Delighting your customers is the main ingredient in the recipe to improve your eCommerce sales.
Once you’ve attracted your ideal customer to your store and gotten them to buy how do you retain them?
The easiest way to improve your retention rate is to create a stellar shopping experience.
Use the strategies below to create an amazing eCommerce shopping experience and see your business grow!
12 Ways to create a stellar shopping experience for your eCommerce shoppers
- Offer quality products
- Respond to customer concerns
- Implement a loyalty program
- Start an email or SMS newsletter
- Ask for reviews and feedback
- Have a social media presence
- Focus on your brand
- Personalize and customize the shopping experience
- Follow-up with your customers
- Research your customers
- Be transparent
- Accommodate your customer throughout the process
1. Offer quality products
The first and foremost strategy you need to focus on is the quality of your product or service.
The key to retain customers is to provide quality so that they are not only satisfied but also delighted, so they come back to your store and purchase more products.
Here’s a list that you can reference to see if your product provides value to your customer:
- The product offers ease to the customers; it is user-friendly
- The product is appropriately designed
- The price you are charging is according to perceived value, not more or less
Once your product or service ticks the complete checklist, you can be sure that you have a quality product!!
If customers see your product as valuable and worth spending money on, they will likely purchase again.
2. Respond to customer concerns
The top complaint that people have with brands is that they take too long to respond!
Your customer service department needs to be effective as they are the most crucial part of solving the problems and queries of your customers.
Be patient
Firstly, the employees dealing with such matters need to be patient as they have to encounter every type of customer. If they lose patience, your brand reputation will bear the cost.
Make customers feel valued
Secondly, guiding the customers throughout the complete process until their problem is solved is essential. It makes them feel valued and cared for.
Additionally, the timely response to the emails and chats sent by the customers needs a reply within a few hours or maximum, the next day as multiple competitors are ready to steal your show.
Have a quick response rate
Most eCommerce stores usually communicate with their customers through chats and emails; hence you need to be consistent, fast, friendly, and accurate in providing them what they need.
It is bad to keep your customers waiting and make them feel that they are annoying you; this may lead to customers leaving your store and not purchasing again.
3. Implement a loyalty program
Who doesn't enjoy
- Free gifts
- Discounts
- Exclusive BOGOF (buy one get one free) offers, etc?
this makes not only awareness of your brand awareness of your existing customers loyal to your store?
For example, each time the customer buys a product, they get a complimentary product or receive a few points, which they can use later as a reward.
The psychological impacts of these tactics are remarkable.
According to the stats, people tend to invest their time and energy when they are winning something for free. Although both the parties know that they are not achieving something extra, the psychological phenomenon is still at work.
Loyal customers buy more
On the other hand, rewarding your regular customers with loyalty points on your eCommerce store will motivate them to buy more frequently, and in the race of getting the prizes, other customers will buy too.
This will eventually increase your repeat purchases.
4. Start an email or SMS newsletter
Nothing else is more credible than what the stat from the research shows. It is calculated that 59% of customers make the buying decision when they get an email. In this way, they are repeatedly reminded about the presence of your online store.
Email is still the best for newsletters
Moreover, the effectiveness of marketing through email is 66% better than the other mediums of marketing and promoting your online store.
Your newsletter can include pictures of your products and feedback from the customers that have used your products and services.
Add reviews to your newsletter
The name and the image of the customers that have given the feedback will also make the comments authentic.
5. Ask for reviews and feedback
Knowing how your customers perceive your product or service is vital.
Getting feedback in the form of a review will help you identify your top products, but also help you make other products better.
Additionally, asking for reviews will make your customers feel valued by your brand especially if you offer them incentives to leave feedback!
Embrace negative reviews
On the other hand, negative feedback is more critical than positive ones. This will let you know what is holding your customers back from purchasing your product. Moreover, this will give you an insight into where you need to work harder.
Asking for general feedback will automatically save the time, effort, and money you were planning to invest in marketing research, as you can directly ask your existing customers about your positive and weak points.
