Customer retention is crucial for ecommerce businesses. Making customers the priority is a must when the competition is intense and customer loyalty continues to decline. We gathered a list of 5 customer retention techniques to apply to your ecommerce strategy to keep your customers coming back and increase sales.
5 Customer Retention Techniques for eCommerce
1. Tailored Emails
People are constantly bombarded with advertisements, so it's become easy to automatically disregard the ones that don't stand out. To stand out among the crowd and to capture the correct audience, create tailored emails and messages. A great way to create tailored emails is to include product recommendations based on purchase behavior for up-selling and cross-selling.
Including product recommendations in abandoned cart emails is also an effective way to capture attention. To further entice them to make the purchase, include a small incentive with an expiration date. If you don't have the ability to capture information on abandoned shopping carts, try using the HubSpot Integration.
2. Educational Resources
The best way to keep customers happy is to solve their problems. Creating effective solutions is only possible by figuring out what problems they face. After you've figured out what they need, create educational content, such as white papers, ebooks, and blog articles.
Become the resource your target audience seeks when looking for information by providing the solutions to their challenges and pain points. If you're having trouble identifying who your ideal customers are, refer to this worksheet for help.
3. Customer Service
Always have a team available to help customers with questions and concerns. Provide several different ways to be reached. Many ecommerce stores now offer live chat panes or have an FAQ page with helpful information. Contact information should be easily identified throughout the page to avoid causing the customer's frustration. It's also a great idea to include contact information in abandoned shopping cart emails to make sure the lost sale wasn't due to a problem on the website.
4. Social Media Engagement
Be active in social networks. Make sure not to only post about your company, provide other valuable information for followers. Social networks are an important place to reply to comments or questions. When others see that someone has left a question for the company and it went unanswered, it gives off the impression that your company does not care about customers. Set some time aside once or twice per week to reply and engage.
5. Responsive Design
Customers will access your website from different devices, so your ecommerce store must be displayed properly on every single one. The ecommerce stores without responsive sites make it difficult to navigate the store on a mobile phone and/or tablet. Online shoppers do not want to spend time on a site with tiny text and pictures, thus causing them to leave the site without making a purchase.
eCommerce sales on mobile devices in the US alone are expected to hit $50 billion this year, with a four year growth in 2010 from $2.2 billion to $42.8 billion in 2013. Do you really want to miss out?
If you'd like to learn more about responsive web design, download our free guide to see how it can improve your business. Here's an example of one store that took the leap to transition to a responsive ecommerce store and has experienced great success. Is it your turn?
