3 customer retention strategies to build to increase your store’s long term revenue

Before we jump into this article, it’s worth reading on our first post about customer retention and how you can use email marketing to drive returning customers

As a quick recap of the first post we wrote about leveraging email marketing strategies to boost customer retention. The 5 strategies were discussed launching the following email series

1. Birthday, anniversary and milestone emails.
2. Cart abandonment email series.
3. Post-purchase email series.
4. Product recommendations emails.
5. Review and testimonial request emails.

We hope you had a chance to implement some of the above strategies using your email service provider (or ESP). In this article we’ll focus on 3 strategies using Shopify apps to drive customer retention.

Strategy 1 - Loyalty

Deploying a loyalty program is proven in the long run to be a winner for brands as loyal (returning) customers tend to spend on average 67% more than new customers. With the ever increasing cost of acquiring new customers, it’s never been more important to build out a loyalty program to keep your customers loyal.

Building a loyalty program doesn’t have to be a complicated process, we recommend starting with a simple, clear points based approach (i.e. X points per $ spent). Having a clear loyalty program base is really important as it allows you to build on additional features to the loyalty program without over complicating how much customers can earn per purchase. Once you’ve confirmed how much customers would earn per $ spent then make sure you select the right technology partner (see list of apps below) that is customizable and can scale as your business grows.

Once launched remember to keep adding benefits to create little “wow” moments for your customers so the loyalty program stays fresh in their mind and they truly feel rewarded for coming back and shopping with your brand.

If you’re on Shopify, there are many apps you can use but the leading apps are Loyalty Lion, Smile, Yotpo (formerly known as Swell Rewards) and Rise.ai

Strategy 2 - Subscriptions

Consider adding the ability for customers to “subscribe” to receive your products on a regular basis without them having to revisit your website and manually order.

Check out how these 2x brands in Australia, Hydro Skin Care and Pet Circle have added auto subscriptions to their product purchase journey to encourage customer retention.

Taking a deeper look at Pet Circle, they’ve built subscriptions (or as they refer to it.. Auto Delivery) seamlessly, when you place an order the products items are automatic reorder is set up for you so their customer doesn’t have to worry about reordering. Worth noting, this method of adding reorders into a customer order can annoy some customers so it’s super important to have an excellent customer service experience in place to cancel the auto delivery service (which from personal experience Pet Circle do)... speaking of customer experience that leads nicely to our last strategy.

In case you’re looking for subscription apps on Shopify checkout Recharge, Apostle, Seal Subscriptions.

Strategy 3 - Customer Service

Great customer service is less of a strategy and more of a must have for customer retention. As a growing company or even a large store we know it can be really difficult to get back to all your customers in a timely fashion and provide the right answer each and every time across social media, email, phone and SMS.

However, we do believe in excellent customer service being paramount to building solid customer retention. If your customer had a bad experience in their first shop they are 50% more likely to share this on social media than those who had good experiences (45% v 30%) according to a Zendesk study.

To make things easy and manageable we recommend deploying tools like Octane AI if your customers are mostly on Facebook messenger or Re:Amaze, Gorgias or Intercom if you have customers who message you across social media, email, SMS and over the phone and need a live chat function live on the site. At Segments we use Intercom and we try to get back to customers within 5 minutes of their customer ticket. 

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We hope you enjoyed reading this post and have some long term takeaways to start actioning internally. As always check out the Segments app for easy to use actionable insights to grow your store revenue and don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn for more #ecommerce tips and tricks!