Building customer loyalty requires balance. Business leaders get it wrong by making one of two mistakes: they either inundate potential clients with emails, ads, and posts or they ignore potential clients in the interest of not blasting them. The first group gets overwhelmed and annoyed, while the second one ends up feeling undervalued.
It’s crucial to find middle ground between blasting and ignoring clients, but that’s difficult for new entrepreneurs. If you’re struggling to find the middle ground, the end of an old year and the start of a new one is the best time to rethink your methods. Start fresh in 2017 by building your ecommerce using our tips.
Zone in on your target audience, and rebuild your platform around them. If you own a cat rescue operation, for instance, your target audience is cat lovers who would prefer shelter or rescue adoptions over buying from breeders. They are likely concerned about cat euthanasia rates, how to care for cats with special needs, and the breeds best for their lifestyles.
However, you want to be choosy about how you build your platform. If your platform includes everything listed above, you’ll burn yourself out trying to attract thousands of clients. Start with the basics – you’re reaching out to cat lovers who prefer rescue to breeding. Give that platform time to grow and then add supplementary topics. If you aren’t sure how to net individual members of the target audience, use Google’s customer match or a similar app.
There are literally billions of websites, and many advertise similar services or products. Customers or clients need a reason to keep choosing yours over others’. To give them that reason, be creative. Engage their senses; offer sound bites and videos instead of blocks of text. Use humor and catch phrases if appropriate. Offer interactive activities, especially if you’re in a field that lends itself well to such activities, like education.
Another way to be creative involves giving customers control over the products they choose. During the holiday season, some of the most popular toys are those that let customers design, name, or otherwise interact with their purchases. Customers love personalization, so offer it wherever you can. If your product can be designed many different ways, make sure you explain that there are plenty of options. If you market a service such as pet adoption, give potential owners the option to do something fun (like sending a note to their potential pet).
Use customer data to determine when you should re-engage. If customers don’t return to your site for two weeks after purchase, there’s no need to bombard them with emails and sales offers every week. Customers who visit more frequently, however, might benefit from more rewards or incentives. Perhaps you’re an author with a core group of devoted readers and have a new release coming out in spring 2017. You might offer sneak peeks of the release only to that core group.
Most ecommerce efforts should cater to your customer base, but you can and should go beyond it. The best way to do that is to treat your existing customers like individuals. When you offer an email form, don’t simply ask for names and email addresses. Ask for personal information like birthday, gender, and product preferences. If you tailor your products to fit current customers, they will more than likely tell friends that your company will cater to them too.
Use email and PPC campaigns to take advantage of the base. If you know a boutique customer loves Lanz of Salzburg nightgowns, send her an email with 5–6 different options made especially for the Christmas season. If you sell your books on Amazon, mount a PPC campaign with BarnesandNoble.com to entice their customers, recapture the interest of yours, and help everyone win.
If you have any questions about building loyal ecommerce, contact Zero Gravity Marketing today.