If you own an ecommerce business, what are you doing to retain your current customers and keep them happy?
Because it costs five times more to acquire customers than to retain them, it’s crucial to create a strategy to keep the customers you already have. Every business owner wants to grow their brand and watch the numbers multiply. However, when you forget about those who already invested money into your company by purchasing your products, you also leave behind ROI, conversions, and revenue.
Customer retention is crucial for ecommerce businesses because it creates a relationship where it’s difficult to form one otherwise. When your brand is strictly online, it’s important to find ways to connect with customers and form a community so they keep coming back.
If you want to improve the customer retention rate for your ecommerce business, here are a few tips to get started.
Improve Customer Support
Your customers are the bread and butter of your business. Without them, you have no one to market to and no way to generate sales. If you want to retain them, you need to show them you care about their concerns and are there to offer solutions. It further humanizes your brand and makes them feel like an important part of your business.
To retain customers, improve your customer service department. Your brand should be able to assist customers at any stage of the sales funnel, answer their questions, and provide solutions. Quality customer service offers quick support, a friendly attitude, a conversational tone, and a personalized experience tailored to the customer.
For your ecommerce business, use live chat to talk to website visitors and provide instant support. Live chat has a 73 percent satisfaction rate among customer service channels, proving it’s an effective method of offering customer support. You can set limited daytime hours or provide 24/7 support if your budget allows.
Use chatbots to further intrigue users and grab their attention. When they feel like they’re talking to a character, it creates a fun, exciting experience that prolongs engagement. Include business phone services that offer over-the-phone customer support for those who prefer this method. It’s vital to consider every customer and how they prefer to interact with your brand so you see improved customer retention.
Optimize Your Contact Form
Because your store is online, it’s crucial to provide a smooth UX for website visitors. If anything on your site doesn’t work properly, confuses users, or makes it difficult for them to browse freely, you’ll see a higher bounce rate and fewer sales.
A crucial part of enhancing customer retention is improving contact form conversions on your website. At some point, everyone has had a negative experience trying to purchase a product online. It’s difficult enough making a buying decision. So, when a customer is finally ready but they encounter an unoptimized form, it discourages them from completing the purchase.
To optimize your contact form, minimize the number of fields you require users to fill out. If you expect them to take time out of their day to fill out 15 fields, you’ll see your sales decrease real quick.
A staggering 67 percent of visitors will abandon your form if they encounter any complications, so ensuring that your forms provide a positive UX is crucial. Make sure you only ask for user information you need to process their purchase. If you don’t need their phone number, leave it out. Consumers today are especially wary about their security when they buy online, so only asking for the most necessary information is crucial.
Build Trust
Today’s consumers are more cautious than they were before ecommerce existed. They now have to consider their security and the validity of the product without having seen it in person. That requires a certain level of certainty and trust they must build with your brand before they whip out their credit card.
But, how do you gain consumers’ trust when everything is online? The answer is social proof. Social proof uses the emotions and attitudes of others to influence you to do the same thing they’re doing. If we see people we know and trust raving about products and services they love, it convinces us that we should copy them to reproduce that feeling.
There are several forms of social proof you can use on your website:
Customer reviews
Testimonials
Real-time activity tracking
Brand logos
Word of mouth
Celebrity or influencer endorsements
Credentials
Awards, accolades, certifications, etc.
When a friend tells you about their latest purchase and how happy they are with it, it makes you feel like you need it too. It also makes you trust that brand because they do and they had a positive experience.
Create a Loyalty Program
Loyalty programs are a great for way ecommerce businesses to reward shoppers for their repeat purchases, increase revenue, and retain customers. It incentivizes the purchasing process so customers feel like they’re taking advantage of great deals and are part of something special.
Make it easy for people to join your customer loyalty program by promoting it freely on your website, through email, and on social media. The rules are entirely up to you. If you want to encourage new visitors to join, you can give them extra points for signing up. Encourage future purchases by implementing limited-time offers, deals, and promotions they can’t pass up.
Rewards programs make customers feel like they’re part of an exclusive online club where they benefit from spending. Starbucks is a prime example of a company who knows what to do with their loyalty program to boost sales and build customer excitement.
With their mobile app, it’s easy for customers to pay for orders, reload their virtual Starbucks card, and monitor their points. Not only does this simplify the checkout process, but it also gives Starbucks valuable data about their customers that they can use for future marketing purposes. It also drives customers back to the app every time they make a purchase, making it a valuable marketing tool.
Over To You
If you own an ecommerce store, improving your customer retention strategy is a must. Your customers determine the growth or decline of your business. If you don’t cater to their needs, form a special connection, and offer incentives, you’ll find it more difficult to encourage them to return. How will you improve customer retention for your ecommerce store?
