Customer retention is vital for online businesses to understand and apply in the convoluted and highly competitive eCommerce space. Online consumers’ increasingly short attention span and the sheer amount of choices they have means that companies that don’t retain their customers effectively don’t succeed.
Many online businesses make the mistake of focusing primarily on attracting new customers. While this is essential, experts agree that retention is as crucial to growth and success. It’s also much cheaper. Online companies can spend up to five times more on attracting new clients than on retaining current customers.
Retention can be challenging, and you need to have precise strategies in place to ensure that it becomes part of the culture of your business. With the proper knowledge and consistency, you will keep customers happy and, most importantly, keep them returning.
In this article, we will help you achieve an effective customer retention strategy by covering the following:
- What is a customer retention strategy?
- The benefits of a customer retention strategy.
- 5 highly effective customer retention strategies.
What Is a Customer Retention Strategy?
Customer retention is the art of ensuring that your customers keep making regular purchases. A customer retention strategy aims to keep your first-time customer happy, engaged, and ready to return for everyday purchases. These strategies should prioritize the customer at all times and ensure that all processes are effortless and convenient.
The Benefits of a Customer Retention Strategy
Customer retention is highly beneficial to online businesses for the following reasons:
Loyal Customers Are More Profitable
You’ve already seen that it’s cheaper to retain customers, and it is also true that regular, loyal customers spend way more than new customers, which is an absolute win-win!
Increased Word-Of-Mouth Referrals
As a business owner, you understand the importance of referrals. Discerning customers can often see right through marketing gimmicks and promises. Word-of-mouth referrals, however, almost always lead to new sales, and loyal customers are the most likely to recommend your brand to others.
Increased Engagement
Regular customers will always engage more closely with your brand, and this close relationship is essential for constructive feedback, which is excellent for improving and streamlining your services.
5 Highly Effective Customer Retention Strategies
Now that you understand the importance of customer retention, it’s time to look at some highly effective retention strategies!
Facilitate Customer Convenience
Your customers don’t want complicated; they want simple. So to retain customers, you need to ensure that their online experience is as convenient as possible.
From your website, app, or social media pages, to your customer service and payment processes, ensure that you make the experience as seamless and easy as possible for your customers.
Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are prevalent for an excellent reason – They work! Your customers will be motivated to stick with you whether you offer discounts on repeat purchases, redeemable purchase points, or any other loyalty incentive.
Remember that loyalty programs should offer reasonable value to your customers. It might have the opposite effect if you provide too little or make it difficult to earn points!
Shipment Tracking
Customers LOVE checking on the progress of their newly purchased goods! In fact, on average, they do so almost five times for every online purchase.
As such, it is vital to have an interactive and accurate shipment tracking platform as part of your customer retention program, giving the customer what they want and opening up opportunities for marketing other goods and services in the post-purchase stage.
Consistency
Whatever strategies you choose to implement, the most important of all is being consistent. Nothing will make a first-time customer run to your competitor faster than flaky, inconsistent, and erratic service.
The golden rule is that if you want consistent loyalty from your customers, you need to provide them with consistent service and value.
Kindness And Consideration
Lastly, customers will want to support you more if they know you care about them and others. It seems a little sentimental, but it’s true!
Philanthropic initiatives should be a part of your game plan – This is not only the right thing to do, but it is also great for customer retention!
Remember to consider your customers too. Be accommodating and understand their needs. Whether it’s ensuring their safety during a pandemic or small things like remembering their birthdays, little gestures go a long way in customer retention.
Conclusion
Finical is passionate about providing online businesses with the tools they need to ensure a seamless online customer payment experience. Problems with the payment process are a severe red flag for customers and are one of the main reasons customers don’t return.
At Finical, we don’t only provide you with the right equipment to ensure customer retention; we also offer bespoke packages and complete support. After all, you are as essential to us as your customers are to you.
Contact us today for a free consultation.