Make leaving a review easy
It would be best to send a review request email where the customers click a star rating rather than provide wordy paragraphs.
The boredom, fatigue, and lack of time and interest can prevent customers from filling out lengthy forms hence keeping them concise and clear.
6. Have a social media presence
When you are looking to have a social media presence you need to
- Analyze the niche you are selling your product
- Figure out the top used social media platforms by your customers
It is common for people to think that online stores can be fraudulent. That’s why you have to win their trust.
Social media helps build credibility
Having a social media presence helps people believe in the credibility of your online store.
When customers see real people interacting with your page, they feel like they can trust your brand. The authenticity of your brand will be inevitable through social media platforms.
Additionally, you can use many other platforms for brand awareness by marketing your product through YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook ads.
7. Focus on your brand
Your reputation is the most significant contribution for a buyer to make a buying decision.
For example, Coca-cola, Sephora, or apple produce exceptional quality products, and the brand image is excellent.
To create a positive image of your brand, you need to share the background of your brand.
When people can personally relate to the history of your brand, they tend to buy more. In addition, the purpose and the intention of your brand will make people draw more attention to it.
Pay attention to the culture
Culture is something people's sentiments are firmly attached to. Therefore, people will eventually be influenced by your brand if you highly promote the cultural values of the country in which your online store operates and sells your products.
Try using the jargon/slang of your target audience and post relatable content. This will help in shaping the image of your brand.
8. Personalize and customize the shopping experience
People feel important when we direct our attention towards them.
Personalize communications
Similarly, if your store uses personalized communication like
- Adding their first name in an email
- Showing pop-ups of people who bought in their geographical area
- Showing their name on a shopping bag
People will feel like your brand cares
Create a personalized shopping experience
Moreover, you can optimize your product page through provide customization of products to your customers according to their wishes no matter what you sell.
This will allow them to showcase their individuality and art through your brand. This will make your brand reputation and bring your customers back to you to buy from your store repeatedly.
9. Follow up with your customers
When you have competition around you, you need to remind and bring your customers' attention back to you.
Send abandoned cart emails
Sending emails to your customers about products they have left behind is essential.
With a hundred things to distract customers, they can quickly leave their products in the carts and leave the page.
You can remind them about the incomplete process of their purchases which can increase the chance of them returning and buying the abandoned item.
Make cart recovery easy
Try adding a link in the email, which directly leads them to their cart; in this way, they do not have to go to your website and follow the process separately.
This motivates the customers to buy immediately due to the fear of missing out.
10. Research your customers
Research is an essential tool that helps you figure out where and how much to invest.
Not knowing what your consumers want and who exactly your customers are will lead you astray.
In order to have a proper direction, you need to conduct market research. Being market-oriented is the best option for the new brand. If you produce exactly what your consumer requires, the demand for your product will increase.
Additionally, knowing who your targeted audience is will make you invest in the areas worth spending. All of this can only be analyzed by market research.
11. Be transparent
One bad experience and your customer will break up with you.
From your end, you might be correct, but from theirs, you are wrong.
But the question is, what leads to such circumstances?
The answer is simple!
Your procedures, terms, and policies are unclear.
To avoid such scenarios so that customers stay loyal to your product, write the terms and conditions clearly on your website where the customers can easily access them.
This will avoid any sort of misunderstandings, and customers will know what they are getting into.
12. Accommodate your customer throughout the process
You might be excellent with everything mentioned above.
Your quality might be the best, and your customers might be cooperative, but if you fail to accommodate throughout the buying process, you may lose many potential customers.
It might take a lot of time and effort to reply and guide all the customers from one step to another; however, it is a matter of seconds for customers.
Once they like something, they immediately want to get all the information regarding the item, so they purchase it.
If you don't respond immediately or accurately, you can lose a customer.
Therefore, the complete buying process should be smooth for your customer to return to have a positive experience!
Conclusion
Once you implement all these steps, you’ll want to analyze your customer retention rate.
This is easy to do if you are using a shopping platform like Shopify.
Things take time, so make your best effort and see your retention rate soar!
