For a very long time, our world has been going through a COVID pandemic that has destroyed the customer’s willingness to try out new products or spend money on luxury items or non-essentials.
Even nowadays, there is uncertainty in the world, customers are avoiding visiting stores. This social distancing and restrictions have changed customer behavior to a very extent.
With all this uncertainty and economic state, more and more brick and mortar stores are shifting towards online. And eCommerce is becoming more crowded in terms of competition and customers.
In this heart throbbing competition, acquiring new customers is harder. But, the report says, it is 70% easier to keep an existing customer.
But, that doesn’t mean you will stop hunting for new ones. You can earn more revenue this upcoming Christmas holiday sales by nurturing your existing customers with an effective customer retention strategy. Do you know if you only invest 5% in customer retention you have the chance to boost your sale by 25-95%?
Yes, exactly! you read it right. In this blog, I will share how to increase customer retention for holiday sales 2021; And a win-back campaign will help you get more sales in this COVID-19 pandemic.`
Let’s get started!
How COVID-19 Has Changed The Shoppers’ Behavior?
After 2020, consumers have shown a radical shift in their shopping behavior. The shoppers are considering priorities over preferences to reduce expenditure on any unnecessary commodity. The long period of isolation, lockdown, and economic uncertainty have very much affected the buying decisions.
Before learning how to increase customer retention and create strategies for this year’s holiday season marketing, let’s see statistical data for the customers’ change in behavior.
1. Buying Basic Necessities Has Taken The Precedence
As I said earlier, the pandemic has taught people to consider priorities over preference. Consumers have centered their buying decisions around commodities like staple products, hygiene, and health-related products.
2. New Shopping Trends That’ll Stay For Long-Term
The pandemic outbreak is responsible for the birth of some new shopping trends that are going to stay for long. Here are the three trends that are the aftermath of the virus outbreak:
Increased Focus On Health
Consumers are becoming more aware of the importance of a strong immune system, therefore, brands should pay heed to promote a healthy lifestyle. No matter what niche your business belongs to, including health in your marketing strategy is very important for the foreseeable future.
In short, understand the sentiments of your audience and assure them that you’re as much worried about the situation as they are.
Consuming Consciously
During the coronavirus outbreak, 88% of consumers were worried about the impact on the economy and 64% were worried about personal job security.
Accenture COVID-19 Consumer Research
This tells us that the shoppers have become more concerned about mindful buying. They are striving to avoid wastage of commodities like food and shop for more sustainable options. As a business, you have to take this very seriously and explore new business opportunities that resonate with this trend.
Support For Local
The coronavirus outbreak created an existential crisis for local businesses and believe it or not these locally owned businesses are the backbone of a nation’s economy. This is how they contribute to a country’s economic growth:
- Local businesses are responsible for a country’s existential bulk of jobs.
- They are responsible for the cultivation of innovation to give customers something every day.
- Unlike big retail chains, local businesses adapt their products to meet the customers’ immediate needs.
We saw so many consumers and even renowned personalities that supported the local businesses in the recent past.
Congratulations the new owners of Tilbury Foodland. They transitioned into the business over the past year thanks to the support from the previous owners and community. We look forward to better times ahead and thanks to everyone for choosing to #ShopLocal#ckont pic.twitter.com/nwqfCjJKuj
— CK Small Business Centre (@CKbizcentre) July 26, 2021
All these campaigns have been responsible for arousing the desire among the consumers to buy locally sourced products which is a good thing. From this trend, we can learn that the brands will have to look for ways in which they can connect with the community locally and engage in relevant ways.
3. Brands Need To Demonstrate Customer Value
In this time of uncertainty, it is important as a brand to focus upon quickly establishing trust with new customers. This means you cannot afford to miss product availability, shipping facility, or any such factor that can break the bond of trust.
The brands can demonstrate that they care for customer values in the following ways:
Reassurance
The digital world has opened a lot of options for customers. As a result, the shoppers are always hunting for the best options for buying products or services.
The sad part is that the shoppers always get overwhelmed by so many choices due to misinformation present on the Internet. Therefore, you need to give reassurance to your audience by being transparent, honest and most importantly you should be driven by a clear purpose.
Keep Your Audience Updated
As a business owner, it is very important to keep your audience engaged with regular updates of your products and services. Here are some steps you can consider:
- Reassess your policies in line with your brand values. All I mean to say, you should clearly define your role on how you can help your audience in this time of crisis.
