Are e-commerce websites twisting your brains against you? You may ask how? The marketers now have learned the magic of human psychology to create fear, pleasure, and excitement among the customers. So next, you are willing to shop online, keep these tips with you.
And for marketers, when used right, these tips can rock your sales & improve your conversion rates.
But before we start, let us look at some of the basic stats on customer retention and why it is important.
- Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. (Bain & Co).
- Attracting a new customer costs five times as much as keeping an existing one. (Lee Resources 2010)
- Globally, the average value of a lost customer is $243.(KISSmetrics)
- 71% of consumers have ended their relationship with a company due to poor customer service. (KISSMetrics)
- The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20% (Marketing Metrics)
- According to our Cross-Channel Marketing Report 2014, 82% of companies agree that retention is, in fact, cheaper than acquisition.
- The Cross-Channel Marketing Report also found that marketers focus more on acquisition than retention.
So, you might be asking how to improve the customer retention rate?
Well, here is the answer by reading this blog till the end.
The after-sale is as important as the sale itself.
Have you ever had a bad experience & you didn’t even bother to let the company know about that? Yes, I have a couple of times and trust me, it was easy to leave the company that didn’t care instead of hitting your head with the customer rep.
As an e-commerce store, it is your job to take care of your customer from the moment he signs up for your website to the delivery of the product. One practice I did with my first venture was the order confirmation call. After the delivery, we made a call to the customer asking about the quality of the product & the service. Tons of times, even if the order went wrong, a customer complained about the phone & we sorted out the problem right away. This did two main benefits for us. Firstly, our quality improved, and secondly, we knew what was going wrong in our delivery process. In addition, we learned a lot when we treated every order as important as the previous one and followed the order till the end.
Offer Fast delivery to increase customer retention rate
Set & beat your standards. Nothing builds trust on customers other than offering quick delivery. When I started my venture. I offered three days delivery, but I made sure to deliver the product in 2. This itself worked pretty well for me. Not just happy customers, but we were labeled the best in our region.
For instance, what if you place an order on the website and instead of 4 days, you get your product delivered in 2? Exciting right? Yeah, this is what I expected from Amazon and got it. Not once, but they outsmart my expectations every time I order from Amazon.
Make registration easy, not a worry.
No matter how many websites I order from, Zappos wins my heart every time I make the purchase. Their persuasion methods are way too cooler than any other website. The way they read your minds and personalize their email campaigns is brilliant.
Next comes the repeat purchase. BestBuy makes you stick to their latest happenings by a pretty catchy email campaign. I may not need their products at the moment, but I indeed go through all the emails.
Easy returns will earn the trust.
When Zappos first launched easy returns, the critics went mad. And customers went insane. But after the first quarter, it was eminent that Zappos was right. The 7-day easy return policy was an instant hit, and people were glued to the website. Sometimes customers just went to try the products and returned the products; Zappos knew and supported this reasoning, which made even more customers.
Time Bond Products
When Gap launched this feature, it was just a test run for three days. But when their server went down 3 times in 5 hours, it was clear that customers were returning at an enormous rate.
Even now, when I see websites that offer time-bound products, I buy just because the offering is far better than the normal products. So use this time bond option to retain more customers.
What are customers saying?
Customer feedback is another option that keeps the customer coming back for more. Yes, until now, 72% of the customers make their buying decisions based on what others say about the brand. So give your customer feedback link on the front page & some websites show one testimonial in front.
These tips will surely help you when browsing a website for an online purchase. Yes, there are still great eCommerce web design sites doing well. But, do you find yourself falling into any trap? Now you have a guideline on where to stop the purchase & when to go forward with the purchase?
