Let’s be honest: most of the marketing experts out there focus on getting more customers and leads. Customer retention is a key part of increasing sales, but it’s also one of the most important but often overlooked parts.
Remember that your goal is not just to sell your products once, but to keep a good relationship with your customers after the sale. So, in this post, I’ll tell you about some effective ways to keep customers coming back, which you need to do if you want your sales to go better.
What is keeping customers, and why is it important?
Simply put, customer retention is your business’s ability to keep its current customers over time. Most of the time, year-to-year metrics are looked at to see how many new customers your business got and how many customers are no longer active.
You can figure it out by looking at the number of closed or inactive customer accounts or users who have stopped paying for subscriptions. This simple formula can be used to figure out how many customers a business keeps:
Customer Retention = (Number of Customers at End of Period – Number of Customers Acquired During Period) / Number of Customers at Start of Period x 100
How important it is to keep customers
Keeping your old customers is more important than getting new ones because they can help you in the following ways:
- More sales: It has been seen that only 5–20% of products are sold to new customers, while 60–70% are sold to existing customers.
- Cost-cutting: Marketing can take up a big chunk of your company’s budget, and customer retention strategies can help you get the most out of it. It can cost up to 25 times more to get new customers than to keep the ones you already have.
- Better return on investment: If you can keep 5% more of your customers, you can increase your sales by 25% to 95%. Taking a few simple steps after a sale is made will, of course, help your business in a big way.
- Referrals: If you have loyal customers, they will automatically tell their friends and family about your business. They will be your best marketing tool.
Ways to keep your customers that you must use
Now that you know the overall benefits of customer retention, let’s look at how to work on it and get good results with your online business by using these post-sales strategies.
Start by making a full strategy for the customer journey.
The first thing you need to do is make a strategy for the whole customer journey, from beginning to end. Most experts only pay attention to the first part of the journey, which is getting new customers. Then you need to pay attention to other important parts like buying, using the platform, customer service, order fulfilment, after-sales services, etc.
So, you should pay attention to all the important parts of your customer’s journey and use your budget wisely.
Focus on giving great customer service.
Once you have new customers and are getting leads from them, you should focus on giving them good support. If you want to keep your customers from going to your competitors, you should try to give them a smooth and memorable experience.
It has been found that about 33% of customers switch companies after just one bad interaction with customer service. So, one of the most important things you can do to keep customers coming back is to have live support on your website or app that is available 24/7.
Also, if a customer has a bad experience on your platform, you can make it up to them by giving them extra discounts or reward points.
Give your clients powerful features.
Most users don’t want to talk to customer service these days. Instead, they’d rather get more options on the native platform that are tailored to their needs. This would be good for everyone because it would save your company money and give your customers more power.
For example, you can give your customers options in your store that let them track their orders. You can also add ways to return a product, reorder it, manage subscriptions, and so on. With these ways to keep your customers coming back, you can make shopping easier for everyone.
Ask your customers what they think.
One of the most important things you should do after a sale is ask your customers for feedback. It would give you more information about the overall services and products on your platform. I would suggest putting sections on the feedback form where customers can easily rate your services, products, etc.
Also, you should think about making the feedback form easy to fill out so that your customers don’t have to struggle with it. It should be short and to the point, but still give you facts that have been proven so you can easily improve your business.
Offer discounts and events only to your current customers.
From the statistics above, it’s easy to see that your customers are your business’s most valuable asset. So, you should think about throwing all sorts of special events for your most loyal customers. With these tips, you can increase your sales and make your current users feel like they are important.
One of the best ways to do this is to offer discounts just for members or to let your loyal users know about a sale before anyone else. You can also offer them discounts based on how long they’ve been using your platform.
Create a programme that rewards loyalty or referrals.
Even though it can be hard to keep customers coming back, that should be the main goal of your post-sales strategy. You can do more for your customers than just offer them cutting-edge services. You can run loyalty or referral programmes for them.
A loyalty programme is just a way to thank your customers for buying things from you (like getting some cashback or subsequent discounts). This would make people want to come back to your store to buy more things.
On the other hand, a referral programme lets you use your current users to bring in new ones. To do this, all you have to do is give your current users referral bonuses that will be added to their accounts when they get leads.
These are some of the best ways to keep customers coming back. They will help you get to know your new users well and turn them into loyal customers. Remember that it’s a slow process, and you can make the loyalty programme more fun by coming up with different levels. This would give your customers small but steady rewards, and they would definitely keep coming back.
Stay in touch with your customers.
Last but not least, you should keep talking to your customers through different channels. One of the best ways to do this is to share all kinds of updates on your social media platforms.
Aside from that, you can also use email marketing to help you use these strategies to keep customers. You can just send emails to your customers if they leave items in their shopping carts or if you have a sale coming up. Not only that, but you can also send special deals to your old customers who haven’t been to your platform in a while as a way to remind them to come back and shop.
Dropship Corporation can help you build your dropshipping store.
In addition to the tips above, you should also have interesting products in your online store to keep customers coming back. So, if you want to take your dropshipping business to the next level, you might want to look into a tool like Dropship Corporation
- It is the official dropshipping platform for AliExpress. It has thousands of sellers, so you can choose the right products for your store.
- You can look through millions of products in different categories on Dropship Corporation for free, or you can pay for its premium version.
- With Dropship Corporation you can order a lot of products at once and take many other steps to keep your store in order.
- It has automatic features that save you time and money, like keeping track of the status of your order or syncing tracking numbers.
- Dropship Corporation also has a unique feature called “Supplier finder,” which lets you choose the most profitable and well-rated suppliers in each category.
You can use Dropship Corporation with other dropshipping platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce without any trouble.
Last Words
This is the end of this long guide about how important it is to keep customers and how we can do all sorts of things after a sale to make that happen. To make things easier for you, I’ve put together a list of the best ways to keep customers coming back to your online store, which you must do if you want to make money from it.
You can also think about using a tool like Dropship Corporations to set up and run your online dropshipping store without too much trouble.
