Re-engaging a past shopper is cheaper than acquiring new customers. You already have their information and know they like the products you sell. It’s just about figuring out the right customer loyalty strategies that would resonate with them enough to bring them back to your store and increase your retention rate.
In this blog, we’ll explore the different strategies you can use to start building customer loyalty among your shoppers and increase your customer retention rate in the long haul.
What is a customer loyalty program?
A customer loyalty program is a powerful strategy for ecommerce stores to increase retention. Through this, they encourage their current customer base to keep coming back for more by offering attractive perks, benefits, and discounts for their next purchase.
This not only increases your revenue but also helps you establish an emotional connection with your customers on a personal level, where they start preferring you over your competitors. Why? Simply because you made them feel important and valued.
7 Customer Loyalty Strategies to Increase Conversions and Retention
Personalized messaging
One of the biggest mistakes brands make is sending generic promotions to their customers that end up ignored. Instead, you can tailor your messages for different types of customers using the customer data available within your marketing tool like past purchases, location, and browsing behavior. Customers are likely to engage more with promotional messages that are relevant to them, bringing them back to buy, increasing their loyalty to your brand, and driving more conversions.
Here are 4 examples of personalized messages you can send to your target audience:
- Repurchase reminder: If you sell products that need to be repurchased (like skincare or food), set up automated reminders to be sent to shoppers to bring them back to your website to restock.
- Send marketing messages based on past behavior: Using customer segmentation, you can target specific customers who viewed or bought from a certain category to let them know about a newly arrived product or a discount they might be interested in.
- Location-based offers: If you have a free shipping offer for a specific region, you can easily send a promotion to shoppers only in that region, letting them know about this deal.
- Abandoned cart reminders: Set up automated messages to be sent to shoppers who abandoned their carts. You can even incentivize them with a small discount to come back and complete checkout.
Klaviyo’s article on segmentation will help you get started with personalized email marketing to get repeat business without skyrocketing your marketing costs.
Tailored on-site experience
When a past shopper lands on your site, making your store feel familiar to them is one of the easiest ways to make their shopping experience more delightful. Why? Because familiarity is a big part of building trust online.
Besides the positive experience of it, a personalized on-site experience lets your past customers get to the products they like with ease, driving them to checkout quicker.
After a personalized shopping experience with a brand, 60% of shoppers think they will become repeat buyers.
Personalizing your on-site experience can be done in a few ways:
- New product recommendations personalized to the shopper's interests
Many brands have a tailored section on their homepage that shows recommended products to returning customers. These recommendations would either be based on what they browsed in the past or just showing similar products from the category the shopper viewed or purchased from. This way, when they start browsing, they aren’t aimlessly looking at your catalog but instead, they’ve already found a product that has caught their eye.
Shopify apps like Rebuy let you set up personalized recommendation sections across your store.
- Bundle products that would be best purchased together
When shoppers are on a product page, you have an opportunity to recommend relevant products that would be a good fit along with the product they are already interested in.
Bundling simplifies your customer’s purchasing decisions, getting them to the products they want quicker. For your brand, it lets you upsell products, increasing AOV without negatively impacting your shoppers’ experience.
Bartesian is a premium cocktail brand that uses “Frequently Bought Together” sections on its product pages to let shoppers know what other products would pair well with the item that they are viewing.
Loyalty programs
Loyalty programs have been a winning strategy for brands of all sizes. They instantly incentivize the customer for every interaction they have on-site— making a purchase, leaving a review, following on social media. The customer can then use the points or extra perks they earned to get a good deal almost every time they shop from your brand, making them feel valued and increasing repeat purchases.
The numbers don’t lie! When joining a brand’s loyalty program, 80% of respondents mentioned that they purchased more frequently, while over half talked more often about the brand.
Teaspressa, a tea brand is all about catering to their customers' needs, from recipes to how-to guides to even a fun loyalty program that they've named “LoyalTEA Program”.
Shoppers earn points, right from signing up, and even get to climb tiers the more they spend on-site. The brand's punny tier names and exciting rewards and offers make it a program their customers are delighted to join.
Setting up a loyalty program for your eCommerce brand is easy. A Shopify app like Rivo lets you define your rewards, tiers, and even how it looks on-site, letting you customize every aspect of your loyalty program.
Install Rivo to get started with a loyalty program.
Instant and helpful customer service
Unlike an in-store experience, buying online does have certain limitations. Shoppers can’t touch or try the product, which means that they have a lot more questions about the product before they’re convinced to buy it. So, getting excellent customer service when shopping online is more important than when shopping in-store.
