06/01/2017
5 Ways To Ensure Your eCommerce Customers Come Back
Depending on what sort of ecommerce store you have, you will see a fluctuation in your sales according to a multitude of denominators. It could be the introduction of a popular item which sees sales soar or celebratory days in the calendar, like Christmas and Valentine’s Day, which cause a spike of sales. But more often than not it can be seasonal.
Take the summer, for example - a great opportunity for ecommerce shops to push a plethora of products ranging from clothing to healthcare products -which shoppers tend to respond to as they’re either going on holiday or anticipating an adventurous summer. Once this summer is over, however, how do you keep those customers coming back, despite the much colder and darker times ahead?
If you start now, the better you will be positioned to leverage the traffic and the subsequent data that you have gathered from Q3 (Jul, Aug, Sep) in to Q4 (Oct, Nov, Dec). This provides an opportunity to begin to generate long-term customers that return to your store despite the weather.
Here are a 5 ways to help you along the way…
1. Assemble emails for retargeting
Hopefully, by the time Q4 comes around, you’ll be getting even more traffic through the door because of what you’ve done in Q3. Now, you must take advantage of this by using pop-ups designed around capturing festive sales from occasions such as Halloween, Bonfire Night and Christmas whilst simultaneously capturing more emails addresses.
The pop-ups you could use are ones which offer visitors a discount in exchange for a subscription to your emails or newsletter. Alternatively, you could promote a pop-up to be triggered when an unidentified user exits and offer to send them an email reminder about the items they browsed or left in their cart.
[link to pop-up examples like these]
By doing so, you are not only providing an interaction and excellent customer service with your customers but also collating more data to retarget them throughout the rest of Q4 and in to the new year with tantalising offers!
2. ‘We miss you’
Further cement engagement and interaction by using the emails you have gathered to intermingle with those customers who have not visited your store for a while. Trigger ‘We miss you’ emails populated with personalised product recommendations, revealing that you have learnt their favourable items, for a more personal connection. Building relationships with your customers is vital to ensure they return from time to time.
[example of an email like this]
3. Re-engage through social advertising
Platforms like Facebook have a highly intelligent system which allows you to target individuals, groups or geographical locations in order to push your products. This is a great way of keeping your brand at the forefront of their minds. Not only can you promote products and offers according to demographics, but you can also tailor make adverts to target those who have visited your store, browsed certain products, left items in their cart and even suggest items relevant to the ones they’ve just bought! Magic.
[example of social advertising]
4. Anticipate the pinch
As your Q4 strategy strides in to the latter stages of and the majority of impulse purchasing has been done, a sure fire way of getting those bargain hunters to take another bite is to delight them with discount coupons to use in January for the orders they place throughout December. It’s a small gesture but one that will hook them back to your store despite their funds lacking from the festive season.
5. Loyalty rewards
Start the New Year as you mean to go on by rewarding the loyal customers who helped you through the previous year. The types of gestures you could make could be anything from a physical gift off your production line to a voucher or discount code for free shipping. If you have bigger budgets and greater resources you could make something a little more personalised for each of them. After all, everybody loves a freebee, and rewarding your customers will make them happy - Happy New Year!
Your customers are the most important assets you have, so make sure you keep them. Above are just 5 ways in which you can do this but there are lots of little things you can do to keep customers on side – just consider what it is you like about the ecommerce stores you frequently shop on and return to and add a bit of your own personality to it!
If you’d like further guidance and assistance, please get in touch with Studioworx either via email ([email protected]), telephone (+44 (0)1603 274285) or the website (https://www.studioworx.co.uk).