Why your happy customers are your biggest assets + three easy ways to maximize customer happiness

By Vera Smirnoff, Marketing Director at Loox — Photo Reviews

You’ve just acquired a new customer! What could be more exciting?

Actually, selling to your existing customer is way more exciting. Here is why.

• Acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty five times more than retaining an existing customer.
• Increasing customer retention by just 5% increases profits 25–95%.
• Existing customers spend 67% more than new customers.

The three pillars of retention

It costs less to retain an old customer. But that is not all! Loyal clients will also buy significantly more from you. It seems pretty obvious that Shopify store owners must ensure that their customers are happy and are consistently coming back for more. And yet, quite often marketing efforts are skewed towards prioritizing acquisition.

When you’ve just launched a new store, there is one thing you should be focused on: getting customers. But the moment you start getting sales consistently, it is time to kick off your retention efforts. By the time you are an established business, a large chunk of your marketing budget should be put towards retention.

“Customer loyalty is the result of consistently positive emotional experience” It might not feel so glamorous as running a successful acquisition campaign that brings in new customers in droves. But it really pays off in the long run. Let’s look at how to generate tons of customer happiness with the holy trinity of a loyalty program, referral program and user-generated content!

Run a branded loyalty program

Loyalty programs are designed to motivate customers to purchase more often to earn valuable rewards. Setting up a loyalty program is an extremely effective way to increase purchase frequency.

Obviously a loyalty program worth its salt will allow you to reward your customers for making purchases, but you need to consider a few other actions to reward for as well:

• Create an Account
• Place an Order
• Leave a Review
• Facebook Like
• Instagram Follow

Loyalty program helps you build strong relationships and ensures that your customers get more value from your brand as you benefit from their repeat business.

You can easily set up a loyalty program with the help of automated loyalty apps such as Smile.io and reward your customers for a variety of actions they take in your store starting today.

Empower your happy customers to share the love!

Once you have established an ongoing relationship with your customers and the repeat purchases started to flow in, it is time to keep up the momentum and try to leverage that customer happiness to get even more customers. Make it easy and exciting for your customers to spread the word about you!

Using a referral program is a no-brainer here. An important caveat to consider is the flexibility in incentive offered, as well as the level of automation. As your program grows, these will be crucial for its success. Try Referral Candy and offer your customers cash rewards or custom-made coupons in exchange for referrals!

Reviews as a retention tool

Photo reviews are often lauded as an excellent conversion tool. And rightfully so! But here is something you probably didn’t know — review request emails is the secret ingredient of an excellent retention strategy.

Review request emails enjoy extremely high open rates.

Email marketing is the backbone of your retention efforts. We analyzed over 2 million review request emails sent out last month through our systems and the average open rate reached 36%. This presents a great opportunity for merchants to upsell happy customers, build stronger relationships and generate repeat business.

Strike while the iron is hot — reinforce positive associations with your brand.

Review request emails help you to capture customer happiness at just the right moment when the excitement of getting great products is still fresh in their minds. Rewarding your happy customers for leaving a review will reinforce positive associations with your brand in their minds.

Reviews allow Shopify merchants to go beyond focusing exclusively on repeat purchases, the bare minimum of retention. Instead, feedback from customers is essential to improve customer experience and engagement and find new opportunities to maximize positive customer experience with your brand. The bottom line — if you listen to your customers and make adjustments to improve their experience on an ongoing basis, your customers will reward you.

Building a retention strategy that works might seem overwhelming at first, but with the right set of tools you can make a real difference in how your customers see your brand. If you haven’t started to market to your current customers after the sale, now is as good a time as any to build a cohesive strategy for maximizing your customers’ happiness and retention!