10 Super-Effective Must Try Tactics For Customer Retention In Apparel Ecommerce

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Ask any entrepreneur, and they’ll agree that they would do anything to retain customers. After all, customer retention brings several benefits with it. Statistics show that the possibility of selling to a returning customer can reach up to 70%. Moreover, almost 80% of business revenue will come from these customers whereas new customers might give you around 20-30%. Same is the case with online apparel industry. The best part about customer retention is that once you have recurring customers in the loop, they’ll give you valuable input on improving or launching new products. In other words, customer retention is one aspect that no entrepreneur would ever overlook. Considering the value of retaining customers for businesses, here are some super effective strategies that’ll greatly help your business in retaining customers:

1. Deploy Smart Retention Techniques

Thanks to the rising popularity of e-commerce apparel stores, buying apparels online is fast becoming a popular trend. Naturally, a satisfied customer will not only return, he/she will also help market your products to other customers looking for similar products. Looking into several customer retention strategies is always a great way to start things off. It will give you firsthand knowledge on how customer retention can be maintained in the apparel e-commerce market. Likewise, you must do research about what price segments are likely to retain customers. For instance, customers spending $50 or more on first purchase can be worked into becoming recurring customers. Similarly, you might require expanding your retention strategy to attract customers in different categories. Make a versatile and flexible retention technique that can be used to attract customers in different market segments.

2. Money Saving Strategies Enhance Customer Retention

The first thing to ensure customer retention is to know what customers look for while buying online. The key to online buying is saving. In fact, you’ll see customers repeating this popular mantra too often. Why? Because they either seek financial independence or have other financial goals, they may be saving money. Money saving also allows them to stay within their financial means and never get burdened with unmanageable debts. In either case, customers always prefer buying online and from e-commerce stores that help them save. Additionally, to ensure saving, they look for a coupon, deal blogs and marketplaces to search and redeem the best offer available in reaching their financial goals. In fact, at a dedicated apparel discount website: ClothingRIC help customers find the best savings up to 60% off at some of the online stores and said 3 of the 10 loyal customers frequently use coupons to shop their favorite clothing. If you could make your business facilitate customers to buy quality apparel brands without spending much, its customer retention will significantly improve.

3. Develop Customer Loyalty Programs

Acquiring a new customer is by no means easy but to retain one can be more difficult. Businesses have to work day in and day out to find and retain customers. Moreover, winning their trust can be a time-consuming and expensive affair, so why not look at developing a strategy something that works? This is where a dynamic customer loyalty program can help your business with customer retention. Though some might argue that such programs may be old fashioned, but they are still commonly used and help businesses retain customers. There is no denying that a quality customer loyalty program will surely help your business retaining customers if it is. A customer loyalty program helps e-commerce companies realize the importance of customer retention. Simply put, the customer loyalty program offers promotions, prices, and exclusive products in exchange of asking the customer to make repeat purchases. In other words, a CLP is all about rewarding your customers for being loyal to your business.

A quality customer relationship program has clear goals and reasons. Research shows that the US has around 3.3 billion customer royalty members in different categories, and the number is growing. Suffice to say that developing a quality customer loyalty program for your e-commerce apparel business will likely go a long way. These will make it easy to work on existing customers while simplifying seeking new ones. Moreover, such programs can be quite handy in increasing the customer retention in the longer run. However, you must ensure not to base your customer loyalty program on discounts. Doing so will not attract desired customers and might even drive away existing ones.

4. Personalized Retention Emails

If you hear someone claim that emails don’t work anymore, don’t pay heed. Yes, the junk mail has increased but despite that, almost all businesses, big or small, communicate through emails. For this reason, email marketing remains a pivotal marketing tool and will likely do so for many years to come. Recent research suggests that around 80% businesses rely on email marketing to maintain customer retention. Almost 63% emails are deleted before they are read, sending retention emails remains the most effective way to reach your customers.

Using personalized retention email to attract customers can, in fact, do wonders to your online apparel business as personally addresses the customer. By making them realize as to how important they are to your business, you are in fact making them feel closer to your business. Likewise, addressing their specific needs and promoting upcoming apparel designs/ ideas and asking for feedback will only bring them closer to your business. All in all, retention emails can greatly influence customers to remain loyal to your business.

5. Simplify Your Site’s Registration Process

There is no denying that most customers find registering online burdensome. The same is true for customers looking to buy apparel online. However, e-commerce apparel sellers know that persuading customers to register online can greatly improve customer retention rate. So, how to make your customers register even if they don’t want to? Ideally, you should employ a strategy to encourage customers to register online.

Start with a registration form that is easy to fill and doesn’t ask for every single detail. Just ask for what is important and leave unnecessary details aside. Make sure you mention the reason as to why filling it is important and how will it benefit the customer. Doing so will make the customer understand the importance of the registration process, and once they do, they’ll likely register without hesitating. Moreover, make registration as interesting as possible. Link it to your blog and provide interesting information about the product or inform them about upcoming products.

