The Holidays are coming, and as everyone in the eCommerce field knows, it’s a very busy time for online merchants. By the end of Q3 you should have your Holiday season marketing strategy planned and your website working perfectly to prepare for the newcomers. But you already know this.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday are very popular dates for online shoppers: American consumers spent $8.9 billion online during Black Friday last year. So, we know traffic is high and sales are up for pretty much every eCommerce site during these dates. Now, the real challenge is to maintain those customers after the discounts are over.
Here’s a stark fact you might not be familiar with: gathering new customers costs five times as much as retaining an existing customer. For an established business, you should always be looking to generate new leads. But you should never do so at the expense of the much more lucrative Lifetime Value (LTV) of your existing customer base.
Here are 8 simple Holiday season marketing tips on both retaining customers, and increasing their LTV to your business:
1. Encourage signups to email newsletters.
Creating entertaining, useful regular email newsletters that include strong subject lines that encourage clicks will keep your business in customers’ minds.
2. Create customer feedback surveys that offer rewards for filling them out.
This works twofold: many customers genuinely appreciate being heard and having their feedback taken into account. The offer provided serves as a hook for yet more personality types; who doesn’t appreciate a nice discount or free offer?
3. Have a succinct, personalized “About” page on your website.
People enjoy a feel-good story. A business owner making good on their ambitions absolutely counts as one! Not every customer will click on your “About” page, but those that do will see your business in a different light.
4. Make sure your social media presence is attuned to both your consumer base and the demographic of that particular social media platform.
Facebook is different from Twitter is different from Pinterest is different from Snapchat is… you get the point! In 2018, customers happy with a product will often follow that business on social media. So make sure your social media is engaging and matches the general vibe of each individual service.
5. Include a “thank you” page after purchases.
Create a charming, simple “thank you” page that appears after converting a sale. It can be a simple picture, a video from the owner, a short sentence, or anything that lands in a genuine way with your customer.
6. Provide unique offers for longtime customers.
Everybody enjoys having loyalty recognized. Find ways to track which customers have been with you for a long time and find ways to uniquely reward them. Provide unique discounts, free items, and even a heartfelt written “thank you” that calls them out specifically. Even though many of these actions can be achieved with good use of your CRM, these tasks and so much more, are very simple to do using a powerful loyalty program platforms such as Clutch, where you can build profiles to understand their behavior and create tailored programs for their very specific reward worthy behaviors.
7. Push replenishment reminders when appropriate.
You never want to annoy your customer. However, there are ways to provide genuine utility to your customers, while also encouraging them to come back to your business. Track items that are regular sellers to certain buyers, and push out notifications when you think they may be running low and need to replenish.
8. Celebrate first purchase anniversaries.
Show your customers you haven’t forgotten how much they’ve helped you over the years with their support. Finding ways to recognize longtime customers on the anniversary of their first purchase is crucial for building loyalty.
These are but a few of the great, proven strategies you can apply to retain customers and increase their LTV even after the Holiday sales are over. To learn more tricks you can use to optimize your NetSuite eCommerce business, contact our team of NetSuite developers and eCommerce growth strategy experts today!
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