8 Steps to Make Sure Your Customers Always Come Back
Customer loyalty is a must in every business and can be defined with different fancy definitions relating to customer repeated behavior to a particular company. But what we here want you to learn is how to develop a love relationship with you e-customers in order for them to have a favorable attitude that results in repeat buying behavior in your B2C company.
After interviewing customers who purchased online, e-commerce industry executives and e-commerce web designers, Srini S. Srinivasan, Rolph Anderson and Kishore Ponnavolu at Journal of Retailing have concluded what has the most impact on your e-customer loyalty. Based on this paper, we have selected our 8 holy grail e-business factors that, when well implemented, will lead your customers to have that “in-love” relationship with your company.
8 C’s to improve your customer loyalty:
- Customization
Have the resources and technology to treat your customer individually at your website. A system that can recognize the customer and tailor his favorite products, services and best individual shopping experience for him. That is the way how the client will find something that they want to buy. Moreover, decrease the frustration of searching for the right product and the transaction will be finished more efficiently. - Contact Interactivity
It is important to ensure the interactivity with the customer through the website, meaning that the engagement and working with the website is easy and logical and the possibility of easy searching for a product is given. Also, the communication and direct contact with the client is easy to find and quick. In result the customer is happy to find his products quickly and can learn more about it. - Care
Retailers should highly care about their customer pre and post purchase activities as well keep them on track after buying with recommending new products and features. Regarding bad feedbacks and mistakes, they occur way worse in the online world for the companies, because of the fact that a bad feedback can affect the opinion of thousands. - Community
Create a virtual community. Meaning to have a group of people that are able to give reviews and opinions about the product you well. These community have the power to increase the customer loyalty. People trust people that have already experience with the product more than what the company said. And people like to get involved in the process and to give their opinion and value. Moreover, customer identify the retailer with the community they belong to. - Choice
An e-retailer should be able to offer a wider range of products than a shop in a mall. That implement that the online store can form alliances with suppliers to offer a better range of products for the customer and make the shopping experience more efficiently then switching between competitors. This saves cost and time on both sides - Convenience
The website should be simple, intuitive and user friendly to fulfil the customers’ needs. Access to Information must be simple and transaction processes should be fast as well. The quality of the website is the brand for the e retailer. - Character
Stand out with a nice design that has character and give a positive reputation to yourself in the mind of your clients. Give yourself outlooking personalities with colors, logo slogan and logical website. - Cultivation
Use your database rights to provide the best offers for your customers. By proactively offering the desired information. That means cross selling opportunities via e-mail or other channels with for example related articles to their last buy.
Measurements
Following a practical methodology to collect actionable insights based on the 8 C’s customer loyalty approach, a survey was sent to 5,000 potential respondents informed that they could by chance win a prize. 1,211 usable responses were produced.
Questions like the customer willingness to pay more in a e-retailer over a specific purchase environment were subject to a revision from several online shoppers, site administrators, and information technology professionals, promoting knowledge-oriented inputs to the final research instrument. By doing so, this form of validation is the logical way for a successful retrieve of actionable information within the industry professionals which to some extent are the final decision-makers. Actionable insights are the challenge inherent to the analysis of the final data gathered from the respondents. Discovering elements within it that a e-commerce business can exploit to enhance performance and get an advantage in the marketplace.
To test the hypotheses, after a series of statistical refination and analysis to guarantee data integrity, the LISREL model was applied to conclude whether this 8 C’s have some type of correlation.
As shown on the radial bar chart, the results leave convenience and community on the bottom and character as superior confidence key variable. Delivering a considerable amount of actionable information, the research can simultaneously supply additional info on the outcomes and impact of e-loyalty on the customer behaviour. To test this essential elements of a e-commerce business against their consequences the following regression was made for “Searching for alternatives when shopping”, “Word of mouth” and “Willingness to pay” on the survey data.
To conclude…
Competing successfully in today’s market requires developing and maintaining customer loyalty. The importance of it and the consequences of its absence must be thoroughly understood and taken as rules to live by in order to prevail. Above all else, just make sure to design the 8 C’s in order for them to fit perfectly in your customers’ profiles and once they are stuck in your web, ascertain the outcomes of their loyalty. By favorably managing all of this, you are on the right track of becoming the love of their life, the one they simply cannot live without.
This post is based on “Customer loyalty in e-commerce: an exploration of its antecedents and consequences” written by: Srini S. Srinivasan, Rolph Anderson and Kishore Ponnavolu.
