How to Retain Customers in Retail?

February 23, 2022

e-Commerce

“Old is gold” – this saying is still so true even today. The same goes for customers. As per consumer loyalty statistics, 65% of business comes from existing old potential customers of the company. As per research, existing customers are much more valuable than new customers.

New customers are good to have for business revenue, and sales but old customers are highly valuable as they can even try your new product if they have already purchased your old products and have trust in your brand.

After the pandemic, there is a lot of change in the shopping behavior of the customers. More consumers were shifted to online purchases when it wasn’t safe to visit retail stores offline. This is now more convenient for customers but after moving out from lockdown, customers’ habits are likely to change once again.

Therefore, it’s key for every business owner to try and retain any new customers using effective customer retention strategies to push them to the next level because new customers are exciting but only loyal and old customers bring back value to the business.

But, the question is how to retain customers who are leaving? To answer that, let’s first understand what customer retention is and why it is important for your eCommerce business.

What is Customer Retention?

Customer retention in the retail industry is an ability to attract customers, turn them into repeat and loyal customers, and also maintain a customer base. It is an ability to prevent customers from switching to competitors. It indicates whether your customers are satisfied with your service and products or not.

One can measure this using the customer retention rate. It is the rate at which a business is able to retain those existing shoppers. Customer retention can help business owners to meet customers’ expectations and fulfill the demands of returning customers too.

Why is Customer Retention Important?

Helps to increase business revenue
Helps to build better relationships with customers.
Helps to build brand identity
Increase customer’s lifetime value
Helps to get new customers because loyal consumers refer brands to their family & friends.
Lower marketing cost because advertising & marketing to existing customers cost much less than marketing to new customers.
More profit with repeat customers because existing customers tend to spend more on your products and services instead of new ones.

What are the customer retention strategies?

Let’s look at some of the customer retention strategies that can help you to sell more, both online and in-store. We have also tried to add a few customer retention examples along with the strategies for your reference.

Focus on loyalty programs & reward customers for their loyalty:

Loyalty programs help to build a strong relationship with your customers. And if you want your customers to return back and shop with you again then you have to provide them rewards, incentives as there is a lot of competition in the market.

Loyalty programs are those where store owners can issue virtual points to their customers for every purchase they make which customers can exchange for discounts, free products, etc. They drive up the average order value because loyalty programs are based on how much customers spend with your business.

If we talk about customer loyalty in the retail industry, then as per the study by Invesp, 64% of retailers find that the best way to connect with consumers is through loyalty programs. 49% of consumers agreed that they spend more after joining a loyalty/reward program of any brand.

Have a look at the Amazon Prime Loyalty Program which offers a lot of benefits and rewards for the loyalty of Amazon shoppers. The benefits include faster shipping, exclusive access to kindle books, tv shows, and many more.

Reward customers for referring your brand

Referral programs are the ones where customers refer your brand to their family and friends through personalized links, social media accounts, text, or email. This will not only increase your brand awareness but also boost sales and increase your brand’s trustworthiness. Also, referral programs will not only help to retain the current customers but also get your business new ones. So it’s a win-win situation if you offer referral and reward options to your customers.

As a store owner, you can reward your customers with every referral. Give them discounts or gift cards as a reward. You will be surprised to know that around 52% of brands use this tactic of rewarding a gift card for customer referrals.

Check the referral program running on ReferralCandy, a cloud-based solution, and how to set the number of referrals required for customers to earn their reward.

Keep in touch with customers:

It’s obvious that a strong relationship with your customers leads to more repeat purchases. If you offer warm greetings, thoughtful gestures, and educated associates then it’s obvious that customers will be back and also talk about your brand to other people.

Provide Best Customer Support

Providing customer support at the right time is one of the best strategies for retaining customers. They need to be proactive in the service if they wish to drive loyalty and repeat customers. Because most of the customers move to competitors after receiving poor customer service.

Personalize Your Customer’s Experience in Real-time:

If you wish that consumers connect with your brand in a powerful way then try to personalize the shopping experience of every customer with offers and targeted messaging.

Collect the customer’s data from your online store and track the customer behavior for every session including logins through which devices, pages they looked at, products they searched, along with cart value, bounces, and page exits. Using this data you can engage with the right target audience at appropriate touchpoints with perfectly targeted live content, messages, recommendations, etc.

Recommended Read: Top Essential eCommerce Website Features

Build a Community:

Using your retail store you can build a customer community because it helps to drive customer loyalty and nurtures an authentic relationship with customers. Building an in-store community gives a solid reason to your customers to come back for a future purchase of your store.

The Sephora’s Beauty Insider Community made for skincare fanatics and makeup enthusiasts. The dedicated online space for them to come together to participate in fun challenges, to ask questions, swap tips and tricks, share photos of their latest looks, and try out new products.

Listen to Your Customers:

To retain customers try to encourage them to share their feedback and stories. What they feel about your product, about your brand, and allow them an option to talk about your brand and flaunt your products. A lot of giant websites use this tactic to attract more customers and increase customer retention.

Sell on Social Media:

Social media is one of the best platforms to retain customers as half of the people using the internet across the world are using social media platforms. They are always looking for more information about their business or brand on a social media platform and check their online presence. So try to sell products on all the most popular social media apps like Instagram, Facebook, etc.

Customer retention in the retail sector is not only important, but a necessity now!

Regardless of whatever strategy you apply, if you make an effort to retain your customers with such automation strategies then you will not only save your time but also stay top of the mind of your customers. Therefore, look at your website data and check what will be helpful and what will be not for your marketing and custom retention process. You can contact Rock Technolabs to help you with the latest tactics to retain customers and boost revenue.