It’s no secret that ads are going up in price, so acquiring new customers is becoming more challenging for brands. iOS 14’s effects are still being felt, so traffic is often less relevant. Now brands are spending much more to attract the same amount of traffic at a lower quality.
It is 5 times cheaper to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one. Naturally, lowering your churn rate is the clear solution to this problem. So what are some ways you can reengage your existing customers to buy again?
A really great tactic that some companies are even using to completely replace paid marketing is creating a community. Having an engaged and passionate group of people interacting with you online and offline is a very powerful tool.
Another strategy for reengaging your customer base is through email. This can supplement your marketing efforts by enticing customers to purchase again.
How do you go about implementing these into your overall business strategy? Below we’ll go into detail on the two key elements that will help you start: building your community and retention email marketing.
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Retention rates for Shopify stores
Retention rates are measured by the number of customers who make repeat purchases. Of course, this isn’t the only metric you want to keep in mind. Things like average order value, purchase frequency, and recency are also important. But in this piece, we’ll be focusing on keeping your existing customer shopping and improving retention.
The overall average percentage of repeat customers is around 28%. Of course, this varies from sector to sector. According to Metrilo, the following is the breakdown across industries:
- Cosmetics: 25.9%
- Apparel: 26%
- Supplements: 29.1%
- Coffee 29.6%
- Pet products: 31.5%
How do your numbers compare?
Building up a community
Marketing costs continue to soar and competitors can outrank you on organic search, but one place where brands have found a lot of long-term success is in communities. Once you have a cohort of loyal customers, there is so much potential.
Of course, the first step is to identify who your ideal customer is. Once you do thorough research on them, how they connect online, and which platforms and tactics are most engaging, you’ll be able to tailor your strategy to your base.
Let’s go over some of the elements of community-building strategy to help you increase interactions.
Promoting User-generated content
People love deals and feeling exclusive. This is why asking your customers to engage online is a really good way to make them feel special and highlight them publicly. Who doesn’t get excited when a restaurant you just had brunch at reposts your story?
So why not target your VIP customers and give them a huge discount if they post content online with your hashtag? Or do a big giveaway contest and field entries via TikTok and Instagram?
Your customers will promote your brand essentially for free and you’ll get great, authentic content from some of your most loyal customers. Win, win, right?
Delight your customers
Before we get to delighting, let’s start with fulfilling expectations. This starts with establishing expectations first. If you’re not in a position to offer 2-day shipping, make sure that this is clearly communicated throughout the customer journey. As long as your shoppers are aware of what’s ahead, they’re much more likely to be satisfied.
If you want to go above and beyond, then you can include extras like gifts or samples along with their purchase. Another idea is to send out handwritten postcards on occasion to add that personal touch.
Whatever works with your brand and for your niche can get you some attention and excite your customers. Once they’re happy with your service, you can send follow-up emails to request reviews or get them involved with your loyalty program to keep them coming back.
Bring in a community management team
All these competitions, promotions, and other tactics are going to require some time and effort. Marketing and customer service already have plenty on their plate. Hiring one person and eventually growing your retention team is a great way to start.
This team will be able to organize all your customer data in a CRM tool. With this, they can target different types of customers with different messaging and offer to reengage them and build up a community.
Retention email marketing
Email marketing is a really powerful tool when it comes to reengaging your customers. While everyone’s inbox these days is overflowing, there are plenty of ways you stand out and reconnect with your shoppers.
Give all the information
As we’ve already mentioned, expectation setting is really important. Having emails sent out at every step is reassuring to the customer. Make sure you’ve automated your confirmation, shipping, and feedback emails, so users know where things stand.
When it comes to requesting reviews, the key here is to make sure this email doesn’t come before the product does. You want to make sure they have had a chance to use your product first before asking them to review it.
In these emails, you can also mention complementary products that they may have not initially noticed on your site. This is a potential opportunity to increase the order value easily.
Well-timed emails
Do you sell products that are consumed within a specific timeframe? Are there accessories that a user typically won’t buy with their original purchase but come back for again?
Sending a well-timed email can be very effective. While immediately after purchase can be a good tactic for some businesses as we mentioned earlier, it all depends on your product.
Have your retention team dive into the habits and usage of your products. If they can gather data about seasonality, longevity, and more from repeat purchasers, they will be better equipped to set up email automations to reengage.
Subscription management communications
Allowing your customers the flexibility to skip, pause, or change the frequency of their subscriptions is really important. Subscriptions are a very good way to generate recurring revenue from customers, but it’s important to keep them happy as well.
Whether it’s because they’ve gone on a month-long trip or they simply have enough product left over from the last shipment, people are going to want to change their subscriptions here and there. If you make sure to allow enough options and send reminder emails before shipments start getting processed, their much less likely to cancel their subscriptions.
Conclusion
Retention is a big factor in success. As it continues to grow harder to advertise to relevant audiences with more online privacy regulations, ads will get less efficient. It’s going to be important to start some of these initiatives, grow your community, and eventually bring on a retention team to help lower your churn.
At the end of the day, keeping your customers happy is the best retention strategy of all. Loyal customers who’ve had good experiences with you will keep shopping and will likely tell their friends to buy from you too.
Use the tactics outlined above to ensure you don’t lose future purchases to your competition.
