5 Tips to Boost Ecommerce Customer Retention

Our company spends a lot of time on marketing and sales, always reaching out to potential customers. While growth is a necessary part of maintaining a business, we make sure we don’t neglect our current customers. Our relationship with our customers is the foundation from which we grow; in our experience, we’ve seen that good customer relationships ensure that the customers will bring repeat business and refer other companies to us. Here are a few ways to foster customer retention.

CONSISTENT B2B MARKETING STRATEGY

As with branding, we must be consistent in our marketing strategy. We do our homework (see #3, Research, Research, Research), so we know about our customers and we market specifically to them. When executed correctly, our marketing strategy produces successful email marketing, excellent web content and other marketing materials consistent with our brand message. For instance, as a creative agency, our B2B customers don’t get emails about our company holiday party or information about unrelated industries. They only get emails about news specific to our services and other related information that would interest them.

ENGAGING WEBSITE CONTENT, SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT AND EMAIL CONTENT

We strive to make sure our website, all our social media posts and our emails contain engaging and interesting content. We make sure our website is up-to-date; we put important and recent information there. We know content that includes video gets exponentially more hits than content without video — even simple graphics increase views. We post content that we, ourselves, would want to read about our company. We make sure we implement appropriate hashtags and industry keywords so the search engines find us.

RESEARCH, RESEARCH, RESEARCH

We constantly carry out research about our industry, our customers and our competition. We always want to know the latest news and trends in our industry to provide the best service for our customers. One way we keep up with our customers is with Google Analytics and other metrics companies that give us intel about customer segmentation. Which pages do they spend more time visiting? Which pages have they stopped going to? Are visitors coming from our competition’s website? Analytics help us give our customers more of what they want because the feedback about them is very specific and helps us better focus our products and services to the customer’s needs.

MOBILE MARKETING

We live in a mobile world; companies need to create a responsive website for better mobile marketing. The company website should be available on any mobile device — laptop, tablet and smartphone. We know that if a company has not created a responsive mobile website, it should soon. An interactive design enables customers to easily access our information at a moment’s notice from wherever they are in that moment. The easier we make it for our e-commerce customers to find us, get information about us and contact us, the more business they’re likely to give us.

TRADE SHOWS

For companies that are totally e-commerce based — and for companies that only have an e-commerce component — maintaining a real-time, real-life presence is crucial. Over the years, we’ve noticed that even B2B customers want to put a face with a company name. We send representatives to trade shows associated with our industry. There, we meet new clients and regularly see the same customers over and over. Our repeat presence at the shows says business is going well. We show off any new products and services. We let our B2B customers know our company is thriving and that they can count on us.