How to Increase New Customer Retention

By Rob Zaleski
May 1, 2020

If you sell online, you’re likely seeing an influx of customers ordering online while we’re all stuck at home. Though the future is uncertain, we can expect things to go back to normal at some point. More than ever, you need to be thinking long-term when it comes to your customer retention strategy so you can keep all these new customers coming back even after they’re allowed to leave home. And if you’re not quite seeing the uptick that some businesses are, you want to hold on to the customers you do have. Let’s look at a few ways to do that.

Stop sending customers away

Every time you send customers to a place on the web not owned by you, there’s a chance they don’t come back. The more you can keep them in places where you control the content and the message, the more likely they are to purchase from you again.

Your customers want visibility into the progress of their package delivery. A best practice for e-commerce merchants is to send tracking numbers to their customers once the package ships. That tracking number leads to the carrier’s tracking page. And just like that, your customer is off into the internet.

For this reason, ShippingEasy released Branded Tracking. When you use ShippingEasy to ship your orders, your customers automatically receive a tracking email. That tracking link leads them to a page branded with your logo, links back to your site, social media channel links, and your customers still get all the information they are looking for.

With Branded Tracking, you’re cutting down on ‘where’s my package’ while simultaneously extending your brand.

Branded Tracking is a FREE addition to your ShippingEasy account. Start your free trial and get completely set up in minutes!

Automate emails based on customer lifecycle

Once you start getting really busy with customers, manually managing your email campaigns becomes exponentially more tedious. Many email marketing solutions offer automated email campaigns that can be triggered by actions your customers take to send high-converting emails at just the right time.

Here at ShippingEasy, we take it a step further by incorporating your order and delivery information into the automation mix. For example, gaining feedback from customers is crucial to successful online selling. However, ask too early or wait too long and you’re unlikely to get that all-important (and actually relevant) review. ShippingEasy bases the trigger on package delivery so you know the product is actually in the hands of your customers.

As the seller of the product, you’re likely best-informed as to when the optimal time is to get feedback from a customer. Sometimes it may be a mere few days, while other products may take weeks to get a relevant experience with the product. In ShippingEasy’s Customer Marketing tool, you can set that timing in your rules, even down to the SKU level, so your customers are getting the review request at just the right moment in their customer lifecycle.

This is just one example of automating emails to cater to your customers’ lifecycles and increase customer retention. We actually wrote an entire blog post on that topic with other examples and ideas you can implement quickly, either with our Customer Marketing tool or your email marketing platform.

Encourage user-generated content

The best way to increase customer retention is to endear customers to your brand. While reviews are one form of user-generated content, more often than not people are sharing their experiences on third-party sites you don’t own. Encourage some creativity from your customers and incorporate them into your brand with some user-generated content campaigns!

Use a combination of social media and email marketing to encourage your customers to share their experiences with your products in a visual way. Use channels like Instagram and Facebook either timeline posts or live videos, branded hashtag campaigns, or even YouTube videos to put your customers’ faces into content pieces you can use to humanize your products.

Especially in this time of social distancing, encouraging customers to create digital content for you can help you feature fresh faces in your marketing campaigns without meeting up in person. Just be sure to get permission to use content and make it clear how you plan to use your customers’ content.

ShippingEasy gives you the tools you need to create great experiences the improve customer retention, promote your products, and save time while doing it. Get started for free with a 30-day trial to make shipping and promoting your products a breeze.

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