How can you keep your customers coming back to your store? Why customer retention is so important? That’s not an easy question. But there are always ways to do that. Today, we will help you by suggesting the 7 best customer retention strategies that you can apply to your business and gain your customer loyalty.
Let’s explore!
What is Customer Retention?
When a visitor makes a purchase on your store, you’ve got a one-time buyer. But then that customer loves your products and comes back to buy more than one time, you’ve got a regular customer.
Customer retention is the process in which you find ways to turn one-time buyers into regular customers. Or in other words, you keep your customers coming back to your store again and again. While getting new buyers is important, keeping your existing customers is critical to your business in the long run. Customer loyalty will bring you more sales, more recognition, and raise more brand awareness.
To learn more about the benefits of customer retention, let’s move on to the next part:
Why Is Customer Retention So Important?
Unless you don’t want more sales, customer retention is one of the most important activities to gain revenue and build your business’ health. It costs you more to acquire new customers than to retain the existing ones. Furthermore, returning customers are much more likely to buy from you than those who know nothing about you.
Customer retention activities also save much of your marketing costs, as happy customers will do word-of-mouth marketing for you. And people tend to trust this kind of social proof than your ads.
Once you’ve got a large loyal customer base for your store, you will be able to improve your branding, build your reputation, gain more customer trust and recognition among people. And the final goal of all your attempts – making sales – will be easier to achieve.
7 Powerful Customer Retention Strategies
Now you already know what customer retention is and why it is important to your business, it’s time to learn some customer retention strategies to apply to your store:
1. Set Realistic Expectations
Sometimes it’s pretty hard to compete with bigger brands in terms of shipping time or range of products. But it’s not the case. The thing is you know what you can do and keep your customers informed about that.
If you know that it’s going to take 2 weeks to ship the product to your customers, you’d better let them know about the estimated shipping time. Don’t keep silent and then your customers will get angry as they don’t know when they can receive the parcels.
You can inform your customers by leaving shipping information on your website, or by notification emails right after they place an order and keep them posted about the shipping process or of any issues coming up. In that way, your customers will know what to expect. It’s also the chance for you to showcase your professionalism.
2. Develop a Loyalty Program
A loyalty program is one of the most effective ways to keep your customers coming back. You will reward them with incentives or discount codes if they come back and shop with you. Obviously, it’s an attractive offer to your customers. Unless they don’t like your products, they will find something to buy to get incentives or discount codes. Furthermore, your customers will feel special and valued when you offer them something for coming back.
3. Be Highly Responsive
Feedbacks and Questions are good for your business. As feedbacks tell you what you have done well and what you need to improve, what people think about your store, and how you can make your product better, make your store better to them.
When your customers ask a question, there’s maybe something not clear enough for them to understand. You can improve your product page, your website, pages to make them more comprehensible to people, for example.
Moreover, actively respond to your customer’s feedback and questions show that you respect and care about your customers. They will also feel that you are trustworthy enough and will be willing to buy or come back to you later.
4. Solve Customer Complaints
Unhappy customers are not what you want for your business. That’s why solving customer complaints is another important customer retention strategy. If your customers are not satisfied with your products or service, they will not come back to you or recommend you to their network. They even may give negative feedback on your page and create a bad reputation for you.
So, in any case, try to find ways and solve your customer complaints and use the insights from the complaints to improve your business better. If your customer complains about your long shipping time, try to work with your dropshipping agent to make it faster, for instance.
5. Constanly update on Social Media
The next customer retention strategy is to constantly remind your customer of your business by being active on social media. They cannot come back and buy from you if they do not remember you. You can like, leave the heart and reply to their comments on your page. If they compliment your store, thank them respectfully. If they leave a question, answer them.
You also should regularly update about your business like updating new products, new discounts, new programs for loyal customers, and so on.
6. Social Responsibility Engagement
One effective customer retention strategy you could use is social responsibility engagement. Your customers not only love your products or your service and they will come back to buy from you. There are so many competitors out there in the market. It’s the emotional connection or the relationship built between your business and your customers.
You can connect to your customers emotionally by incorporating social responsibility into your business. That means you can help your customer feel like they are doing something good together with you. You can launch a repair or recycling program to protect the environment. You can let them know that when they place an order, they are donating 10% to helping the poor children, for example.
All those activities are good to increase your customer retention and create a positive image of your brand. If you are doing good for the world, they will be more likely to come back to you.
7. Be Honest
Last but not least, the final customer retention strategy is very simple. It’s being honest. It’s important to be honest with your customers. If there are faulty products, you can apologize and refund or reship the products to your customers. If you have confusing returns policies, admit to your customers and try to improve them.
If you made a mistake, be honest with your customers. Don’t try to run away or lie about it. That will drive your customers away at the end of the day. Furthermore, when they already like you and feel that you are honest to them, they are easier to forgive.
Private Agent for Dropshipping Success