Getting someone to buy things is tougher than making a simple purchase.
It’s difficult to persuade someone to make a purchase. But forcing them to get into repeat purchase mode is exhausting.
Because of this, most brand owners do not place a lot of emphasis on keeping customers. Instead, they devote all of their time, resources, and money to lure in new clients.
They are unaware that long-term, existing clients are far more important than acquiring new ones. Existing customers are gold. Bain and Co. estimate that repeat customers spend an average of 67% more than new ones.
How to get repeat customers
We’ll go through some of the effective business methods that you can implement in your eCommerce store right immediately to increase recurring transactions.
Encouraging repeat purchases is an important goal
Because they have established a network of relationships and trust, successful firms see a high rate of repeat business. Here are a few tested methods to aid you in achieving the same goals:
Having a loyalty program gets you repeat customers
No matter how big or little, every successful eCommerce company needs a strong loyalty program in place. Customers can be traditionally attracted and encouraged to make their first purchase through loyalty programs. Credit points, cash discounts, freebies, and other incentives can make them get into repeat purchase mode.
Once you’ve attracted customers, you can next spice up the program by doubling or tripling the number of reward points they receive for each transaction. This starts a positive feedback loop where your customers can make purchases, earn points, and then use those points to make more purchases.
Everything benefits from this situation. As your sales grow, your customers continue to receive rewards for supporting your business.
Create an omnichannel experience
This tactic has a great deal of potential to expand the window of repeat business in your company. Owing to the advance of technology, people have gotten much better at researching and separating the good things from the bad ones in a store. This indicates that the emphasis has changed from product quality and brand name to the shopping experience.
The simplest solution for a business owner to improve the customer experience is to create an omnichannel ecosystem. To rephrase it, you must make sure that your customers can make purchases from you through any channel of their preference. More importantly, you need to provide the same standard of service across all of these platforms.
Make the purchasing process really device-independent, to begin with. In other words, customers should be able to make purchases from any device of their choice, including a tablet, smartphone, or laptop.
Second, make investments in areas you haven’t yet explored. For instance, if your company merely has a website, think about developing a mobile app.
And before you raise an eyebrow, creating a mobile app isn’t a big task as it once was. It simply takes a few hours to construct a customized app for your company using low-code/no-code platforms like Appmaker. The coolest aspect is that writing any code at all is not necessary to create the app.
Concentrate on the high-volume sales season
Repeat purchases can be greatly increased during sale events like New Year’s and BFCM. However, this is also the time when customer loyalty is the lowest. If they discover a better bargain on the websites of your competitors, customers won’t bat an eye. Additionally, if it starts to reduce your profit margins, it is tough to offer a sizable discount.
The best solution to this problem is to extend more loyalty points just before the start of the sale. It has two advantages. One benefit is that even if you do not provide greater prices than your competitors, it will encourage customers to think about your brand during these times. Two, it will be helpful to you when it’s off-season and business is often slow.
Make email lists and send follow-up messages
Emails act as text-like alerts for your customers, informing them of fantastic bargains and letting them know how important they are to your business. Customers will leave their contact information when they make purchases from your store. It is your obligation to compile the list of contacts and organize the contact information so that you can start focusing on the right audience.
The essential window of time to encourage a repeat purchase is right after a buyer places their initial order. Describe the extras they can add to their order in a follow-up reminder email.
Give customer feedback priority
Make sure to include customer feedback in your retention plan. Listening to the customers who spend money and time with your business might not be as simple to quantify as a KPI or retention rate, though. However, taking their feedback into account will help you create a more thorough customer experience that will promote more return business.
Make use of retargeting ads
As the name suggests, retargeting advertising campaigns are created to target a certain demographic of potential customers who may have previously viewed an advertisement. Although you have the option of making first-time buyers your target market for the advertisements. Using the data from the analytics tool, you can duplicate the advertising pattern and increase sales with these ads. Unsurprisingly, result-oriented advertising campaigns outperform non-optimized ones by a wide margin.
What is a good returning customer rate?
The total number of consumers (customers) a business retains over time is known as the return customer rate. Additionally, it shows the proportion or percentage of a business’s customers who remain with it over time. Despite the metric’s initial simplicity, it provides crucial insights into areas for possible development and improvement.
You must also account for any new clients you got to keep your estimates from changing. For example, if you start off with 20 clients, lose eight, then gain nine, your customer retention rate is not 110%. Tracking retention or loyalty metrics is therefore crucial for evaluating the success of a company’s customer service program and marketing strategy.
The computation of the return customer rate accounts for repeat customer transactions divided by all website purchases for a specified period of time. The formula for calculating the return customer rate, or repeat rate, is:
Each sector has a particular set of “acceptable” rates, which vary for different stores, depending on the product mix and consumer groups you’re serving. For small and medium-sized retailers, a repeat purchase percentage of 19.87% to 39.6% is a reasonable range. According to Squarespace, aiming for a repeat purchase percentage of at least 27% is a good standard.
Conclusion
To sum up, bringing in new customers is only one aspect of your responsibilities as a business owner. You must make sure that your current customers stick around and regularly make purchases from you. Only if you offer them rewards, exceptional service, and a seamless shopping experience will they continue to be loyal to you.
The advantages of keeping your current customers go beyond sales and money, so keep that in mind. Through word-of-mouth advertising, devoted customers will inevitably bring in new customers.
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