This means you need to invest in a customer support team that is prompt, thorough, and friendly. Without good service, customers are likely to choose your competitor, even if they previously liked a product they bought from you.
In fact, more than half of consumers will switch to a competitor after only one bad experience (with customer support).
When setting up good customer service for your eCommerce store, keep these basics in mind:
- Choose a customer support tool like Gorgias that is trusted and reliable.
- Set up automated responses for common questions.
- Ensure that you have support agents available round the clock and that they aren’t spread too thin across customer conversations.
- Keep turnaround times for conversations as short as possible. The sooner your team gets back to your customer, the faster the conversion and the better the customer satisfaction.
- Have an internal document of information that your team can easily copy from and modify, reducing time spent manually typing out responses.
Shopify’s guide to customer service dives into this in detail.
Create a community
Communities are a great way to build a loyal customer base. It allows people to talk about their interests, ask for advice, and have meaningful and engaging conversations.
In communities created by ecommerce brands, many happy customers become brand advocates, advising new shoppers. For customers, this becomes like a space that they can rely on for honest information about the products before they buy it, or even other information relevant to the industry. As a result, customers are more likely to think about the brand frequently and feel a sense of belonging to this exclusive group.
But, how do you build a community that increases brand loyalty and retention? Here’s how you can get started:
- Define the value you’re providing. For instance, if you’re a fitness brand, your goal can be to talk about fitness and what it looks like for your customers.
- Where do you want to host your community? It can be on your website, as a Facebook group, on Reddit, or even on your social media.
- How do you engage your community? Many brands start by sharing customer stories on social media, asking questions and sharing replies, engaging with comments, etc. They then prompt customers to join their private group.
- Engage regularly. Initially, you’ll need to pull the weight and constantly engage your shoppers and even share content. Once your customers start contributing and your community grows, it’ll stay active.
Fresh Chile sells sauces and has successfully built a community within a Facebook group. With more than 29K members, customers share recipes that use the brand’s sauces. At this point, they have 2 new posts every day.
Timely feedback collection and implementation
Brands with loyal buyers always do one thing right— they listen to their customers and optimize their brand experience based on the feedback they get. The result is satisfied customers, an emotional connection, and a lasting relationship.
One leading factor that drives loyalty among customers is when a brand works hard to provide excellent service and build a relationship with its clients. Collecting feedback from shoppers about your product as well as the experience they have with your brand shows them that you prioritize giving them the best. What’s more, by using this feedback to improve what you offer, you’ll attract new customers as well and ensure that your brand stays relevant to what customers need.
Collecting feedback is the easy bit, especially if you’re paying attention. You can collect and find feedback in many ways— post-purchase surveys, customer interviews, reviews, customer support conversations, social media platforms, etc.
You can take all this feedback to identify what’s a recurring issue or suggestion that customers have and make changes based on that.
Read this in-depth guide to collecting customer feedback.
Showing how you’ve implemented the feedback is trickier but a great place to get creative. Many brands use social media to let their shoppers know about their product launch based on suggestions and messages they’ve been getting or about optimizations that they’ve made to their brand experience.
Even sharing an Instagram Story letting your followers know about an improvement in your on-site experience can make them feel more connected to your brand.
Blogilates is an athleisure brand that does this well. They share videos around new variants of products that their loyal customers have been asking for, incorporating the feedback they get about how the product feels, fits, and looks.
Incentivize word-of-mouth with a referral program
Referral marketing generates 3-5X higher conversion rates than any other channel. And it makes sense why. People trust recommendations from friends and family more than anyone else.
A referral & rewards program doesn’t just get you new shoppers. It also keeps your repeat customers coming back because the incentives of referring someone new gives them a good deal on their next purchase.
Rareform, known for repurposing billboards into products like bags, has a referral program that gives referrers a $20 credit every time a referred friend shops from the brand. This way, past shoppers are rewarded for recommending the brand.
Prioritize your customers and see higher retention
Of course, quality products and a seamless on-site experience are the biggest reasons why shoppers would come back and shop from you.
But, with customer retention strategies like a loyalty program, you can remind past shoppers to buy on time, improve customer experience by making them feel special, and incentivize them in the right way so that they continue to choose your brand.
Brands like Rareform have increased their repurchase rate by 26.9% by implementing a customer loyalty program tailored to their brand and their customers' needs.
You don’t need to build your loyalty program from scratch. Rivo lets you build a loyalty program that matches your brand design, with rewards and tiers that are customized to your preference. Â