- Perform an experience audit that allows you to collect honest feedback from your customers and detect areas of improvement.
- Establish a responsive listening channel with your customers that lets you act upon real-time predictive insights.
Why Is It Important To Retain An Existing Customer Post-Covid?
As in my previous blog, I have already explained that acquiring a new customer costs about 5-25x more than selling an existing customer to a business. And the existing customers spend 67% more than new customers.
According to Marketing Metrics, the success rate of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5-20%!
As we’ve discussed earlier, customer behavior has undergone a radical shift and therefore customer retention has become even more important than ever. From the pandemic outbreak, we can learn that brands need to have customer value if they want to return on the path of growth. Therefore, keeping your loyal customers is very important and it could be only achieved by working strategically on increasing customer retention.
My question is why we keep on spending on acquiring new customers when existing customers can easily purchase from you with little or less effort.
The Benefits of Customer Retention
- It’s easy to convince the existing customer
- Increases sales and revenue
- Requires low marketing cost
- Motivates staff for the efforts and work
- Increases the chances of referrals
- The probability for cross-selling and upsell increases
- Engaged customers provide more feedback
- Improves brand reputation
- Loyal customers are more profitable
It will help you understand why customer retention is important during the holiday season. Down from here, I’ll discuss what are the best methods of retaining customers and how to increase the number of customers.
10 Ways to Increase Customer Retention this Holiday Season 2021
- Create A Win-Back Campaign Strategy
- Personalize Email Marketing
- Improving Customer Experience (CX)
- Coupons And Reward Points
- Actionable Social Media Advertising
- Try To contact Customers Through Calls
- Reinforce Your Value With Customer Service
- Creating A Customer Loyalty Program
- Ask For Their Valuable Feedback
- Creating Urgency For Brands/Products Among Your Customers
What’s the value of all the efforts put in to acquire a new customer, if they never come back to you? It’s hard to accept the fact but it’s true!
While the coronavirus outbreak has increased the scope of online shopping, retailers are still facing problems in retaining customers due to the change in shopping behavior.
So let’s start with how you can prepare yourself for the post-covid holiday season and increase customer retention significantly to gain maximum profits.
1. Create A Win-Back Campaign Strategy
As we have discussed above, retaining existing customers is cheaper than acquiring new customers, at the same time how difficult it is to retain a customer. The existing customer had already purchased a product or service from your store. You already have a relationship and trust level with your existing customers.
Therefore, convincing them for more purchases becomes easy, and it is where the eCommerce retention strategy works. That’s why the win-back campaign strategy has a great impact on the company’s bottom line. To create a win-back campaign, use customer data which may include their email address or phone number.
Action Items –
- Tell people you exist. Drop a “Hello email” to remind your audience you are alive. This hello email will trigger your customers to start an interaction.
- Bribe your customers with an incentive. Offer discounts with offers like Buy One Get One (BOGO) or nudge your customers by temporarily lowering the product’s price or the ability to raise the price again later. It will push your customers to buy from you.
- Ask for feedback. Ask them to rate your product on a scale of 1 to 10. Feedback email is an important part of an existing customer retention strategy. Getting qualitative feedback from your customers is extremely important. Sending feedback emails helps your customers keep purchasing from you and also helps to improve your marketing.
- A FOMO email. Motivate your disengaged buyers with “Fear Of Missing Out”, using keywords like “few hours left”, “last chance to grab the deal” or “Unsubscribe”.
- Unsubscribe. Tell them you’ve unsubscribed them from your email list, but also leave an option for them, if they want to return home!
2. Personalize Email Marketing
The marketers use email marketing campaigns to get new and retain existing customers and to convert them into conversions especially in the holiday sales season.
To briefly understand what importance email marketing holds, please look at the email marketing conversion rates given below.
How Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns Can Increase Customer Retention?
- Helps in generating new leads and keeping existing customers
- Improve customer retention
- Nurtures lead to convert them into loyal customers
- Through emails, you can stay at the top of the customer’s mind
- Enhances brand awareness
- Strengthens customer relationship
- Increases revenue
Email marketing campaigns are a good option for keeping customer loyalty. To plan out your Email Marketing Campaign, you can also make use of email templates available for free!
Action Items –
- Transfer the control to your subscribers by giving steering in their hands, let your customers decide their mailing preferences, including an option “unsubscribe”.
