By Steve Tucker,
Bunting
When it comes to e-Commerce, marketers often focus on
driving new web site traffic and getting new customers. While these customer
acquisition efforts are undoubtedly important, it’s often forgotten that it’s
your existing customers who will make
up 40% of your future revenue.
Retaining existing customers brings a greater ROI than
acquiring new ones, and research from RJ Metrics showed that returning
customers typically spend 3X more
than first time shoppers. Another report from Adobe found that marketers in the
U.S. and Europe need to acquire five and seven new shoppers, respectively, to
match the revenue of one repeat shopper.
Advertisement
So, with this in mind, how do you keep your valuable
customers returning to your store to make a second, third, fifth or sixth
purchase? Retention marketing is all about making your current buyers happy,
and nurturing a relationship that yields brand loyalty. But this requires you
to know your customers, and treat
them as individuals, tailoring your marketing efforts to their unique wants and
needs.
In this article I’ll run through some ways you can use
personalization to delight your customer base, and see them returning, again
and again.
1. Know Your Customers — Then Engage Them
Your customers are a varied group of people, with different
preferences and behavior patterns. Some shoppers may be a regular buyer for a
specific item, while others may arrive on your site to browse and look for
inspiration. Look at your customer data, and consider transactional and behavioral
metrics such as browsing patterns, average order value and purchase history.
This allows you to segment your customer base and target users differently with
content relevant to them.
So, you might want to target customers according to when they last converted.
If a customer is approaching the end life of a previously purchased product,
send them a helpful reminder for product replenishment. Or, if a customer
hasn’t shopped for a while with you, send them an inspiration email filled with
products they might like, based on their previous browsing history.
2. Personalize Offers
Offers are a great way to drive repeat sales, but only when they’re relevant to
your customers. To this day, I still find emails in my inbox full of brands
eagerly sending me offers on items completely irrelevant to my interests. These
find me promptly reaching for the ‘unsubscribe’ button. Likewise, when I land
on a site that I’ve purchased from before, I expect the offers to be relevant
to me: my gender, my style, my interests.
Knowing what your customers are interested in provides great
opportunities for targeted offers. Research has shown that for 78% of shoppers,
offers are only effective when tied to the customers’ previous interactions
with your brand.
Tip: Offers are most effective when they’re time-sensitive.
Increase urgency with countdown timers.
3. Reward Your Most Valuable
Customers
Most retailers have a group of VIPs — your most valuable customers — the ones
who keep returning and who have remained loyal to your brand. These customers
deserve to be rewarded, and in doing so, you further strengthen that
relationship. And, with so much choice available in e-Commerce today, you
should never be complacent about your VIP customers hanging around.
It’s important to make these customers feel special and valued. As they’ve
interacted with your brand for some time, there’s no excuse not to employ
personalization.
Be creative and think of ways to delight this precious group
of customers. Free gifts relevant to them, free samples, previews of new
product lines and exclusive access to events are just a handful of ways to
reward your VIPs. Think about what works best for your brand and products.
4. Make Email Personal
It’s still a great channel to reach your customers, but it’s
more important than ever to send your customers high quality, relevant content.
The goal of email is ultimately to bring shoppers back to your site — and
purchasing from you again. But it’s also a great opportunity to nurture the
customer relationship and, by sending customers content they’ll love, it will
help turn them into brand advocates.
You can re-engage customers with a ‘we miss you’ email, with
personalized offers and product recommendations based on their interests. But
also consider presenting new product lines relevant to brand preferences.
Abandoned cart emails should also be filled with product recommendations,
helping shoppers find alternative products they might like. Every email
communication should be relevant to your customers. Blasting out generic
messages really should be a thing of the past.
So, to wrap up, personalization brings a plethora of ways to
engage and delight your customer base. Using creative ways to tailor your
marketing and web site offering will see happier customers who return more and
buy more. A good personalization tool will enable you to easily segment your
customer base and deliver targeted personalized content. Happy personalizing!
Steve Tucker is the
founder and CEO of web site personalization tool Bunting.
He brings over 15 years’ experience within the e-Commerce sector, and has
raised the conversions of hundreds of e-Commerce companies globally. Bunting is
a cloud-based omnichannel tool that boosts e-Commerce conversions by rapidly
delivering powerful personalized experiences.
