7 Customer Retention Tactics to Get Current Ecommerce Customers to Purchase More

By: Richard Lazazzera

You’ve heard it time and time again. It’s cheaper to get past customers to purchase again than it is to find new customers. This is true for most businesses, especially in the crowded online ecommerce arena where ad impressions, clicks and conversions always seem to be increasing in cost, making new customers more and more expensive to acquire.

Knowing that it's cheaper to get current customer to purchase from you again, ask yourself, when was the last time you truly made an effort to re-engage your current customers to get them to come back?

In today’s post, we will look at seven strategies to target your current customers and get them to purchase more often.

Let’s find out how

Benefits of Reselling to Current Customers
There are several benefits to reselling to previous customers versus acquiring new ones. First and foremost, as mentioned in the intro, it usually costs less. That alone is reason enough to spend more time focusing on your current customers, however, there are additional benefits as well.

According to the book Leading On The Edge Of Chaos, customer profitability rates tends to increase over the life of a retained customer and a two percent increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by ten percent.

Finally, the more times a customer purchases from you, the stronger your relationship becomes. It’s these strong relationships that cause customers to champion your products and services, effectively creating powerful referrals and word-of-mouth marketing that will help drive new customers.

So now that we understand why focusing your energy on your current customers can be more important than acquiring new ones, let's look at some ways to increase conversions amongst your current customers.

1. Utilize Customer Accounts
Customer accounts can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, accounts can make repurchasing much easier by giving customer easy access to past orders as well as pre-filled shipping information. On the other hand, customer accounts can be a seen as too big of a commitment for new customers. Because of this, most people will choose to checkout as a guest if given the option

So how can you effectively implement and encourage customer accounts while not hindering conversions of first time customers? The trick is to provide the option to create an account after the first order has been placed.

Additionally, if you're on the Shopify platform and your customer accounts are optional, you can send customers direct invitations to encourage them to activate an account after the fact.

2. Implement a Customer Loyalty Program
Further developing on the idea of customer accounts, is to reward customers for their loyalty. Developing a loyalty membership to your store is another way to increase conversions from your current customers while rewarding them for their repeat purchases.

Creating a loyalty program can be as simple as rewarding customers on their second purchase at your store or after a set dollar figure. Your store reports makes it easy to see who your best customers are by dollar value and total number of orders:

If you're too busy or your customer list is too big, there are ways to also automate this with Shopify apps such as Klaviyo which can automatically email your customer a reward coupon when your customers make a repeat purchase from your store.

Additionally, you can opt for full featured and automated loyalty apps like SLoyalty and LoyaltyLion which can reward your customers for a variety of actions they take in your store, including creating a customer account, referring friends and making purchases.

3. Send Regular Customer Newsletter Emails
Your email list is a critical tool for maintaining and building relationships with your current customers. Time and time again email has proven itself to be one of the top converting channels for ecommerce. Take a look at the graph below from Monetate. It's clear that email converts much higher than social and close to twice as high as organic search:

An email marketing campaign like this to all of your customers is quick to implement and can produce big gains.

For best practices when sending out newsletters, check out our post on Email Marketing: A Guide To Ecommerce Newsletters.

Read More at: https://www.shopify.com/blog/15593136-7-customer-retention-tactics-to-get-current-ecommerce-customers-to-purchase-more