Keep customers coming back to your Magento store by setting up an effective customer retention strategy.

Acquiring new customers is an ultimate goal for any ecommerce venture, however retaining existing ones forms a foundation for the long-term success. In this post, we share our top 5 proven customer retention strategies with sucessful examples, that will help you maintain beneficial relationships with your customers and nurture their loyalty.

Customer retention reflects the efficiency of a business, since loyal customers are a driving force for its success. That is the reason why online merchants strive to increase the customer retention rate. Implementation of a retention strategy is a smart, and usually a less expensive way to keep your customers interested in your products in today’s competitive market. There are a bunch of marketing strategies, that allow enhancing customer retention and make customers shop at your store again. So, let’s take a closer look at the ones we consider the most efficient.

1. Make registration and repeat purchasing easy

Persuading shoppers to register on your website can be quite challenging, but it brings huge opportunities for further customer retention. You can’t force customers to create an account. However, such things as a simple and well-designed checkout and easy registration process can motivate them to do so while buying online. Registered customers are able to track orders, get exclusive deals and repeat purchases with just one click. All of that will help you encourage them to come back to your store.

An online beauty reseller Feelunique offers their customers to register while completing orders. An email address is the only thing you need to become a registered Feelunique user 

2. Offer subscriptions

A subscription-based model is one of the most popular and effective tools for retaining customers. Especially, if you sell fast moving consumer goods or any other products of everyday use. Subscriptions streamline the overall shopping process, freeing customers from the burden of placing an order every time they need one or another item. Whilst bringing convenience to customers, it allows you to benefit from the recurring sales.

Amazon has its Subscribe & Save Service that allows customers to order scheduled deliveries and get extra savings

3. Personalize customer experience

Over the last few years personalization has become the number one driver for the retail and ecommerce industry. Thus, online sellers should add personalization techniques to their customer retention strategy if they want to contribute to customer loyalty. Some of the tools for establishing a personalized customer experience include:

• Product recommendations based on customer’s preferences and previous purchases
• Personalized content
• Direct communication via email or social media
• Cross-selling and up-selling

When customers register with Asos, they are asked to connect their social accounts. It allows Asos to gather additional customer information for more targeted messaging

4. Launch a loyalty program

Loyalty programs and rewards have proved to be very successful in terms of customer engagement and retention. Exclusive deals and gifts with a purchase that can be unlocked with accumulated points are a great motivation for customers to keep coming back and shopping at your store. Launching a loyalty program for your Magento store is a piece of cake, especially with the help of an effective extension. You can offer discounts and promo codes, give rewards for referrals, registrations or social shares as a part of your loyalty program.

With the eBay Bucks program, customers are able to earn a percentage of the product price in the form of special points that can be redeemed for future purchases 

5. Take advantage of email marketing 

Email newsletters are a vital tool for managing and enhancing relationships with your buyers, especially when it comes to ecommerce. Of course, there are multiple social channels to keep in touch with your customers. But emails stand out because of their personalization level, since they can be addressed to a specific person. Segment your email list and send targeted, engaging messages based on individual customer’s preferences. Then you will be able to offer exclusive discounts and deals to encourage repeat sales, as well as send gentle reminders to customers that left their carts abandoned.

Dialaphone reminds their shoppers about abandoned carts with simple yet vivid personalized emails

Final thoughts

Customer retention will always be a challenging task for ecommerce businesses, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for that. But we hope that our 5 tips will help you establish a powerful customer retention strategy that will make your customers come back to your store over and over again.