How often do you thank customers for every purchase they make with your brand? Whether it’s their regular weekly grocery shop or a shiny new luxury car, customers have made a conscious decision to part with their hard earned cash to purchase your product or service but are often not rewarded for it.
To help increase engagement and brand loyalty, customers need to feel valued and appreciated for more than just purchases. Many brands are great at rewarding purchases offline; coffee shops will give customers loyalty cards whilst fashion stores provide vouchers for future purchases. But how can brands translate this success online too?
Treat customers like Rockstars
Customers should always be celebrated and rewarded when they make that crucial decision to purchase from you. If you’re looking for creative and cost effective ways to thank them, why not give them the celebrity treatment by making them brand ambassadors instead of some glossy influencer? Leading fashion and beauty brands like Dove, Boots and TK Maxx are well known for using real customers in their advertising campaigns and this is a fantastic way to engage customers by not only putting them centre stage in your brand’s output, but also making them feel important and most of all valued.
Consumer marketing is often one of the best ways to encourage customers to evangelise about your brand; they have first hand experience using your products and unlike costly celebrity endorsements, they can provide unbiased reviews to their peers and wider network. Encourage customers to market on behalf of your brand by incentivising them with anything from VIP invites to product launch parties to a glittering drinks reception with your CEO; the more a customer feels invested and included in your brand, the less they feel like just a number and much more like an engaged stakeholder.
Personalise your communication
Email marketing is a crucial part of any successful eCommerce growth strategy and brands hoping to increase engagement rates following purchase must ensure their marketing communication is segmented, personalised and automated for effective email marketing at scale. Premium platforms like dotmailer are perfect for eCommerce brands looking for a more data driven solution that provides tangible and measurable results. When a customer chooses to share their email address with your brand, they are inviting you to send them relevant and helpful information without aggressively spamming them. You can do this by implementing a post purchase email strategy where you send a personalised email to a new customer thanking them for their purchase, invite them to leave a product review and encourage them to sign up to your company newsletter. Future email campaigns can be segmented by anything from gender, location and purchase history for a more targeted approach that will result in more conversions.
Even with thousands of customers on your mailing lists, your brand should still ensure all emails are personalised where relevant; for example addressing customers by their name and sending them a promotional discount on their birthday. With marketing automation you can ensure personalisation and segmentation is at the heart of your email strategy as that is the most effective way to increase both conversion and engagement rates post-purchase.
Encourage repeat purchases
The challenge for most retailers is how to improve customer retention rates as statistics continue to indicate that it costs 6-7 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain one. Despite these statistics, most online retailers continue to focus on customer acquisition instead of retention. With repeat shoppers accounting for 40% of online sales, it’s absolutely imperative to have a watertight strategy in place to improve customer retention. A popular way of increasing customer engagement rates amongst long time customers is to ensure your eCommerce store implements a loyalty program. It’s important that your program does much more than just reward your customers for making purchases. A loyalty program from LoyaltyLion for example enables stores to reward customers for a wide range of actions including account sign up, newsletter subscriptions, reviews, referrals and much more. By enabling customers to collect and redeem points against products, your store will gradually see an increase in repeat purchases as customers have a much stronger motivation to continue shopping with your brand.
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