Attracting new leads is something every eCommerce entrepreneur aims for. However, it’s just as important to care for your existing customer base. Consider this: The probability of a current customer making another purchase is an impressive 60% to 70%, while the likelihood of a new deal is only 5% to 20%. What’s more, recurring purchases require less of an investment on your side — simply make your customers happy, and they are likely to return. In short, strengthening customer loyalty, working on customer retention, and earning repeat business from existing customers are all key drivers of success. This is why they should be a top priority for any eCommerce retailer.

The following three eCommerce strategies will help you improve customer retention and begin increasing repeat purchases:

Get to Know Your Customers

To improve customer retention and facilitate repeat business, an eCommerce entrepreneur needs to know their clients. This will involve keeping track of every interaction with them, as well as being aware of how to best target them. Let’s take a closer look at the areas where collecting and analyzing customer data is crucial, and how you can get to know your audience even better.

Through Sales

In order to learn more about customer behaviors, you first need to find out which products your customers have shown interest in, which pages they’ve visited, what items they’ve viewed multiple times, as well as which items have landed in shopping carts and which were left abandoned. You should also link this information to your customers’ profiles and accounts. Ideally, your eCommerce business platform should let you track customer behavior as well, allowing you to connect specific website interactions to visitors and clients. This way, for instance, you can identify  customers who have abandoned carts, then send them targeted messages with the hopes of winning the deal. According to some case studies, email remarketing alone made it possible to recover 29% of abandoned shopping carts.

Through Marketing

As you know, using a single marketing strategy for every occasion with your audience is not the best solution. However, one technique that will let you get a better understanding of your customer, as well as create more effective marketing campaigns, is customer segmentation. This refers to the practice of grouping customers who have similar characteristics, such as their demographic information or their purchasing behavior. Doing so can help you send the right offer to the right client at the right time. According to the report submitted by DMA , segmented and targeted emails generate on average 58% of a business’ total email revenues compared to generic or action-based emails.  By gaining more control over the emails you send out and the promotions you offer, you will be able to make your marketing activities much more successful.

Through Support

In order to obtain a comprehensive understanding of your customer experience, you will need to go beyond marketing and sales, and assess the quality of your support. Companies that fail to do this risk alienating a large portion of their customers. In fact, due to poor customer support, 71% of dissatisfied consumers tend to leave for good.

To prevent this from happening, you should take note of how your customer support service interacts with clients, and analyze all customer service tickets that have been logged. This will allow you to see how many incidents, on average, your clients face, as well as what the severity levels of these incidents are. This information can help you improve your customer support workflow and create a more positive customer experience. This, in turn, will help you increase customer loyalty and retention, make your  business operations more effective, and eventually increase your revenue tied to customers.

When you scrutinize your consumers through the prism of sales, marketing, and support activities separately, it will be difficult to gain the right insights to formulate a winning strategy. This is why you should think of a one-stop shop approach. Only a holistic 360° view of your customers (i.e. a cross-channel data capture from every interaction point) will give you a key understanding of your clients.Satisfied customers are integral to the long-term success of any  eCommerce business. Knowing more about your customers helps in creating more effective strategies for your sales, marketing, and support teams.

Analyze Recency, Frequency, and Monetary Value of a Customer

Sometimes, you might want to examine customer behavior or estimate customer value by  identifying your top purchasers or even your customers who’ve shown no activity.

To do so, analyze your client database to discover

• How often do your customers make purchases (recency factor)
• How many orders have your customers made (frequency factor)
• How much money have your customers spent (monetary value factor).

You can then rate your customers according to this criteria in order to get a clearer vision of both your marketing and sales activities. Analyzing these metrics will help build more effective campaigns.

Alternatively, you can create customer segments based on these ratings (e.g.,  largest purchasers, most active customers, ‘hibernating’ customers, etc.), then send these groups personalized emails, special offers, comeback-discounts, or other pertinent messages.

The recency, frequency, and monetary value data can also be used to find new sales opportunities. For instance, you can create a report that only displays clients with high scores who have also recently abandoned shopping carts containing a high monetary value. Don’t miss the chance to build a list of low-hanging sales opportunities.

Invest in Your Customer Experience

When it comes to generating repeat purchases, it is often more about maintaining the successful relationships you’ve already established  with your clients, rather than continually trying to keep them content through unsustainable means, such as low prices, membership discounts, or free shipping.

This relates to your customer service experience as well. You need to make sure you have minimized your response and resolution times, and that your support teams are incentivized to quickly solve your customer’s issues.

As an eCommerce business owner, you (or your senior leadership) can encourage your customer-facing employees to make customer experience a top priority. This means communicating to them that the work they do is essential, but the customer experience is also an important success criteria. You can learn more about effective ways to improve your customer experience here.

Conclusion

Without the proper technology, it is difficult to turn your eCommerce strategies into tangible improvements. OroCRM and its open-source philosophy provides a flexible CRM platform that allows users to view customer information across channels (such as marketing, sales and customer support), conduct recency, frequency and monetary analysis to segment customers, and enhance the customer experience.

Contact us to learn how our customers have increased repeat business using OroCRM.