Additionally, linking your business’s social media tabs can also appeal customer’s interest and help them register online. Moreover, make an online social media community for new customers and let them speak their mind about the apparel. Respond to their comments from time to time and ask them for feedback for upcoming products. Keep in mind that the idea is to get them to register and promote a long-term, meaningful business relationship, during which, your customer retention rate will also climb.

6. Make Repeat Purchase Easy

Who other than e-commerce entrepreneurs knows better about the benefits of simplifying repeat purchases? In fact, faster repeat purchasing is one of the prime reasons why customers prefer buying from their preferred stores. There is no denying that a simple and fast repeat purchase can greatly enhance your site’s customer retention rate. A survey states that small businesses credit for up to 50% of their revenue to repeat customers.

Similarly, another study concludes that repeat customers spend up to 67% more compared to fresh customers. Considering how Amazon’s One-Click is a great example of repeat purchase as it provides the easiest option for returning customers to make payments online. Truthfully, customers don’t care how their payments are processed. All they care is to buy the product, make the payment and have the product in hand. In the meantime, verifying the payment is processed and the item delivered is the responsibility of the e-commerce retailer.

7. Reduce The Rate Of Shopping Cart Abandonment

In case you didn’t know, shopping cart abandonment is one of the more profound challenges in improving customer retention rate for the e-commerce industry. A study indicated that the cart abandonment rate remains around 69-70% on average. Though e-commerce stores use methods like remarketing to reduce the rate, the overall impact of abandonment is still there. Higher prices are also a common reason why customers abandon carts.

Some customers might feel annoyed while scrolling through your site and eventually leave the cart without buying. There may be other reasons, but they don’t necessarily force customers to abandon carts. Cross-selling is a useful way to significantly reduce the impact of cart abandonment for e-commerce apparel sellers. Moreover, you can reduce cart abandonment by adding a progress indicator on the checkout page, or put the thumbnail on all the pages until the customer buys the shopping cart. Providing numerous payment options can also dramatically reduce your cart abandonment rate.

8. Enhance Your Sites User Experience

User experience is a key factor in enhancing your site’s customer retention rate. Without it, your site will likely struggle to retain customers. Research has it that around 60% first-time customers will not come back if your site lacks a friendly user experience. You can make them visit multiple times by enhancing your site’s interface and user experience. How? Start by making your site user-friendly, instead of focusing on making it viewer friendly.

In case you may be wondering what’s the difference between the two? Well, there are several. Firstly, your customers want to use the site to buy the apparel, while you want them to wow the apparel, the difference is quite visible. So, how to address this? Simply improve the user experience by facilitating faster browsing through pages. Make it light, not heavy and provide as much product information as possible. Don’t put too many images/ content that take an eternity to load and often crash on slower computers. Instead, user visual content that properly shows the product. Also, don’t force your customers to sign up without offering them any incentives. Doing so will likely drive them away, and you’ll lose precious customers. Instead, inform them about the product by showing pictures and content and let them explore and read. The idea is to inform them that your product offers the value they seek.

9. Use Customer Feedback

Once a customer buys an apparel from you, wait for the feedback. The feedback can be an invaluable source of information that tells you if your product is fulfilling customer’s expectations or not. In other words, the customer feedback serves as the ultimate litmus test that will educate about the ups and downs of your product and will help you adjust and improve the upcoming products accordingly.

Moreover, adding a customer survey can help you better understand your customers. In the longer run, it will allow you to offer them improved, more valuable products. Make sure your form doesn’t become long and boring so keep it pertinent to customer experience and ask for recommendations/ improvements.

10. Reduce Your Site’s Bounce Rate

Imagine, you pulled every trick in the book from blog content, targeted ads to organic search to improve your site’s customer retention, only to lose it to higher bounce rate? Truth to be told, that’s exactly what higher bounce rate can do to your site. Worse, analytics you use to get more traffic are the ones that show customers your site’s higher bounce rate. Luckily, you can control the bounce rate in several ways.

Firstly, pay attention to your site’s content. Long sentences and chunky paragraphs will scare your visitors away so avoid them. Then, use SEO tricks to make your site’s content more readable. Use bullet points and subheadings, infographics, charts and headings, and screenshots to add more conviction to your content. Update your content from time to time and keep adding fresh leads to make it relevant.

Lastly, add a great call to action, to sum up, your piece and entice the customer to take immediate action.

Try this customer retention enhancing tricks and see how your apparel business gets noticed. In time, your effort will pay off, and customers will take note of your endeavors.

Hassan Mansoor
Hassan Mansoor is the Founder and Director at Technical Minds Web. After completing Masters in Business Administration, he established a small digital marketing agency with the primary focus to help the small business owners to grow their online businesses. Being a small entrepreneur, he has learned from project management, and day to day staff management and staff productivity. He's a regular contributor on Business.com.

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