Marketer’s Guide to Retain Customers While Scaling an eCommerce Business

As any eCommerce business scales, it becomes crucial to focus more on customer retention compared to acquisition. This is because after your online store’s sales become stable, retaining existing customers and nurturing them becomes more profitable than spending money on acquiring new customers.

In fact, studies have shown that increasing customer retention by 5% results in a minimum 25% increase in profits. As an eCommerce business, you should start focusing on customer retention as soon as you start gaining some traction.

As your business scales and becomes established, the focus on customer retention should eventually be more than the focus on customer acquisition. This way, you can save money on ad spends and use the money for reinvesting your business profits. For example, a great choice for reinvesting your company profits would be the stock market.

So, it is wise to start working on your customer retention strategy as early as possible to get the most results out of it later on. In this brief guide for marketers, let’s talk about some tips and tricks to start working on customer retention while scaling your eCommerce businesses.

Offer Premium Customer Service

One of the foremost important things that eCommerce marketers must focus on right from the start is offering good customer service. The kind of customer service you offer can make a world of difference to your customer retention rate, and it can also help to attract new customers to your business.

You can offer good customer service, make it easy for customers to get in touch with you in case of any queries or issues. You should add your contact details on your website homepage, emails, and across all social media bios.

You can also consider integrating AI chatbot with your website or mobile app. This helps customers find instant answers to their queries without having to go through the hassle of contacting you.

Start a Customer Loyalty Program

Starting a customer loyalty program is one of the easiest ways to get your customers to keep coming back to you. Loyalty programs offer credits or rewards to your customers each time they make a purchase.

Loyalty programs turn out to be a win-win for both you and your customers. Your customers get some value by making purchases from you, and you make more profits out of your existing customers.

Right from the first purchase, you can encourage customers to create an account by offering them some free credits or discounts for doing so. You can then offer credits or rewards for each time your customers make transactions. This will encourage them to keep making repeat purchases from your store.

Throw the Spotlight on Your Customers

Having a customer-centric approach may be the key to retaining more of your existing customers. Hence, you should never miss the opportunity to throw the spotlight on your customers.

You can do this by featuring your customers on social media. Creating a user-generated content strategy may be helpful. You can urge your customers to create some kind of content for your brand, and in return, you can feature them on your social media profiles or website homepage.

Making your customers feel special and valued will help you win over their loyalty for a long time. This will also help to increase the visibility of your eCommerce brand through word-of-mouth marketing.

Nurture Your Customers Through Social Media

Social media platforms can be a potent tool to create a meaningful and valuable relationship with your existing customer base. This is because all your customers are most likely to hang out on one social media channel or other every single day.

You can use this opportunity to nurture them, thus increasing the chances of repeat purchases. You can create a unique social media strategy that is specifically tailored to nurture your existing customers.

You can engage your customers on social media channels by offering unique, value-packed content. You can also conduct giveaways and contests on social media on special occasions. Offering exclusive discounts and offers can also help to gain traction and nurture your customers on social media platforms.

Use Email Marketing to Engage Your Customers

Leveraging emails to engage your customers can be transformational for your eCommerce business. Personalized emails that genuinely add value to your customers can be a great means to trigger repeat purchases from your customers.

To encourage customers to provide their email addresses, you should consider offering them incentives like a special discount coupon, free credits, or free shipping. Once you start building your email list, remember to use it wisely.

Instead of bombarding your customers with promotional offers, you can try to send a newsletter with informational content. This can be a curation of relevant content, some special guides, or anything else that will be of interest to your customers.

Create Designs of The Website and Content For Each Customer Journey Stage

Many new eCommerce businesses make the mistake of creating content only for the awareness stage of the customer journey. Though this may be beneficial in acquiring new customers, it may not be effective for nurturing your existing customers.

So, you must do equal justice to customers at every stage of your customer journey. This includes the awareness stage, interest, consideration, purchase, loyalty, and advocacy. Customers at each stage will be interested in different types of content. Having a deep understanding of your customers will help you with this process.

You can research your existing customers to understand the type of content and relevant website design they may be interested in. Check this post out from GlobalOwls on relevant website design. You can also research your competitors to have a fair idea of the type of content that will gain you the most amount of traction at each customer journey stage.

Offer Easy Exchange and Returns

Exchange and return policies are a big deal for many customers. Even one disappointing encounter with your business can lead to customer churn. Offering smooth exchange and return policies is a must if you want to retain more customers.

Ensure that you have a process to fulfill orders, like the one from Pack & Send’s reliable eCommerce fulfillment system. Your order fulfillment practices can remove any bottlenecks that may lead to bad experiences for your customers. Try to offer hassle-free product exchanges and returns to ensure satisfactory experiences for your customers.

Offer Personalized Customer Experience

Consumers today do not want the one-size-fits-all shopping experience. It is important to offer experiences that are tailored and ultra-personalized to your customers’ needs. Personalizing the entire customer journey can be highly beneficial in winning over their loyalty for life.

Using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can help you segment your existing customers into different categories. You can segment your customers based on demographics, interests, pain points, customer journey stage, and many other factors.

Segmenting your customer base into different groups will help you target each segment with personalized customer experiences. You can use personalized messaging to ensure increased brand loyalty. You can also offer personalized product recommendations, upsells, and cross-sells to trigger more repeat purchases from your customers.

Final Thoughts

As your eCommerce business scales and becomes established, the focus on customer retention should eventually be more than the focus on customer acquisition. This way, you can save money on ad spends and use the money for reinvesting your company profits, say in the stock market.

As an eCommerce business starts scaling, it is important to create an effective customer retention strategy to ensure maximum profitability from the existing customers. A lack of effective customer retention strategies may lead to a considerable dip in profits.

Plus, remember that people search about a site online, be it a social media or search engine. So, building a solid brand presence will help you retain your customers and leave an everlasting brand image. You might also want to go for an SEO consultant if needed. SEO Trench’s Montreal SEO Consultant is one such resource. You can search in Google to find a reliable one from your location or as per your budget. 

You should start working on your customer retention strategy early on. The tips provided in this guide will help you with just that.


About the Author

Vikrant Jhala

Vikrant Jhala is a Content Marketing Specialist at Growfusely. He has been in the online marketing space for 5 years now. He loves researching and developing content. He has a keen interest in photography and emerging technologies like blockchain and artificial intelligence. In his spare time, he prefers binge-watching online courses on marketing, copywriting, and post-processing.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *