As an online merchant, you’re always trying to woo your buyers with a great shopping experience during the buying cycle. But what happens when your efforts pay off and the customer buys from you? What happens after the payment is cleared, invoice sent and product shipped? If you’re like most companies, you put your efforts back on customer acquisition and do whatever it takes to win more new customers. The cycle repeats until the old customers come back to do more business.
But… will they come back?
The answer is simple. Not unless you give them a reason to.
Despite the fact that customer acquisition is 6 times the cost of retention, reports conclude that more than 80% of companies tie their business objectives to customer acquisition but less than half give importance to retention.
One of the reasons why merchants don’t always have customer retention top of mind is that, unlike lead generation or customer acquisition, retention campaigns take relatively longer before producing results. When you run a lead gen or ad campaign, you can easily see and measure the results.
After a closer look, however, it’s clear to see that customer retention is more valuable than acquisition.
The proof is in the numbers:
According to Adobe reports, online retailers spend nearly 80% of their digital marketing budgets acquiring shoppers even though for each 1% of shoppers who returns, overall revenue will increase by approximately 10%. That means that if you retained 10% of your existing customers, you would double your revenue.
To do so, you have to pay more attention to the customers that aren’t currently buying anything but are likely to buy again in the future. Just because an existing customer is not buying from you, doesn’t mean you put them on the sideline. It pays to show up from time to time. A great shopping experience for your customers depends on what you do between sales.
Surprisingly, a quick Google search for tools to help online merchants with their customer retention will yield less results than you’d expect. Especially being a clear area of improvement that would positively affect your long-term bottom line. Luckily, our network of partners provides us with the latest tools and solutions for the newest eCommerce challenges.
Introducing Reconnect. A simple tool that does the complex task of automating your customer retention.
Reconnect automatically identifies your non-returning customers and creates branded and responsive email templates, personalized with intelligently generated product recommendations based on your customers’ last purchases. The tool targets those non-returning customers after 30 days, 90 days and 180 days to keep your customers engaged with your store through smart recommendations.
Powered by DataConnect technology, Reconnect is currently available for eBay, Shopify and Magento merchants. Reconnect’s 1-click integration to your store allows you to automate your customer retention in minutes and focus on other areas of your shopping experience. A quick comparison on handling and maintaining this type of customer retention program demonstrates how you can increase productivity, scale your business and save your most precious resource: TIME.
