Acquiring a new customer is expensive, especially at this time when you need to fight hard to gain a potential customer’s attention. When it comes to marketing, you have many other ideas competing with yours in the advertising world. And most times the best attraction wins the target customer.
Customer acquisition might require a whole lot. Every walk along the journey requires great effort. From reaching out to target customers with mind-blowing ads that can spike their interest, to driving that traffic to your Shopify store and then converting them into sales. This journey chain needs a good marketing and sales plan to see it work out as desired.
After making a first-time buyer make their first purchase, do you now let them go forever? Absolutely, NO.
You need a good customer lifetime value to get the maximum return from customer acquisition costs. Typically, you need to make a new customer buy from your store multiple times. So that the profit from the orders they make can cover for the money spent on acquiring them. This way you can get a win situation.
It is not an easy task to convert a visitor into sales. And more work is expected to make the new customer into a repeat buyer. You need to shape your marketing to boost customer lifetime value.
Check this blog post on Customer Lifetime Value and how to calculate it.
What Is CLV?
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the length of years a customer spends as a customer with your e-commerce store. The period a customer has spent buying from your store, their average order value, and how frequently they make a purchase are elements of a customer’s lifetime value.
Effective And Practical Ways To Increase Customer Lifetime Value
1. Customer Support
“A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large.” – Henry Ford
Good customer service is your best-seller trick when it comes to customer retention, customer acquisition, and customer lifetime value. If you play good with your customers, they are going to love you forever for it. Maybe until you give them a reason to stop.
Customer support is not only about popping up in the customer’s direct chat channel saying ‘Hello, Jackson’. It comes with understanding every bit of their shopping journey and helping them through it all. You should be able to envisage what your customers might need at different stages and how you can help them get past that.
“If you don’t take care of your customer, your competitor will.” – Bob Hooey
Great support for your customers pre and post-purchase is your flight into increasing customer lifetime value. Availability and accessibility can be your selling point. Once customers know that they can reach you on all your platforms, it gives them more trust in your brand.
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2. Collect Feedback And Use Them
You should collect feedback so you can use them to provide better service for your customers and not just for collection’s sake. Having reviews on your Shopify store is not a routine, it is for the sole benefit of helping your store grow and get better in terms of customer support.
Although, reviews and feedback can serve other functions to buyers. The sole aim of feedback for a store owner is to make adjustments when necessary. When customers see your response to feedback, they get encouraged to stick to your brand.
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Customers are likely to stay loyal to stores that are able to fix their issues and evolve to give them better service. When you abandon customer feedback, your chance of growing your Shopify store becomes low. Because at a faster rate, you will be having customers churning your store when there are no changes.
When you collect feedback, go through them and not dump them. There lies a path to your growth.
3. Build A Customer-Friend Relationship
A strong bond between buyers and sellers has the chance to increase customer lifetime value. When you have a good communication line with your customers, they see you as a friend. Someone who is genuinely concerned about them.
Rather than sending sales-related messages all the time, you can take your time to get to know your customers more. Create a poll and engage them with something fun. You can schedule game time together with customers or any other activity that can spike the customer’s interest.
Having a relationship beyond buying and selling with your customers saves you one loyal customer who will not think twice before visiting your store to make a purchase.
4. Reward Loyal Customers
If there is something to gain each time a customer makes a repeat purchase, the customers will surely want to visit often to redeem the reward attached to their repeat purchases.
Customer loyalty can be known through the frequency of purchases a customer makes. Offering a reward for such customers encourages them to keep returning to your Shopify store to make a purchase.
This further strengthens customer relationships and loyalty to your brand. So if you are looking to increase customer lifetime value you can encourage them with a reward for every repeat purchase that they make. This way you extend a customer’s lifetime value on your store because they keep returning due to the attraction from the loyalty rewards.
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5. Smooth Shopping Journey
Making the onboarding process for every first-time visitor to your store can help you improve customer lifetime value. Optimizing your Shopify pages to make customers’ shopping experiences seamless is necessary for retaining customers.
Onboarding has to do with the design and arrangement of the Shopify store. You do not want visitors to leave after a few seconds of landing on your homepage or interacting with your products.
Providing customers with a clear call to action, guidance using design or copy, tutorials, etc can boost customer’s curiosity and confidence to look through your product collection.
This should also be reflected at every sales funnel stage. As much as you need to create a first impression with the top and middle sales funnel, the bottom funnel (checkout and thank you page) also need to have a seamless experience.
Wrap
Increasing CLV requires a comprehensive and customer-centric approach, where each step is aimed at delivering value and exceeding expectations. You should look towards optimizing the key pages on your Shopify store to better customer experience and loyalty.
