The retail landscape has shifted over the years, and most of us like to shop at places like Amazon or Shopify rather than shopping malls. However, some remain the same: customer loyalty is still the most crucial metric to determine your success as a business. Retaining customers long term is cheaper than attracting newer ones, but you need to retain some form of loyalty to accomplish this. Here are a few ways to attract new customer attention and keep it long-term.
Start by Recruiting Participants Through Advertising
The user experience on your eCommerce website may be lacking. To know if that’s the case, you can consider recruiting research participants on Facebook and other platforms with targeted online advertising so they can help you determine where your UX/UI experience is lacking. It’s important to find a group of individuals that fit your customer base because they are more likely to use your website and interact with its functions. If you find that the user tests aren’t giving you relevant data, the test questions may be the issue. Try different tests to determine the best results.
Consider User Experience
People are busy, and we don’t want to spend more than a few minutes trying to find the product we were looking for when we searched. Even worse is when your advertisement doesn’t bring your customers to the right page of the offer. Once your customers are on the page, is it easy to navigate? Is the page pleasing to the eye? Is the design symmetrical? It’s super important to look at customer retention rate per page, so you know the length of time they spent looking at your products.
Loyalty Programs and Subscriptions
Loyalty programs are an excellent idea, but many online retailers forget about this strategy because they’re afraid of annoying the customer. To do this properly, don’t oversaturate their e-mail multiple times a week and give an incentive for joining. An example of a loyalty program is a book store using points that they get depending on a dollar spent, which will lead to discounts.
Subscriptions work in a similar way to bring people back, but without the need to continually go back to your website. Customer lifetime value is your projected revenue from a customer relationship, which you’ll want to increase in value over time. The customer lifetime value includes metrics like repeat purchase rate and redemption rate, which is determined by how many coupons are redeemed divided by the number of coupons issued.
Reviews and Customer Service
Customer reviews go a long way in a consumer’s decision to buy a product. If you have no customer reviews on your website, or they’re low ranking, you’re not going to keep their attention. To get great reviews, send an automated e-mail that will ask the customer to leave one. As an alternative, you can keyword search your product on Facebook and ask if you can use the review someone used on their profile.
Along with reviews, customer support can go a long way to improve ratings and trust. Although this is difficult for smaller retailers, if you’re quick to answer a question, you’ll have many happy customers. Customers who receive fast support feel a more reliable connection to the retailer and are more likely to remember you. You can determine the likelihood of a recommendation by using the Net Promoter Score, calculating the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
