Why Keeping E-Commerce Customers Matters More than Acquiring Them

Every e-commerce business always wants to attract new customers. But many have since found out that attracting new customers in today’s business environment is not only difficult but also expensive. This is largely due to the huge competition out there in e-commerce business world. Out there, it is hugely difficult to convince a perfect stranger to make a buy decisions. Doing so often requires a significant investment of time, energy and marketing resources. Comparatively in terms of costs, it is much cheaper to retain old customers than to source new customers. Customer retention promotes loyalty and more repeat business which is great for the bottom line. Significantly therefore, the biggest ROI lies in keeping your existing customers longer.

Following are powerful ways to improve customer retention and lifetime value in your e-commerce business.

Loyalty Momentum Effect

In business-customer relationship, loyalty begets loyalty. The loyalty momentum effect is thus a powerful force for e-commerce businesses. If as a business owner you deliberately create positive shopping experiences for your customers, it helps your business to create more opportunities for goodwill and loyalty-building. By doing so, your business can manage to ignite a beneficial cycle of caring for your customers while they in turn remain loyal to your business. Anytime customers have many good experiences with your business, they are likely to tell others. This significantly helps to create a high-quality, cost-effective lead generation channel for your business.
 
You can explore many ways to tap into the loyalty momentum effect. You can choose to tap into traditional loyalty programs to build this momentum. Programs like discounts and free products for past purchases, rewards for taking desirable actions like promoting a brand on social media, being an active member of a community, and writing positive reviews are great for building momentum. The key is, you can build momentum by intentionally rewarding customer behaviors that directly support your business. Customer loyalty builds up over time with the help of these rewards.
 
Ease of Making Loyal Customers Brand Ambassadors

Brand ambassadors are golden loyal customers. You can easily build brand ambassadors from your crop of loyal customers. Brand ambassadors are individuals who already believe in your products and are willing to promote them with pride. These are the kinds of individual you can best build your brand ambassador around. These individuals usually carry immense clout in the marketplace. This gives them the right potential to accelerate your customer retention funnel. You can deliberately tame and nurture your brand ambassadors to grow your business. This ultimately helps to make them a dependable marketing channel and a source of high-quality feedback. This helps your business to continue to transform first-time shoppers into long-term advocates for the business.
 
More Effective Marketing with Personalized Experiences

One of the best and most effective ways to separate your e-commerce business in the minds of customers is to carefully create more personalized shopping experiences. This is because most customers always want to see their preferences and desires reflected in the products they buy. If you are able to make this happen as a business owner, it becomes fairy difficult for your customers to switch loyalty to other products. But, delivering personalized experiences requires that you know your customers well enough. If you don’t, it can be pretty difficult for you to collect reliable information about who they are and what they want. Such personalized data can be really valuable for your business over time if you act on it. Ensure your data is trustworthy enough to be reliable for marketing purposes.
 
It is possible for you to collect such data effectively by way of customer feedback obtained through surveys and analytics info. If you have actual behavioral data of your customers, it can always help you to determine where and how your marketing campaigns and product offerings are falling short and exactly what you need to do in them to keep your customers returning for repeat purchases.