New business is great and all, but do you know what’s even better than winning over new customers? Making your existing customers happy.
With a few exceptions, customers who have already converted and made a purchase from your store prove much more profitable than first-time buyers. The following are a few strategies you can use to turn your shoppers into loyal customers and exponentially increase their lifetime value.
Stay in Touch
Your customers won’t come back if they don’t remember who you are. Communicating with your base is key to keeping your brand at top of mind. Something as simple as a monthly email marketing campaign can go a long way toward keeping them engaged and invested in your brand. These communications don’t even need to be promotional in nature.
The Simple Solution: Consider sending your customers monthly tips, helpful articles, and other content relevant to their interests. A profitable email marketing campaign will add value or capture customer attention to reinforce the conclusion they came to when they made their first purchase—that your brand is one worth investing in.
Offer Subscriptions
The subscription model is all the rage in ecommerce. Merchants of every kind are looking into starting a subscription service or adding subscription options to their existing offering. If you can keep the cost of acquisition the same, a subscriber is much more profitable than a one-time buyer. Even if the customer acquisition cost involved in converting a buyer to a subscriber goes up, a successful subscription should retain that subscriber long enough that it does not affect profitability.
The Simple Solution: Something as simple as adding an automatic reordering option can skyrocket customer lifetime value by giving one-time and occasional buyers the ability to become subscribers.
Reward Loyalty
Encourage repeat business by offering your customers exclusive deals and discounts. Including a promotional code for use on future purchases with every new order can provide enough incentive to convert one-time purchasers into returning customers.
The Simple Solution: For some merchants, introducing a points system can gamify the shopping process and extend customer lifetime. Others can offer a free monthly gift for loyal customers as a creative way to promote product discovery and clear out extra inventory.
Quality Customer Service
This might seem obvious, but a happy customer is more likely to become a return buyer than a dissatisfied one. Quality of customer service is consistently cited as a top factor affecting consumer trust in a vendor. A negative product experience can be smoothed over by excellent customer service, but few products are compelling enough to make customers disregard a bad service experience.
The Simple Solution: Focusing on providing quality customer service is a great way to keep customers content, loyal, and profitable.
Keep your customers coming back with a killer subscription service. Learn from the best in the business in our whitepaper, Think Outside the Box: How Brands are Dominating the Subscription Economy.
