Learning to Retain Customers

As you can imagine, simply surviving on the business that you receive from new customers will only carry you so far. At some point, you are going to need to focus your efforts onto finding a way to start gathering information about your current customers to see what you can do to lure them to come back to your store. Obviously bribing them with free items is good, but do you really want to bribe your customers? Wouldn’t it be nice if they returned simply because they appreciate your business and enjoy the products that you offer? In a perfect world this is the scenario that everyone strives for, to help your business get there you need to play detective.

There are several ways to keep customers coming back. The biggest ideas that typically come to mind involve being polite, offering competitive prices and even ensuring that products are shipped promptly when they need to be shipped. This has the benefit of helping to ensure that everyone is able to move smoothly through your store and can be quite helpful to ensure that you are not dealing with the hassle of constant customer complaints about your checkout system. You should also ensure that you are making the check out process as simple as possible, if your check out is complex and confusing people will leave your site and go somewhere else.

Once you have these basic steps into place you need to look further to see how to retain repeat customers. Many businesses use the ideas of looking for specials and other discounts that they can offer. But do you remember what everyone is giving you when they check out? Stop and think about it, they are giving you their address as well as e-mail address. This makes them perfect to add to a mailing list so that you can run specials and sales just for them. This allows you to target your current customers based upon their current shopping habits, and helps to ensure that you stay in the front of their mind.

You also need to take into account what are your customers purchasing from your store? If they are purchasing sandals in the summer, perhaps in the winter you should offer boots. This would be a perfect complement to the previously purchased item, yet still be different enough to warrant a sure return to your store. Imagine now if you offered them a small discount of 10% in that same e-mail. Now consider that you have added a special coupon code to the particular e-mail so you can see exactly who is coming back based upon your marketing effort.

You are now in the process of gathering information about your business that can be used for future e-mail marketing campaigns. This form of data collection is what most businesses use. If you want to succeed at business, you are going to have to attract customers to return, and many times this means taking the time to study your current customers. Keep in mind as you are doing this entire process, the happier that your current customers are, the more likely you are to get both repeated business and new clients. A happy customer will generally tell two people they are happy, while an upset customer will tell approximately 10 people that they are upset. Consider this as a rule of thumb when trying to gather new customers as well as retain your current customer base.

Many businesses are going so far now as to ask about birthdays and other special occasions. This information is often used to send out a card for the special occasion and ensure to include a special offer for either a free item, or a nice sized discount off their next purchase. This is a way of letting the customer know that you appreciate them, would like to offer your congratulations and invite them back to your store. All of this is possible simply by gathering some good information from your customers. The good news is that many e-commerce programs available offer tools that will allow you to easily keep up with this information, which will help to streamline the entire process.

As you can imagine, the amount of e-mail that is sent out in a successful business is quite large. But if you break your customers down into specific mailing lists based upon their personal shopping habits, you will notice that you are tuning your marketing to their specific needs, reducing the amount of junk mail you are sending them, and improving your ratio for repeat customers. With a bit of work and effort you will be quite surprised to see just how effective data collection can be when used together with e-mail marketing campaigns.