For an e-commerce business to flourish, it is very important to rope in new customers. Once a buyer has been introduced to your e-commerce business, you have to make sure that you attract them into repeat purchases. However, turning your buyer into a loyal customer isn’t as easy as it sounds. Repeat purchase is a gift you need to earn by satisfying your buyers with your services.
How do you keep your current customers happy to ensure that they return? And how do you turn your one-time customers into repeat buyers? A cohesive marketing strategy is what you need to get started with it. But before that, let’s discuss the significance of repeat purchases.
Why Is Repeat Purchase Important?
Repeat purchase shows the loyalty of your customers. This is important because five times more resources are spent to acquire new customers than the resources spent on maintaining or retaining an old customer. Also, there is a 25% – 95% chance of you being able to sell your new products to someone who is already your customer, which is almost four times the possibility of selling it to someone new to your website.
Another important factor to be considered is the fact that merely 8% of an e-commerce website’s customer base can earn them 40% of their entire revenue, on average. Most e-commerce websites spend as much as 80% of their total budget on acquiring new customers only. But the amount of revenue that their old customers serve them is unbelievable.
An e-commerce company that has its priorities figured out rationally, knows the importance of customer retention, and therefore spends a significant amount of its budget on not just acquiring new customers, but on retaining them too.
Top 5 Steps To Achieve Repeat Purchase
Now that you know the significance of repeat purchases in your e-commerce business, let’s move on to discussing some of the most effective strategies to boost repeat purchases for your e-commerce platform.
1. Design Customers’ Lifecycle to Maximize Sales
The customer lifecycle comprises the stages that a customer goes through on their path to loyalty. It involves touchpoints from the time that they learn about your product to the time that they turn into your brand advocates. The customer lifecycle stages include awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy.
Once a customer purchases from you the first time, there are several actions that you can take to increase the chances of repeat purchases from that customer.
- Use a CRM tool and an email automation tool to immediately send them thank you emails after they have bought a product from you.
- Use Google Analytics to understand what related products your customer might be interested in and recommend those products.
- Dish out regular updates on your latest products and special offers.
- Offer prompt customer support and reach out to them proactively.
- Personalize your email outreach based on their browsing history and past purchases.
2. Run Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are an easy way to drive repeat purchases. Many shoppers tend to consider the prospect of earning loyalty rewards to determine where to shop. 35.5% of the shoppers across the world make at least half of their purchases from retailers with loyalty programs. Of these, over 90% of them buy to earn loyalty programs.
Loyalty programs play a key role in incentivizing future purchases by encouraging your customers to do business with you. Here are some easy ways to set up loyalty programs to enhance repeat purchases for your business.
- Try to understand what drives your regular customers to shop from you and tailor your loyalty programs accordingly.
- Keep track of customer behavior so that you can easily anticipate what they are looking for and fulfill their needs through your loyalty program.
- Collect customer feedback for your product and encourage social media engagement.
Remember, the key is to reward action-based interactions that can benefit your business. For example, you can reward customers whose purchases exceed a certain limit. Also, reward customers who bring new customers to you through referrals, purchase from you during a slow business period, or engage with you on social media platforms.
3. Offer Frictionless Experiences
Improving the purchase experiences of your customers is a sure-shot way to boost e-commerce conversions and drive repeat purchase rates. A recent study revealed that the price of the products is the most important factor that motivates customers to transact (98%).
Other important factors include accurate product descriptions (94%), stock availability (94%), ease of finding products on the site (93%), and quality images (93%). Free delivery (92%) and prompt customer service (90%) were other important factors that drove repeat purchases.
The message that you can extract out of these stats is that your customers desire a stress-free experience. Easy navigation, how-to-guides, detailed product descriptions, and a seamless payment gateway all play a role in making your customers’ experience a smooth one.
4. Use Cart Abandonment Emails
The average cart abandonment rate for online sites stands at a staggering 69.80%. Reach out to your potential customers with cart abandonment emails. Send your customers emails reminding them about their cart and motivating them to complete their purchase. However, this will require you to use data for personalized communication. Reach out to your customers with the right messages by identifying when they have an interest in a product on your site.
Some of the other best practices for cart abandonment emails that you can use to boost the purchase rate of your e-commerce platform include-
- Send your customers emails within the shortest time after cart abandonment so they can clearly remember what they are missing out on.
- Incentivize your customers with discounts, free shipping, and interest-free financing.
- Use personalized and fun subject lines in your emails to draw your customers’ attention instantly.
- Include testimonials and customer reviews in your emails for social proof.
- Add a CTA button in your emails and offer one-click checkout options.
5. Analyze & Optimize Your Strategy
Having a clear understanding of your brand’s current position is key to driving repeat customer purchases. You can do this by keeping track of the metrics that give a clear view of your site’s health and leveraging those insights to increase repeat purchases from your customers.
Here are a few metrics that you should track apart from repeat purchase rate.
- Conversion rate: How many of your site visitors purchase from you? Boost your conversion rate if it is low before you target repeat purchases.
- Total sessions: How many customers visit your site in a given period? Onboard new customers to increase the total sessions and turn them into repeat customers.
- Purchase frequency: How frequently do your existing customers purchase from you? Knowing this can help you in optimizing your outreach efforts.
- Customer Lifetime Value: How much do your existing spend on your site on average?
Key Takeaways
Implementing a customer retention strategy isn’t as challenging as you might think. It is merely a shift in focus on bigger priorities with a lower cost of conversion and higher conversion probability.
Your ultimate goal should be to create loyal customers that return to you to make repeated purchases. As an e-commerce business owner, you should try building customer relationships that last for an extended period. This can be done through loyalty and referral programs. The bottom line is, to grow your business by selling more to your existing customers instead of trying to acquire new customers constantly.
If you have any doubts about how you can increase your repeat purchase rate, take Wigzo’s free trial today to drive your customer retention rate drastically.
