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. 

6 Ways to Gain Customer Loyalty in your E-Commerce Store

Expert marketers like to advise that it is by far cheaper to retain customers than to get new ones. If you run your own e-commerce store, once shoppers make a purchase, they become customers. Anyone who so makes a purchase therefore becomes a customer gained. It is at this time the business owner can now shift focus to providing direct value and establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with the customer. This is the time to use all customer retention techniques to have this customer coming over and over again to make purchases from your store. This is the stage when customer loyalty comes into the mix. This is the time the business owner must take deliberate steps to know the customer well enough together with his buying habits then deliver his own unique personalized value to communicate with and engage the customer. This is with a view to getting the customer to return for repeat purchases.

Following are effective strategies any smart business owner can use to position his e-commerce store well enough to gain customer loyalty.
 
1. Leverage Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is all about rewards and commissions earning. Affiliates help business owners to promote products and earn commissions on the sales they generate. Smart business owners always explore many viable options to reward their affiliates as well as customers. Some choose to incentivize and motivate their affiliates well enough to help sell more products. The activities of these affiliates directly help to grow brand awareness for the business, get customers for the business and help the business to sell more products all in return for commissions. New customers can even become affiliates by referring their friends, family and associates to the business to make purchases. If you reward them with monetary compensation in form of commissions of about 10% or more of the price of each purchase, that helps immensely to build customer loyalty for your business.

2. Promote What Makes You Unique

It is products that are great and unique to you that can help grow customer loyalty for your e-commerce store. These products can be unique in terms of quality, method of delivery and even prices. When your products stand out from the crowd, they inevitably attract repeat customers to your business. They help to build up the loyalty of these customers over time. If you take deliberate steps to ensure you promote only products that distinctly set your business apart from others, it can help encourage customers to buy directly from your business over and over again.

3. Offer Your Customers Repeat Purchase Options

If you want to build and elongate a good relationship with your customers, always offer them enticing repeat purchase options. Such enticement can include but not limited to bulk purchase discount, free and automatic shipping and so on. Once they get a unique value from your business that they do not normally get if they shop elsewhere, they’ll keep returning to your business for more purchases.

4. Extend Your Loyalty Program to Customers

If you don’t have a loyalty program for your customers, have one as a matter of priority if you want to cultivate customer loyalty. I guess you’ve heard about buy two and get one free? Come back for a repeat purchase and get 10% discount? These are some form of loyalty programs that help to get customers back to your business. You can also use reward points or a discount after customers spend a set amount of money directly in your store.

5. Deliberately Build Relationships from the Outset

Good business is all about building good relationships. Once a customer makes the first purchase from your store that is when you start to build a one-on-one relationship with the new customer. Encourage each customer who purchases a product for you to give you a feedback about his purchase experience and even the use of the product. Do not forget to first show appreciation though for the purchase that has been made from your store. Always thank customers profusely and demand to know from them how you can serve them better. Let them know the type of incentives they can benefit from when they return to make more purchases. Release discount codes to them for such purposes if you are using discount codes of your loyalty programs. If they are entitled to commissions when they introduce other parties to make purchases from your store, let them know. All these help immensely to build customer loyalty.

6. Always Encourage Your Customers to Help Share Your Brand Story

There is no business without a story behind it. If the story is unique to the business, that is much better. When your customers help to tell your unique story, it is not only credible, it spreads faster. Make your bragging rights known to your customers, how far your business has come, what it went through and how many obstacles it had to overcome to still be in business. These are the kind of stories people want to hear to relate them to their own stories. Your customers can directly share these stories with their family, friends, associates and even their social media audiences. If convenient, you can offer a token but valuable gift with a purchase or a discount off their next purchase directly from your store for widely sharing your story. Such offers can help bring customers back to your store to claim the gifts. That’s customer loyalty.