- Retain customer base by segmenting them based on their shopping behavior with RFM Analysis (Recency, Frequency, Monetary).
- You can make an email list of lost customers who have not purchased any product or service from your store for a long time.
- Bring cart abandoners back to your site with cart recovery emails based on the visitors tracking history. If you’re a WooCommerce store you can consider our Abandoned Cart Recovery to be the job which is an all-in-one recovery solution.
- Target inactive buyers with post-purchase emails, educational content, freebies, customer loyalty programs, polls, giveaways, surveys.
- To humanize your brand, make your customer feel special with attractive promotions, run personalized discounts on birthdays, anniversaries, or seasonal greetings.
- To encourage your one-time shoppers to purchase, you can include attractive offers/discounts and rewards in your emails.
- In the emails, you can also ask your old customers to subscribe to the newsletter to stay active and tuned.
3. Improving Customer Experience (CX)
Whether it is before Covid or post-covid customer experience is very important for a business. Remember your customers love to be treated like humans and not like targets.
Whether it’s an online retail store or eCommerce store to increase customer loyalty is their ultimate target. One way to increase customer loyalty is by improving the customer experience.
According to a study by SuperOffice, for about 45.9% of business professionals, customer experience is the number one priority for the next 5 years.
One of the benefits of improving customer experience is, it helps in gaining trustworthy and loyal customers. This strengthens the relationship between marketers and customers.
Action items –
- To revamp customer experience you first need to improve the quality of your staff. It can be improved by training them with advanced and upgraded skills.
- Use a Free buyer persona tool to map your buyer’s journey with creating buyer personas to target the audience based on their shopping preferences and taste.
- Catch your customers before they say goodbye to you, with traceable overlays and pop-up forms. (I recommend HubSpot CRM, Here’s why).
- Personalize your customer experience with geo-targeting and User Generated Content (UGC).
- Give personalized product recommendations through emails.
- Remind your customers of the exclusive price drops on the items wishlist by them. It increases the chances of conversions by 30-40%.
4. Coupons And Reward Points
One of the best ways to increase customer retention is by offering coupons, price drops, and rewards to the “At-Risk” customers.
Learn How To Setup A Point-Based Reward System On Your Store
As per a study, 58.7% of internet shoppers, earning loyalty points as rewards is one of the most valued aspects of the online shopping experience.
Action items –
- Create win-back offers for your old customers. The coupons/discounts/rewards are used by many eCommerce stores to make their customers feel like part of the family and not a target for them.
- Use plain text, text with fascinating images or it can be a landing page.
- Reward repeat customers with weekly, monthly, seasonal offers include Black Friday Cyber Monday Deals (BFCM), and Christmas offers in this holiday season.
- Give your first-time shoppers coupons like Free delivery, free shipping.
- Encourage your customers by rewarding them customer retention points on referring a friend, that they can easily utilize them at your store, Double profits!
- If you are running a brick mortar store, then you can offer region-based coupons, like USOPEN10, AUS50, etc.
- Reward your customers by adding reviews on your social media platforms, and site. According to a study from iPerceptions, 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site that has user reviews.
5. Actionable Social Media Advertising
Social advertisements play a vital role in improving customer loyalty concepts.
Through social media channels, you will be able to reach your target audience. There are several social media platforms. Online marketers can decide the platform according to their needs and desires.
Social media enables you with the benefit of fascinating and persuading your new and existing customers. Therefore, this festive season doesn’t forget to add social media channels to make it more joyous.
Action Items –
- With social media platforms, you have the opportunity to convince the customers about the offers, discounts, and rewards you want to offer them. It’s also easy to create urgency in the mind of users through social media ads.
- Let your customers easily find you over social platforms, with tools as Namech_k helps you to keep a check on the usernames which are available across thousands of platforms.
- Automate your social media strategy by scheduling some of your posts with tools like Buffer.
- Social media listening tools like Google Alerts, Hootsuite, Mention, give instant notifications on your brand mentions and give you an easy way to track your audience engagement with your brand this Holiday Sales 2021.
- Use social media to know your customers as individuals, what they want, and what are the trends, interests of your consumers by following hashtags, and monitoring their “likes”.
6. Try To contact Customers Through Calls
They are your customers, so it’s your responsibility to look after them. Perform actions according to their behavior.
If the customer is inactive for a long time, try to communicate with them through calls. Solve their problems and queries; make them feel free to give any suggestions.
During the call, you have an opportunity to attract them towards the coupon and the trending offers of your site.
