Business Strategy – Engagement and Loyalty

Business Strategy – Engagement and Loyalty

We’ve talked a lot in recent articles about winning new customers through a variety of traffic strategies and then employing the most efficient fulfilment options. But once you’ve led a new customer to your site them you’d like to keep them coming back.

One of the main elements in keeping down the Cost per Order (CPO) is to wring as much from each customer as you can ....... but not in a predatory way you understand. Those customers should want to be willing participants in helping you make the most of their desire to buy from you.

Unless you happen to work with a grasping third party affiliate platform that counts the cookie from the previous transaction, then each time a customer returns to your website and makes a purchase directly, they have cost you nothing in direct commission cost. So it makes sense to put as much work into persuading customers to:

Spend as much as possible at the first visit.

Come back regularly and make more purchases.

There are several ways to make your customers want more at the first visit. You’ve all seen the big online stores have a pop up ‘complementary products.' If you like that - then you’ll just adore this....’. Most good e-commerce platforms will have options to offer either specific or randomized products to go along with their first purchase, and you may be surprised that as many as 12% of people intending to buy a single item were tempted into buying further items through such tactics.

What about offering incentives for a bigger spend? Perhaps free shipping or even a discount for reaching a particular value. And if you are going to do that, make sure your checkout process alerts the customer to the gap before they check out – ‘just spend another $13.67 and your shipping will be free.' It’s just amazing how many times someone manages to pay exactly the correct amount to win their concession!

The easiest way to tempt customers into coming back is to ask yourself what would make you return to your shop time and again. Are there any e-commerce sites that you visit regularly that could provide some ideas? Well if not here a few ideas to think about:

Make the buying experience a seamless pleasure - this is the key, and we’ll expand on this more on this in future articles.

Create a VIP club and track customers who make multiple purchases. Then reward them with offers or perhaps points towards future discounts.

Enclose offer coupons in the packaging of all products sent to customers.

Offer something for referrals to other customers.

Create exclusive collections of products for existing customers.

Offer a one off voucher for a signup to your mailing list.

All these initiatives are accessible and use few resources to implement. They help to make your customer feel they are valued, and if people feel valued then, they are far more likely to return.