Welcome to this post on customer retention and eCommerce businesses, via Afrokonnect. In today’s present eCommerce sector, it is important for businesses to ensure that their customers remain with their brand and don’t run off to competitors with more lucrative offers on the table.
The e-commerce sector is presently overflowing with numerous customers and even though it is important that your brand focuses on acquiring new customers, it is also essential that your brand has a strategy to ensure the nurturing and retaining of existing customers.
Various researches has shown that the success of a business lies in its ability to retain customers as it provides them with an added advantage over its competitors.
Customer retention ensures that the businesses develops the ability to create long-standing relationships with the customer, who in turn reward such relationship with constant patronage and loyalty to the brand.
The present e-commerce sector is overflowing with numerous alternatives for customers at their fingertips but building customer loyalty to your brand ensures none of your customers leaves your brand to another.
What is Customer Retention?
Customer retention dwells on the processes involved when engaging and retaining a customer, with the aim of building long-term relationships hence generating profit to the business.
This involves the implementation of certain strategies to ensure customer loyalty to a particular brand or business. Customer retention can also be defined as the process of reducing the chances of customer’s defection and encouraging greater patronage through various initiatives hence affecting the revenue of the business positively.
The difference between Customer Retention and Customer Acquisition?
Customer retention is the process of keeping customers after they get attracted to your brand, which will positively improve your revenue streams long-term, while Customer acquisition is the process of you attracting various customers to your brand but skips the process of retaining them,
Which will have a short-term positive effect on your business’s revenues. The latter, Customer Acquisition, is very important to any business that want to grow as it ensures the rise in the brand’s revenue, which prompts growth but isn’t advisable for any business that wants to maintain its growth;
Customer retention is far more important in the growth of any business as it ensures the business maintains its relevance for a long time. The growth of any brand is determined by how the brand ensures that it has returning customers, which will ensure that it records consistent sales boosting the company’s revenue.
Ways to improve Customer Retention for your brand
There are various ways to improve the customer retention for your brand but few will be mentioned here and they are:
1) Integrating Email Marketing:
Having an email address is one of the necessities for any human that’s on the online space either as a customer or business owner. Due to the heavy usage of email by various people, it is of upmost importance that your company/brand considers integrating the email platform with your brand’s ideology.
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Not all customers willingly forget your brand but due to either health issues or enormous workload, they might not remember an iota of your brand, so it is up to you to engage them continuously on their email platform hence reminding them of your services and generate more revenue for your brand.
2) Having a strong social media presence:
The social media space is the most common way of reaching your customers, as billions of the human population have an active social media presence ranging from Facebook, Twitter to Instagram and Whatsapp.
Having a strong social media presence can be very helpful to your brand if you are targeting the newer generation as your customers and selling online entails of you having a social media presence to reach more customers.
3) Personalize the customer’s experience:
The use of data in the marketing among various e-commerce businesses has greatly revolutionized the industry, as various e-commerce business now have access to the data of customers and this can be helpful in personalizing the experience of the customer of your platform.
You can also improve the personalized side of your e-commerce business by asking customers questions, this can be done through surveys on how you can improve their experience while patronizing your e-commerce business.
4) Convince customers to create an account:
You as a business have to encourage your customers not to desist from creating an account on your platform, as creating an account with your e-commerce business ensures that customers start receiving personalized emails and getting latest information on your products.
Why Customer Retention is important to E-commerce Businesses
1) It causes an increase in ROI:
ROI is an acronym for Return on Investment – it entails that the capital put forward towards a business is gotten back with profits. Getting new customers as stated before is very helpful to businesses,
But the capacity to generate returning customers is cheaper and generate bigger revenue which ensures your increase your ROI on marketing efforts. Reducing the money spent on getting new customers can be used in other aspects of businesses.
2) Improved Customer Acquisition:
After getting loyal customers for your business, there will be a lot of added incentives as they can be used to get new customers with no extra cost attached.
In a case where Customers who have a good experience patronizing a particular e-commerce business, they will surely recommend that particular e-commerce business to their friends or even followers (if they are big influencers).
3) Causes brand loyalty:
Humans in general are known not to let good things slip away from their hands so you not expect customers who have good experience patronizing your brand move to other brands. Customers are known to remain in a brand that meets that requirement and not switch to other brands which they aren’t sure will meet their requirements.
Others include:
4) It reduces the Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC);
5) It increases the Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Conclusion
Customer retention is essential for the success of e-commerce businesses and businesses focusing on generating customers’ loyalty is sure to increase its growth, reduce costs and have a wider acceptance.
It is important that various businesses focuses that resources in investing in various customer retention strategies, which will ensure that the business propels to a new height in the online space. Thanks for reading and I hope to see you again on Afrokonnect.ng.
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