7. Highlight Values That Are Intrinsic To Your Business

Well, I have heard it said that everyone brags with something of unique value that is attributable to them. It holds true too even in business. So, if you have an in-house policy of using a given percentage of your sales to support noble causes around the world, let your customers know. You can specifically mention the causes you support with charitable and not-for-profit organizations like the Red Cross, Rotary International, World Wildlife Foundation, Amnesty International and so on to make our world a better place to live in. Consumers who care about these same causes may be influenced to buy from your store and to keep buying from the store in support of these causes.

Tangible Benefits of Small Business Marketing

You cannot have a small business and keep it under wraps. If you do, you may not be in business for much too long. Marketing and exposing your small business is what helps it to grow. Even though marketing a small business takes a bit of time and resources particularly money, you’ll discover that it is well worth it when the returns start coming in. If you don’t deliberately market your business, it means you’re practically waiting for customers to stumble into the business by themselves. Such waiting usually turns out to be a long and frustrating one. It is unprofitable too. Marketing gets your products/services in front of people who need or want them. Usually, good marketing helps to convince buyers that you have the right solution to their problems. Through it, you can sometimes manage to convince consumers that they have a problem that needs fixing and you have the right solution to the problem. All these make marketing hugely essential for the growth and stability of your small business.

If you market your small business well enough, you can get the following direct and tangible benefits from the business.

Business Awareness: You cannot sell if you are unable to market your products/services effectively. Creating awareness around your business is part of that process. For people to buy your products/services, they must first know such products/services exist and are available in the market. They must know the right market too. What marketing does is to directly expose your products/services to potential buyers. That helps buyers with the opportunity to sample them or even buy them.

Customer Loyalty: Even if you already have customers, customer loyalty guarantees repeat business. Good marketing helps your business to retain customers and to do repeat business with them. Out there in the business world, the competition is always very stiff. It is akin to a dog-eat-dog relationship. Even if people are willing to buy your products, a competitor may just come along and do everything to try to win them over. Marketing helps to keep your brand tops in the minds of customers. That somehow helps to ward off competition a bit but not for long if you take your eyes off the ball. Effective marketing helps to keep your eyes on the ball. 

 
Business Insights: Effective marketing helps the business owner to have vital insights and gather relevant data to grow the business. With insights, you get to learn more about your target audience, what they like, what they do, how they shop and so on. You get to know which marketing strategies resonate best with them. You get to learn about what communication methods particularly what type of emails resonate best with them. You learn of which level of discounts lead to more purchases and which images convert better for your marketing messages. With such vital insights, you can better handle your product development, pricing, and future marketing strategies.

Sales and Revenue: Every marketer who knows his trade must know that marketing directly drives sales. The more and better you market, the more sales you make. More sales directly translate to more revenue for your business. Good marketing guarantees that. No matter which promotional strategies you are using, whether email campaigns or a social media promotion, it is marketing that gets consumers to buy your products/services. These consumers translate to customers and the more customers you have, the more sales and revenue you make in your business.

Repeat Purchases: Every smart small business owner always wants to have repeat customers. The business reason for this is that it is by far cheaper to market to old customers than to new prospects. Yes, one-time purchases may be great, but repeat buying is better. Marketing helps to remind customers about your products/services to get them to come back for more. If you have already built trust with your customers, getting them to come back for repeat business is usually not too much of a hassle.

Effective Tactics to Nurture Your Digital Marketing Customers

 

Are you still thinking of the best ways to engage and nurture your digital marketing customers? First, you must build a great relationship with your customers using digital marketing strategies. These efforts must be deliberately geared towards nurturing your one-time customers as well as your repeat customers. Both sets of customers are hugely valuable to your business and they deserve nurturing hand in hand. For this reason, if you are looking for credible and effective ways to acquire, nurture, grow and retain customers, you must improve your digital marketing efforts. These here tested and proven tactics are very handy to help you nurture and retain the loyalty of your customers over the long term.

