Practical Strategies to Retain Online Store Customers

Online stores like any other stores need to retain customers if they want to remain in business. These stores must in addition keep up with the latest trends or risk going out of business.  No matter the sizes of these stores or in whatever niche they are operating, they need to invest in online tools to provide the best customer experience and earn customers’ continued trust. This is hugely essential to their continued operation because even a minor improvement in customer retention in any online business can lead to significant gains in overall revenue and profits. So, retaining customers is much more profitable than acquiring new ones as every smart small business owner very well knows. Customer retention is therefore a key to growing your small business online. 

Hereunder are some of the most practical methods to making your online store good enough to attract repeat customers and also to attract new ones.

Make a Strong Presence on Social Media

In practical marketing experience, most customers are more trustful of brands they are familiar with. The task before business owners therefore is to do those things that can significantly help their brands to be better trusted by customers. Doing these things on social media takes time and efforts. Such activities that can be of help are, sending personalized emails to customers, promptly responding to customer inquiries/concerns, having a highly visual, catchy social media presence, all crucial to helping you to educate customers about your brand, promote your products and generally build familiarity with your customers. Sending personalized messages to your customers directly and staying connected with them on a personal level on social media helps to cement this relationship.

Nurture Customers with Personal Letters

Be sure to have good online tools on your website to enhance easy two-way communication. These tools are very handy to help open communication with customers many of who more often than not need just a little nudge to come back to your store again and again, and eventually to form a habit of shopping repeatedly from your online store. One great way to encourage your customers to return to your website and order again is to write them optimized and personalized emails. Whatever it takes to nurture customers well enough on your website is welcome. Through a combination of Artificial Intelligence, AI, personalized one-on-one communication and optimized emails, you can maximize the likelihood of customers coming back to your website for their repeated business.

Make your Emails Stand Out

These days, customers are bombarded with marketing messages from all over the internet. The reason many can be wary of email messages. Emails that are unique, optimized and targeted tend to make the most impact. Your emails must therefore be crafted to stand out and provide customers with real valuable information. You can give these emails some personal and emotional touch by timing them to coincide with anniversaries and special occasions. At these times, you can offer your customers free products to commemorate and appreciate them on their anniversaries. Great for customer retention no doubt!

Prevent Common Shopping Problems

From experience, delays and mistakes in your product delivery process can hurt your chances of getting repeat business. For this reason, your website must not only be user-friendly, your order and payment system must be smooth and easy to use. Make sure your order fulfillment process is in perfect order, practical and adaptable. Always be sure your customers receive products that satisfy the quality standards they’ve come to expect from your brand. This together with a great order fulfillment process can help to encourage them to keep coming back to do business with you.

Offer Personalized Service

Every human being likes to be appreciated and valued. Offering personalized service to customers helps to fulfill this ideal. If you understand your customers’ needs well enough, you can always make recommendations to help them fulfill these needs. Most customers appreciate this by showing a clear preference for your business. You can take deliberate steps to personalize the homepage of your business website to include products and promotions that could be of interest to your customers. Your online store therefore needs to use CRM solutions to create different categories for customers depending on their needs, pain points and interests. By doing this perfectly, you can better address your customers’ needs, keep them satisfied and retain them.

Reach out to Customers with Abandoned Carts

In online business, an abandoned cart simply means a certain customer was interested enough to go through most of the purchase process without finishing it. That cannot be good for business. Abandoning carts may be as result of cumbersome checkout system, difficult payment system, or even some other distraction. Whatever the reason may be, reaching out to such customers may encourage them to finish the process by placing an order. Anyone who liked your online store enough to add items to a cart can easily be persuaded to complete the process. It is possible too to turn such persons into paying customers and even to retain their long-term loyalty.

Focus More on Customer Retention

To retain customers, you must first be able to acquire customers through any cost-effective digital marketing activities you are good at. It is by far cheaper to retain customers than to acquire new customers. Good advertising will make customers discover your business. That will mean spending a little extra money on marketing to potential customers though. Once customers discover your online store through your ads, their experience with your website and your product will entice them to keep coming back even without the advertisements. That is when you take steps to focus your attention on customer retention activities. At this stage, having a highly effective customer retention strategy can help you to turn regular customers into excited brand ambassadors. These in turn bring you even more business.