No business would be able to stay afloat without its customers. For many eCommerce business owners, the question of whether to focus on customer attraction or retention is always hard to answer. However, the real experts know that it’s all about finding ways to do both.
No matter if you’ve just started your eCommerce business or you’ve had your store for years, you need to focus on your customers. That’s why this article lists the strategies you can use to attract new customers to your eCommerce store, as well as all of the ways you can keep them as loyal customers.
Customer attraction
No matter how good of a website you have, you won’t be able to sell any of your products unless you get people to visit it. Even though attracting new customers seems like an impossible thing to do, especially if your store is brand new, it’s actually easy if you know all the right tactics.
Developing buyer personas
Before you can actually start attracting customers, you first need to know exactly who you want to attract and create buyer personas, or avatars who are most likely to purchase something from your business. It is also much easier to create your marketing strategy when you know who you’re marketing to.
The features of your buyer personas should cover the following:
- Basic demographics such as age, gender, and geographical location
- Their needs and pain points
- The goals they’re hoping to achieve
- Their qualities or traits that trigger interest in a product or the desire to purchase it
Search engine optimization (SEO)
eCommerce is a very competitive market and you will need to fight to get the attention of your potential customers. Considering that as much as 93% of users start their online experience on Google, it’s easy to see why SEO isn’t a consideration but a necessity.
Here are just some of the things you can do with SEO:
- Drive brand awareness
- Create a quality user experience for your website visitors
- Guide your leads through all the stages of the marketing funnel
- Optimize content with the right keywords and get a substantial increase in traffic
- Expand your remarketing audiences
While you could optimize your website yourself, it would take a lot of time and you still couldn’t do as well of a job as an expert. That’s why the best solution is to hire an eCommerce SEO company so you could achieve great results and also have enough time to focus on other business tasks.
Paid advertising
When you run a paid search campaign, Google shows your ads on the first page of someone’s search results, usually above all other search results. These ads are pay-per-click (PPC) and they’re considered to be one of the more cost-effective advertising methods.
When you use PPC ads, you should find a good keyword for your app that your target audience is most likely to search for.
There are four different PPC ad types you can choose from:
- Exact. Only when someone searches the exact term you used in your ad and doesn’t have any spelling mistakes, Google will display your advertisement.
- Phase match. These ads are shown to people who search for the exact phrase that you used in your ad. In this case, the ad has other words before or after the keyword phrase.
- Broad match. This is the default match type and it shows your ads even when customers search for your phrase in any order or even use a synonym.
- Modified broad match. Here, an ad is triggered even if the person typed in the wrong phrase, but it doesn’t include synonyms.
Visit the same websites as your customers
Most people think that they only need to visit social media websites. However, while social media marketing is very effective and you should take advantage of it, keep in mind that there are also other websites where your potential customers spend time.
Locate other online spots your customers like to visit. This can be any website or a community forum such as Reddit and Quora. There, you will be able to create specific campaigns tailored to each individual website. Just make sure the content you post matches the tone of the website you’re posting on.
Customer retention
A lot of business owners put a lot of effort into customer retention, and for a good reason. Having customer retention increased by just 5% boosts profits by 25% to 95%. So let’s take a look at all the best ways to retain your customers.
Provide great customer service
Even if you have great products, your customers won’t come back to your website if they receive poor customer service. Whenever a customer contacts you, your customer service reps need to be ready to answer all of their questions and address all complaints politely and accurately.
To make sure your customer service is good enough, you should take a look at the best eCommerce customer service practices and follow them. No matter what device they use to contact you, leaving a good impression and providing great service should be your priority.
One of the best ways to turn one-time shoppers into loyal customers is to contact them via email and send them content they’re interested in. You can use email to inform customers about special deals and sales, new arrivals, as well as news about your business.
One of the most common email marketing techniques in eCommerce business plans is sending out newsletters, as it’s a great way to always stay at the top of your customers’ minds. Sending out newsletters is easy and low-cost but it also shows your customers how much you care about them and their loyalty.
Since it will take you some time to collect enough subscribers, you should consider installing one of these plugins that boost email subscribers. They will make this process much easier and faster.
Create a subscription business model
Today’s consumers are lazier than ever and are always looking for ways to make their lives easier, and that’s one of the reasons why subscription models have become so popular lately.
Of course, this tactic isn’t sustainable for some types of businesses, but if your store offers products that can be sold and bought regularly, such as coffee, cosmetics, and food, you should consider offering subscription boxes.
If you decide on this model, it will also be much easier to predict your monthly revenue.
Track your customers’ behavior
To better learn how to retain customers, you should try to understand what made them interested in your products in the first place and what their shopping pattern was like.
One thing you can check is their activity to see which pages are their favorite and most frequently visited. Once you know that, next time they visit your website, you will be able to show them what they probably want to see and offer them a more personal experience.
Try to see if any of your customers sometimes show a shopping pattern and how often they visit your website. For instance, if you notice that a customer usually visits your store once a month, you can send them promotional emails every two weeks to try to encourage them to buy more.
And finally, check to see which of the items you offer are the most popular among customers and which page has the most clicks. You can then make sure to place that page and those products much more prominently on your website.
Final thoughts
Without your customers, you would never be where you are right now, and that’s something you should never forget. While some businesses treat their customers like nothing more than a way to make a profit, smart eCommerce business owners know how important it is to treat customers right.
And there’s no need to discuss whether it’s more important to stick to customer attraction and retention. As long as you stick to the tips you just read about, you’ll have no issues excelling at both.