Update Your Customers Routinely

By giving your digital customers undated information promptly, you can quickly build trust with them. It pays to notify customers very promptly about important product information like price adjustments, promos, discounts, giveaways, sales and the like. If for instance you have customers that have been viewing your products for a while, price drops and sales promos can help them to make a timely buy decision as soon as they get the information. Giving out vital information promptly does not only help to boost business opportunities for sales, such information can also help to boost customer loyalty and better business relationships.

Predict Customer Spend

If you can predict customer spending particularly at periods of festivities, anniversaries and celebrations, you can make better sales from your efforts. Marketers can make use of online AI software to make fairly accurate predictions about customer spending. With this software, it is possible to assess trends and anticipate how much your customers will spend over a given period, say within the next week, month or some future time frame depending on the season. Armed with this somewhat intelligence information, you can fine-tune and specifically target your messaging across multichannel to make more sales from both your high and low-value customers.

Ask for Product Reviews/Feedback

Asking customers to review products they have purchased from you is one great way to show that you care about how they feel. As soon as you make a sale, you can follow up by email to ask customers how helpful the product is to them, and what they have to say about the product by way of product review. Such customer feedback allows marketers to get some very vital insight into how to improve on the user experience of their products. It helps to demonstrate how much marketers value their customers’ thoughts and opinions. You can effectively turn customer reviews and ratings into marketing messages to entice more customers if you highlight them as authentic endorsements for your products.

Always Send Re-order Reminders

You build a hugely beneficial customer relationship if you do not fail to send re-order reminders to customers who purchased quick consumables or perishable products from you. Better still, you can encourage your customers to set up “Auto-Delivery orders” by which the products are delivered to them at a given interval without any fresh re-order formalities. Armed with authentic information about any product’s lifespan, you can design re-order messages to prompt your customers for a repeat purchase. This is one very effective technique to retain their patronage and prevent them from turning to your competitors for same product or an alternative.

Promote with Your Milestone Anniversaries

Either for your business or for your customers, you can use key milestones to effectively promote your products. Anniversaries of product launch, customers’ birthdays and other important celebrations in the lives of your customers, when recalled and marked with product promos can be very effective for sales. These dates are always very good moments to send personalized emails to customers congratulating them and reminding them that you value their business with you. Such well-crafted and well-timed massages can generate good click-through rates and more incentivized purchases.

Track Customer Journeys

If you have been in digital marketing for a while, you can understand how essential your customers’ journey is to your business. By using analytics tools, you can effectively track how customers generally interact with your website. From the information, you can have very good insights into what they do and the steps they take to complete certain online transaction actions like choosing a product, making a purchase or taking part in a competition. That allows you to be able to visualize their pathways to spotting opportunities on your website and the user-experience obstacles they encounter with the site that do slow down or obstruct customer engagement.

Target Ads from Analytics/Metrics Reports

With good Analytics/Metrics report, you can better understand the role such vital information plays in the customer journey on your website. That is the information that allows you to easily see the decreasing effect out-of-stock products have on your customer experience. You can also see the increasing effects of reduction in prices, sales and giveaway promos on customer engagement. If you aim to prevent your customers from taking their business to your competitors, you can use information from these analytics to implement better strategies aimed at customer retention. Using the data they generate, you can design better and more effective ads and target them specifically to your customers based on their demographic information gleaned from the data. That way, you can attract a very significant amount of organic traffic back to your website, with more and better conversions to boot.

Share Specially Targeted Content

In digital marketing, specially targeted content tends to drive better organic traffic. This is more so when such content is shared multichannel. Such content if well targeted is one great way to recognize the customers who stay loyal to your product and how much you value their business. Many customers usually appreciate by staying local to your business. As they say in the business world, one good turn deserves another. Special content can engender vital information and exclusive early access to a sales promo or price reduction. Many customers do appreciate such gestures and they usually reciprocate with repeat purchases. 

