The main purpose of your eCommerce site is to offer your products to the visitors and generate sales revenue. For this, you focus your energy on bringing in the visitors on your site and selling them more, meaning – visitor acquisition and conversion optimization. But along the way, it is possible that you start working to acquire more new visitors and forget about bringing back those old customers. That is one of the major problems which we will address here. We’ll present the ideas to help you reclaim lost sales and improve customer retention and loyalty.
Let’s talk about Recovering Abandoned Sales at first.
Claim back the lost sales
E-commerce experts work on optimizing the product pages, product details pages and various components of those pages like CTA buttons, product images and descriptions to make the sales happen. Next trick that is applied to increase the sales is working on the user experience on the e-commerce sites.
But despite enormous efforts on those, there are other factors like market competition and availability of products, ease in shipping, etc., most of the visitors tend to leave your site without buying anything.
So, what can be done about this?
a) Optimize Product Pages for Intent Specific Keywords
If your question about intent specific keywords, these simply mean the words or phrases that determine the intention of the user. It can be informational, purchase, product search or something different. Whether the user is looking to check the specification of a specific product or the user is actually willing to purchase the product.
Let’s take a look into an example. A visitor lands on your site through “how to change iPhone screen”. This user is in the information collection phase of buyers behavior. Customer journey analysis is important. He is unlikely to purchase from your site. But if you link a page there to sell your service to another page like “cheapest iPhone screen change service”, the visitor is likely to visit that page and purchase the service. Obviously, there are other parameters like the one mentioned earlier but optimizing your site for intent specific keywords will help you get back the lost sales.
b) Use Offers and Discounts
Based on your promotion type, you can use offers and discounts to increase the conversion rates and get the lost sales back. When you price a product on your site competitively and despite that, your visitors tend to ignore your offering even after landing on that page, it’s time to do two things.
First, check whether you proving some “put-off” information on that page, it could be the images, description, title or some other lacking information. Second and more important, set up some discount and offers like free shipping, limited time discount, stock clearance sales and such.
If you can offer a fast and free shopping option, this will also help a lot in recovering the lost sales. This will help you to get back the visitors as customers.
c) Cart Abandonment Recovery
This is more serious than we would actually expect. If your potential customer abandons your site without purchasing even after adding products to the cart, you can get back the lost sales simply by probing the customers.
This problem exists in the eCommerce sites in between the range of 60-80%. About the solution, the most popular types are onsite remarketing and email remarketing. Use of exit layovers is more popular and effective to grab the email address if you want to implement email remarketing.
Due to the increase of mobile re-marketing, eCommerce sites also grab the mobile numbers of visitors by providing some baits like discounts or such. But, whether SMS remarketing or Email remarketing, these campaigns are definitely the way to go.
Now, let’s take a look at the strategies that will help you on customer retention and even with loyalty.
Customer Retention Strategies
While running an e-commerce site, it is imperative that you maintain a cool and healthy relationship with your customers to make them come back to you time and over again. For this, you need to implement some customer retention strategies that will also help you to increase customer loyalty. Let’s take a look at some of the popular strategies.
1. Host Contests and Awards
For your e-commerce sites, you can hold contests such as product reviews on your site and provide some freebies as awards to the best reviewer. This will not only help your customer engagement in your site for a long time but will also help you sell that specific product by improving user experience.
2. Share Updated News
When your customer purchases a product, they will want to know what the latest trends are upcoming in the market for that. Also, they want to know the updated features and pricing about those products for some time.
To help with that, you can post related information in your blog or news section and occasionally send out newsletters to your subscribers as well. This will not just help your customers stay updated through your site but will also help you in on page SEO.
3. Offer Loyalty Programs
When one of your customers purchases from you twice or more, what do you do? Do you wait to make a sale for the next time or do you try to engage the customer making him easy to purchase from you again? This is where you can make the best use of a customer loyalty program.
Send out some gifts, cards, or discount offers. Ask them if it’s okay to mention them as a valuable customer in social media. These all increase the value and provide them the recognition that will, in turn, help you retain them as a customer and win their loyalty.
4. Offer Referral Rewards
The referral reward is not just a step on your growth hacking but it is also a great way to increase your customer loyalty. If you recommend some product or business to your friends, why would you yourself hesitate to use the product or service twice? This is the basic human psychology which will help you get more customers as well as customer loyalty all in minor cost of acquisition like discount coupons, free gifts or other such offerings.
5. Try to Stay in touch
The only way that you can actually understand your customer needs is to actually communicate with them. Whether you send out survey forms or post a questionnaire on your site to understand your customers better, make it as humanly as possible.
A more effective way if you can invest in effort and cost will be live chat support for handling pre-sales inquiry. Your live chat can give a more personalized experience to your visitors and help them get what they want easily. This is a sure-shot way to get increased customer loyalty.
6. Manage the Processes
Once your customer purchases from your site, you need to make them easy in every way to purchase again from you. Don’t let them fill in all the information again, except for the crucial financial information. You don’t want to take that burden and it’s illegal to some point.
But for other info like location, preferences, product, etc., manage a system to store this information to offer a personalized experience for the next time. A user account will serve great for this purpose.
Again, offer the lowest cost shipping if not free, and overdue on meeting the customer expectations on processes like delivery, packaging and such. These are the things that matter the most.
7. Stay on top of channels
Make sure that you stay on top of the social media channels. Interact with your customers through your social media accounts. If your customers are on Facebook, help them purchase through your Facebook Store. Allow your customers to find your products everywhere whether by conducting remarketing campaigns or by listing your products on Amazon, eBay or Google Merchant.
We know there are more customer retention strategies but we’d love to hear what worked best for your shop. So share your opinion in the comments below. Also, make sure to check our other eCommerce promotion ideas,
