Customer loyalty is the key that unlocks long-term e-commerce profitability. For many years now, digital marketers have been searching for ways their existing customer base to buy repeatedly.
According to Gartner, 80% of all future customer revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers. SEO and content competition is the highest it’s ever been, making it harder to retain the customer’s attention. There must be a way to ensure the continued growth of sales, right?
Enter the new-age customer retention strategy, driven by a strong website-based 360 degree loyalty program that allows you to continually engage and convert your existing customers.
This post will help you understand how this kind of loyalty program can explode your sales.
Owned Media Is Profitable Media
You own your website. A 360-degree loyalty program works for you, 24 hours a day, in auto pilot mode. With the right technology choices it can be seamlessly integrated into your brand’s e-commerce website.
An investment in customer loyalty to engage users on your own website is worth far more than the engagement of the same user on a social platform that you do not own. It makes more sense to draw customers to your e-commerce pages, where the sales happen.
What Is a Customer Retention Strategy & How Does It Work?
In the current sales climate, the customer has the ultimate power. They get to shop around, and only once they have collected all the information available do they decide where to buy. According to MineWhat.com some 81% of customers do research before they choose to buy.
A customer retention strategy defines how you are going to prevent your customers from defecting to other brands in the future. And what is the most high performance driver of this type of strategy?
That’s right, a 360 degree loyalty program.
The Functions of a 360 Degree Loyalty Program: Retention Power!
By leveraging the power of social engagement on your e-commerce website, something incredible can happen. Each action, every activity becomes incentivized for your customer. This gives them powerful motivation to come back to your brand and your website, and this increases the probability that the next time they visit, they will buy.
A 360 degree loyalty program will guarantee that every customer you attract will become a long-term repeat customer because of the social plug-ins that are integrated on your website.
A program like this can rapidly improve your sales. In addition to earning points for purchases, customers can earn points for various online activities such as writing reviews, becoming an email subscriber, liking a photo, connecting via Facebook, connecting via Twitter etc. These points can be exchanged for discounts and other rewards directly in their personalized customer dashboard.
Get your loyal customers to perform these actions to simultaneously boost your marketing vitality and social engagement, while improving customer loyalty.
Here are some examples of social engagement widgets that can earn points:
- A friend referral widget prompts your customer to send a personalized message to their friends inviting them buy from your brand, with a discount off their first purchase.
- An email subscription widget prompts your users to sign-up to your email list and gives them an incentive like free shipping to do it.
- A purchase sharing widget prompts customers to share their purchase with friends on social media sites, which converts them into brand ambassadors for valuable social proof.
Each time your customer performs a social action, they earn points – making engagement with your brand fun and rewarding. This pulls them back to your website time and time again, because they get points for engaging with you.
Interactions that earn points could be anything from visiting the website, buying products and completing challenges to entering contests, answering surveys and writing reviews. Such a 360 degree customer retention strategy increases social engagement and repeat website websites, resulting in 26% more repeat purchases.
Does your brand run a customer loyalty program directly from their website? If so, tell us how it has worked – or not worked – for you.
About The Author.
Samir Palnitkar is the President at ShopSocially, a social, referral and loyalty platform. He is a serial entrepreneur who has done four successful startups prior to ShopSocially. He has over 20 years of industry experience, has been awarded five technology patents and has written two technical books.
