era is a huge challenge, and it demands an immense level of effort to bring in different and workable new strategies at regular intervals and execute them the right way. The process of customer retention starts with studying the target customer in detail and delivering their requirement, if the process is carried out righteously then the expected customer retention can be attained easily.