7 Tips to Retain Customers in your E-commerce Business

With more and more people now shopping online, e-commerce business owners really need to explore all ways to retain customers. If as a business you invest a huge amount of money, time and effort in attracting customers, it makes a lot sense to do things that can help you retain these customers in a hugely competitive market space as the internet. You cannot afford to lose customers if you want your e-commerce business to thrive. This is more so when you factor in that today’s time-strapped consumers expect a lot from their buying experience and are easily distracted by offerings from your competition. Doing everything to retain customers is key to success in your e-commerce business. Following are a few steps you can take to help you retain customers in your online business.

1. Robust Social Media Presence: Presently, it appears as if social media is where everyone is at worldwide 24/7. Taking your business on social media is like taking it to where your customers can be found. A robust social media presence for your business helps it to source customers and retain customers. A constructive and engaging social media presence for your business helps to increase online visibility for the business by creating a valuable connection with your audience. Taking your business on social media is taking the business to where potential customers like to spend their time and where you can meet them on their terms. It is one place your marketing messages can be widely shared and interacted with by potential customers as well as customers.

2. Positive User Experience: Online, user experience is made up of different elements. These are elements that attract customers to your website, retain them there for a while and lure them to do business with you. To enhance this, make sure your website design is user-friendly, fast loading, looks professional and is easy to navigate. Be sure it has a clean and intuitive design that works perfectly well on mobile devices. Take quality time to ensure the details of products/services you are marketing are kept engaging with snappy paragraphs and good aesthetics. Deliberately use bullet points and informative visuals to attract and retain buyers’ attention, making sure the site displays clear CTAs to help guide buyers towards a seamless checkout.

3. Personalized Marketing: Selling out of your e-commerce website should be clearly more than just a simple transaction if you want to retain customers. This is why you must carefully tailor your marketing messages to specified audiences. You can do this effectively if you clearly understand your audiences then cater your content to it. You also need to have the behavioral data of your customers. This can be useful in getting a feel of what pages they click on and what content they interact with the most. You can effectively cater better to their needs with these insights. If you engage in personalized marketing, your customers will feel valued and will be encouraged to do more business with you. This is more so in a hugely competitive market space like the internet. You can retain customers better by using effective methods to curt and build their loyalty. Such methods that include offering rewards programs, or regularly sending out personalized emails with product recommendations and discount codes.

4. Simplified Checkout Experience: Available research data indicates that global cart abandonment rate is an astonishing 70%. This directly translates to lost business in e-commerce stores. Taking steps that can help reduce shopping carts abandonment and lost sales can help you retain customers. On this score, you can make your checkout process as simple as possible. Make sure you have multiple payment methods that are safe and easy to use such as PayPal and other reputable e-payment channels.

 
5. Unlimited Shipping Options: Most consumers always expect to receive their online orders within a very short period say from 1-7 days depending on their locations around the world. However, some consumers always have a preference for free delivery, even if they have to wait a bit longer. It helps your customers therefore to offer several options at checkout. This helps to give them choices such as speedy delivery at cost or no delivery charges, making sure to be transparent about costs and delivery times. It is great for customer retention to offer tracking services so buyers can keep their eyes on their orders and know exactly when to expect the products.

6. Selling Globally: In today’s globalized world, geography is no longer a barrier to trade. You can always position your e-commerce store to sell globally because consumers now look beyond geography if they can find any product they want at the right price. You must therefore set up your e-commerce website with features that enables it to trade globally. Doing so will help the site with unlimited growth opportunities and reach. Be sure the site is set up to accept international payment options, that is, popularly acceptable and credible e-channels payment options worldwide. You can also offer international shipping options depending on the country or geographical region. If you’re targeting a specific country, it is a good marketing strategy to make sure your website is accessible in its local language.

7. Robust Security Measures: With hackers and cyber criminals everywhere on the internet, protecting your customer data is of utmost importance as a viable strategy to retaining customers. Your business needs robust security strategy in matters of creating a mutually beneficial relationship with your customers. Because of the nefarious activities of hackers and other cyber criminals, many shoppers are usually apprehensive when shopping online. Your business should always aim to give customers all the assurances they need that they are shopping on a secure website. To enhance security on your website, get your domain address on HTTPS// and a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certification for the website. These help a great deal to enhance online security and assure shoppers on your website. 

How to make your E-commerce Website Work for You

Technically, your e-commerce business website is the front door of your e-commerce business. It is where internet users first get in contact with your business. It is practically the first point of call after someone Googles a keyword related to your business. Your e-commerce website is where potential customers first learn about your business. It is where they get to learn first-hand who you are, what you do and how the products/services you offer are better than anyone else’s. That’s where business owners get to build their online presence that will determine whether they succeed or fail in the business. 

Your e-commerce website is thus so significant to the success or failure of your e-commerce business that you cannot afford to treat matters related to it with levity if you want your business to succeed. Therefore, if you are desirous to make your website really work for you, you must carefully choose a platform and host, get a suitable domain name and choose a template making sure it is search-friendly before launching the website. These here user focused design tips can help your out when planning the website:

Know Your Audience: You can only do this by way of research. You should try to conduct a thorough research to understand the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your target audience. This way, you’ll get to know what type of website you can design to meet their needs.

Design and Aesthetics: In the website, you must ensure that its design is consistent with the brand identity of your business. You must use size, color, and spacing to highlight important elements in your website to guide users through your content. Choose legible fonts and appropriate font sizes. Try to maintain good contrast between text and background to enhance the appeal of the website.

Functionality: A functional website is always user-friendly. The functionality of your website can therefore not be overemphasized. You must regularly test your website for bugs, broken links and other functionality issues.

Accessibility: Ensure your e-commerce website is accessible by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Doing so helps to make sure your website is accessible even to users with disabilities.
 
Mobile Friendly and Responsive: These days, over 60% of internet users do so via mobile devices. If you don’t want to miss out from this huge data, you must design your website to be mobile-friendly and responsive.

Performance Optimization: A fast loading website is a user friendly website. You must therefore design your website to have fast loading times. You can ensure this by optimizing your images, use efficient coding practices, and leverage browser caching to reduce loading times.

Analytics and Feedback: Be sure your website has real time performance measurement tools to enable you know how well your marketing campaigns are going at all times. You can use popular analytics tools like Google Analytics to track visitor behavior and site performance, real time.
 
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): If you take care to use well researched and selected relevant keywords throughout your content, it will be SEO compliant. Try to avoid keyword stuffing though because the website can be penalized by search engines for keywords stuffing. Always provide valuable, well-written fresh content that answers users' questions and engages them. You can then use meaningful meta titles and descriptions for each page to improve search engine visibility for the content.

Compliance: Because the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, if for instance you are operating in the EU or dealing with EU citizens, you must ensure full compliance with GDPR and other regulations particularly as they affect use of ads and consumer data.

Clear Call-to-Actions (CTAs): CTAs are great marketing gimmicks. You must ensure the CTAs on your website are visibly clear and compelling enough to drive user actions.

Legal Compliance: Since the internet is a worldwide phenomenon, legal requirements are rarely uniform across countries and geographical regions of the world. For this reason, try to always ensure your website has clear, accessible privacy policies and terms of service.  

Security: Since hackers and other cybercriminals operate freely everywhere on the internet, you must think security at the design stage of your website. Always make sure your website uses HTTPS to protect user data. Make sure to improve its search ranking with SSL Certification.