How Businesses Can Encourage Work Friendships

It is now known from Gallup research efforts that when employees have good friends at work, it positively affects company profitability, safety, inventory control and customer loyalty. That when employees have best friends at work, they are less likely to leave their jobs! Great benefits if you ask me. But, inspite of these benefits of making close friends at work, many businesses are still falling short in terms of helping employees connect. That is a bit surprising though. Granted it may not be prudent to force relationships on people, there are very many things employers can do to encourage friendships among their employees. Some of these things involve having to provide more opportunities and the right environments for them to get to know each other and develop friendships naturally. In that regard, here are some of the activities that are practical and effective on employees’ friendships.

01. Provisions for group snacks and lunch. Yes, people love to eat and eating together and at the same times allows room for small talk and social interaction. Talking over a meal is a great way to build friendships.

02. Encourage employee attachments. In his book “The Audacity of Hope” former US president Barrack Obama is reported to have met his future wife Michelle in some form of work attachment to Michelle when Barrack was an intern in a law firm in Chicago. Many companies still use such a buddy system to welcome new employees. That is a way of pairing an employee with another who can show them the ropes, both formally and informally. That encourages real friendships and much more, even marriages as in the case of the Obamas.

03. Encourage group excursions/holidays. You can select and put some employees in charge of choosing, planning and organizing occasional events like excursions and even group cruises or holidays. Friendships grow easily from such group events.

04. Schedule some meetings offsite. It is always very exciting for employees to have meetings offsite their normal work environments. Workshops and seminars in a cozy resort or hotel away from home come in very handy here. Maybe once or twice a year, getting your team offsite for a day or a weekend is beneficial for them to socially interact and build friendships.

05. Form games teams. Company tennis, golf or volleyball team in a local recreational league can help build bonds of friendship among employees outside of work. With such teams playing in organized tournaments, even other employees who aren’t athletic can participate by cheering their co-workers on. Everyone thus catches some fun as a result.

06. Play games together. Games which help employees to bond are highly beneficial. Everyone gets to know and like the company champion in chess, tennis, and even champions in trivia games. 

07. Schedule road works or hiking together. To keep fit, every employee needs to get active. Left alone, many people never get around to doing things which help them to keep fit. In groups, it is fairly easier to get employees to do road walk or go hiking together to help them keep fit. Employees can even be encouraged to go dancing at weekends to engender bonding. In most cases, doing silly stuff together helps to loosen people up and build bonds of friendship.

From the foregoing, you can easily discern that what works naturally is to have regular beneficial opportunities to do things socially together. Bonds of friendships naturally grow more easily that way. Employers must do things to make these activities happen for the overall benefit of the business. Yes, there’s work to be done, and there always will be. But it’s also very important to build relationships with and among the people who help you do the work.

How Work Friendships Benefit Your Business

Our world is changing, so are human relationships particularly in the workplace. These days, nearly everyone wants to get along with other people to build beneficial relationships. If you run a business and you employ people, you too may want your employees to get along well with one another. Here is some good news for you. The Gallup Organization has found out that friendship among employees is highly beneficial to any business. In times past, it was thought that friendships between employees generally led to goofing off and petty gossiping at work thereby wasting precious time. Thanks to research, we now know that having close friends at work confers a variety of benefits not only on employees, but also on the companies they work for.

Since the benefits are both ways, smart employers now actively encourage work friendships among their employees. Below are some of the very glaring benefits companies and their employees derive from work friendships:

01. Employees who have best friends at work are more productive than others.

02. They enjoy more work satisfaction.

03. More women benefit greatly from the social interaction they get from work friendships.

04. Employees who feel a deep connection with their team members are more likely to take positive actions that benefit the business.

05. Employees who have a best friend at work are less likely to leave their jobs.

06. When employees have good friends at work, it positively affects company profitability, safety, inventory control and customer loyalty.

Can you see why smart business owners now actively encourage their employees to be good friends and to make good friends at work?