Customer retention and customer acquisition are two big terms in e-commerce that store owners must get to understand.
Knowing what these terms are and how they can help you grow your store with regard to customer base, sales, and revenue can accelerate your journey as a Shopify merchant.
Starting a Shopify store is a one-in-a-million step in building an online presence for your brand. For some store owners, an online store is to give their already existing business an extension to gain more sales and customers. While others use only the online store as their sales channel.
In a word, those are the omnichannel or multiple channel and single channel respectively. Whichever category you are in, you need to take your tips and tricks lesson on how to get customers (new) and how to make the new ones stay or return to buy again (returning buyers).
Let’s see how you can make your newly acquired customers return to buy again without having to break your pocket. The customer retention ways we’ll be walking through in this article might require very little marketing cost to achieve them.
Hence, the heading that says a cost-effective way to increase customer retention.
What Is Customer Acquisition?
Customer acquisition happens when a store or business gains new buyer customers for their store. Customer acquisition can involve a number of steps such as identifying potential customers, target marketing for that customers, and persuading such customers to make a purchase.
For e-commerce stores, the average cost of acquiring a new customer is estimated to be around $45 to $50 for big stores. Relatively, for small retail stores customer acquisition can be around $20 or less depending on product niche or customer behavior. This cost is not rigid and you can acquire your customers for far less depending on which marketing strategy you choose.
So before going for a customer acquisition strategy, ensure you have your store audited and know what your potential customer will be responsive to.
After acquiring a new customer, what next?
That question is what will bring us to the customer retention phase.
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What Is Customer Retention?
When you have a first-time buyer in your store make a purchase and the same customer comes again to place another order at a different time. That shows you have retained such a customer.
Popular notion says to retain a customer costs five times (5X) the cost of acquiring a new customer.
That shows that the work does not end with customer acquisition. If you spend $1 to acquire a customer, you might need approximately $5 to retain that customer.
Know that the cost of retaining your customers depends solely on the industry or niche of the products you sell. Research by Shopify shows how much it costs to gain customer retention based on the product category.
Ways To Increase Customer Retention For Your Shopify Store
1. Improved Customer Service
Boxes to tick with this customer retention strategy are
- Personalization
- Trust
- Good onboarding experience
- Good Post-Purchase experience
A customer’s experience begins from the home page down to every page of your store. To give your customers a good shopping experience, you need to have your call-to-actions and other marketing words on your store to be direct and quick to understand.
This way the first shopping experience with every customer can keep them coming back for more purchases.
As the onboarding experience is important so is the post-purchase experience of your customers. You can optimize your Shopify thank you page to help maximize every customer and also give them a departure that will make them return.
You can attach a discount to your reorders, offer gifts, and also engage personalized strategies like using customers’ names to show how much you value them buying from your store.
Personalization can also be your selling point from customers’ carts. Instead of using indirect pronouns, you can get customers to sign up with their names which can be useful for this function. With this, you can say “Hello Sarah, your cart is loaded and ready for payment”.
This way customers can trust you and you can gain some personal ground with them. Both sides win.
2. Offer Post-Purchase Support
Making your customers know that you care beyond getting $100 bucks from them builds bonds and trust.
Having customer-centered post-purchase support for your products can help you increase customer retention. As an online buyer myself, I get comfortable with stores that do not leave me hanging on how to use a product I got from them, especially for items I’m buying for the first time.
Even for products that you think are easy to understand its use, you can still have a support video that can show customers the other ways they can use the product beyond what they know.
For products that do not require such tutorials, you can highlight other ways customers can use them, maintain them, and probably recycle them when they are no longer usable.
This small technical support can be an attractive point for a customer and can make them want to order again from your store.
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3. Clear Communication Channel
I know email marketing is one of the marketing cards e-commerce store owners play. And this marketing strategy gives feedback that is amazing in terms of sales and customer retention.
When choosing your communication channels ensure that customers are given the utmost priority. Whether you choose web-based communication, that is having pop-ups that customers see on your store as they browse through or push notifications. I’d say that you feed them with information that customers would find valuable.
Let’s say Jacquline placed her order two days ago with a deal to get it delivered in 5 days. You can give updates about the delivery stage and a probable time of when she will get the items delivered. In the same vein, when there is a delay, ensure you mention it to your customers. This helps you strengthen customers’ trust.
4. Build a community
The reason why having a community for your brand helps you grow sales and customer base is that you gain more authenticity with existing buyers.
It is easier for new customers to buy from you when they see your track record of customers who have made a purchase from your store in previous times.
An online community gives customers and potential customers a sense of belonging and togetherness. With a channel like this, customers can share their experiences in your store. These conversations can be converted into feedback that can help you improve your store as well as your customer experience.
Wrap
You can increase your customer retention rate without having to break the bank on marketing strategies.
Using the measures highlighted in this blog post can help your customers stay with you for a long time. These strategies not only increase customer satisfaction but also create loyal customers who are more likely to return and refer others to the business.