But one thing I’d like to mention here, don’t irk your customers by continuous calling. Make a call only when it is necessary and required.
One more thing as this is the time of the holiday season make sure you provide them with offers regarding Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas Eve.
Did you check out 11 Tips To Boost Online Traffic?
7. Reinforce Your Value With Customer Service
Remember, great customer service is a key to customer happiness. Analyze your customer issues and give them frequent responses that add up value to your brand.
It gives your customers a positive feeling about your brand. You work hard to deliver value to your customers through your products, but the service they receive at your ends makes them your brand advocates. And gives you repeat sales by spreading Word-of-mouth and give chained conversions that never break.
In order to answer, how to get repeat customers in retail, maintain service, and follow up for customer retention and appreciate your customers for raising a query with customer service phrases like.
Action Items –
- “Thank you for bringing this to our attention.”
- “I will update you by [time].”
- “Happy to help.”
- “As much as I would love to help”
- Say “I certainly can check that for you.”
- “I apologize for the inconvenience.”
- “I don’t know, but let me find out.”
8. Creating A Customer Loyalty Program
The purpose of customer loyalty programs is to influence the customers towards more and more purchase of products and services of your company.
The coronavirus outbreak has taught us the extreme importance of customer loyalty for retaining customers. When retailers are seeing such a radical shift in customers’ buying behavior it is the loyal shoppers that you should count upon for reviving your business.
The best customer retention programs basically help in increasing client retention, brand awareness, improving conversion rates, with the best customer loyalty strategies this holiday sale season 2021.
The loyalty program helps you to engage yourself with inactive customers or customers that have started avoiding you in the post-covid era. By including a customer loyalty program this holiday season for the two biggest sales days, that is Black Friday and Cyber Monday will help you to boost the sale.
Do You Know How To Use Social Media To Enhance Customer Loyalty Program?
9. Ask For Their Valuable Feedback
None but your customers can give you the best feedback and show you the areas of improvement. The best way to collect customer feedback is through reviews.
According to research, 90% of people read customer reviews, and 88% trust these reviews as much as a personal recommendation. These numbers show us that in today’s web-based shopping world, everyone is apparently reading customer reviews.
Action items –
- Ask for the feedback of customers in emails and on social platforms. The feedback will definitely help you to regain lost customers.
- Plan out your Loyalty Program to motivate your customers to provide feedback. To do so, you may allow points and rewards for each review of your customers’ posts.
- Run Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to know what customers think of your brand and unveil those areas that need improvement.
- Ask your customers to give product feedback that helps you address the customer concerns, issues, or custom requirements. It will improve your products as well as customer experience.
- NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a working customer retention metric that keeps a check over how loyal your audience is.
WooCommerce store owners can take the help of Product Reviews For WooCommerce which is a solution that allows the merchants to collect product reviews efficiently. With the help of this WooCommerce solution, you can send reminders to customers to review their recent purchases.
10. Creating Urgency For Brands/Products Among Your Customers
Lastly, to increase customer retention retailers can always add an element of urgency to their festive season marketing campaigns. Scarcity creates a sense of urgency in the customer’s minds about the products and services.
Scarcity, also, helps in enhancing brand awareness. Marketers create scarcity through emails, landing pages, social ads, and advertising on T.V. You can create scarcity by adding a timer running against an offer for a specific duration like in the image below.
Action items –
- Offer free delivery to your customers for a “Limited period”.
- Monetize your Holidays with a deadline by running effective promotions on events like BFCM, Thanksgiving that encourage immediate action.
- Offer “Today Only Deals”, “lightning deals” to drive impulse purchases.
- Use pop-ups to hold customers leaving your site without making the purchase. You can use marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Mautic to create highly converting pop-ups.
- Display how many customers are buying these products as Myntra does.
- Turn your customer’s curiosity to urgency with “Coming Soon” sales.
The Final Words
Generating new leads, converting them into sales-ready leads and, then retargeting the existing customer to purchase again, it’s a complete cycle. Each step requires attention and nourishment. The marketing campaign is incomplete if any of the steps are missed.
In this blog, I have discussed the points that will help your business to reach how to increase customer retention post-covid to rejuvenate your business.
To boost your this holiday season you’ve to primarily focus on tactics to increase customer retention strategies by valuing your customers overhauling the communication.
Share your views if you find this blog post amazing and worth reading!
About the Author: sanjeevmaurya
