When it comes to customer count—more isn’t always merrier. Expanding your market base is great for growing your brand, sure. But at some point, all those droves of customers will end up costing your eCommerce business more rather than sustaining it. Let’s dive into why it is best to retain your existing customer base, as well as some ideas you can use for your own customer loyalty programs.
Why is Retaining Better Than Attaining?
Focusing on customer acquisition may seem tempting. On the surface, more customers mean more sales, right? Well sure, at first. But over time, when customers stop coming back, you would naturally invest in attracting new customers all over again. In the long run, attracting new customers can cost your company up to 5x more compared to retaining your existing ones.
If that’s not enough to get you investing in customer loyalty programs, you should know that loyal customers spend 67% more on their favorite brands. So not only will you be avoiding major revenue leaks, but you’ll be getting more revenue from the customers you already have.
Your Customers Aren’t the Only Ones Who’ll Benefit From Customer Loyalty Programs
There are a lot of benefits your eCommerce business can get out of customer loyalty programs, such as:
- A 5-10% increase in overall revenue.
- 5-20% more money spent on your brand by loyalty members compared to non-members.
- And 5-20% more buying frequency from those loyalty members as well.
- Also, based on a Global Shopper Trends Report from January 2019, 58.7% of global internet users who responded value earning rewards and loyalty points when shopping.
Here are 5 more practical benefits you can get:
1. Improve Customer Retention
Customer loyalty programs aim to reward your customers, by giving them that incentive and motivation to return to your brand. By the way, did you know that increasing your customer retention rate by just as much as 5% can already boost your profits by up to 95%?
2. Gain Much-Needed Information for More Optimized Marketing
Returning customers can give you more solid and consistent data. You can get a complete view of your customers’ spending habits, preferences, and more.
With information like this, your marketing strategies can grow in a much clearer direction. Your marketing materials can be more relevant as they would be more tailored to your specific set of customers.
3. Increase Your Cart Value
Based on the data you gathered, you can cross-sell and up-sell more efficiently and accurately. Knowing your customers’ preferences can help give you a clear idea of what other products your customers might also want to buy aside from their initial choices.
4. Maximize on Profitable and Efficient Customer Retention
A well-made customer loyalty program can help you better focus on the incentives to customers who deserve them. You can better segment your customers as either profitable or unprofitable.
Unprofitable customers would be those who focus only on discounted products and avoid the premium price range. While profitable customers are those who are willing to spend more when buying from your brand.
So when maintaining your loyalty programs, it would be more efficient to focus on your profitable segment of customers
5. Better Customer Communication
With a customer loyalty program, you can establish a direct line of communication with your customers. This way, you can easily promote your products and services to the right customers. Since it’s pretty much guaranteed that loyalty members would be interested and are most likely to take up your offers. And in the end, you’ll have a fully organic list of emails to boot
5 Customer Loyalty Programs for Your Inspiration
1. VIP Treatment
This email from Milled included some details on what perks VIP members would get during a special sale. In this case, loyalty members get $10 free on a specific order price range.
2. Birthday or Anniversary Celebrations
DAVIDsTEA sent a nice warm celebratory email marking their customer’s 10th anniversary with them. In this email, they included some perks for their very special customer, entitling their customer free shipping for orders over a specified price and also 3 free samples with every online order.
3. Gamification
Make your loyalty program fun by gamifying it for your customers to participate. In this email from Postable, they sent an email with a GIF flashing their different postcard designs.
They asked their customers to vote for their favorite design. The customers who voted for the winning design get to win $150 worth of cards.
4. Flexible Loyalty Rewards
Give your customers the freedom of choice. That’s what Starbucks did for their loyal customers. Rather than listing a specific food or drink item, their customers are entitled to any food and beverage item of their choice.
This is a great alternative to the usual “one size fits all” type of reward. Allow your customers to redeem a reward they actually want.
5. Affiliate or Partner Programs
Here’s a great opportunity for you to promote your partners (or have one of your partners include you in their loyalty programs as well). Saving Star highlighted to their customers the different stores where they can avail of the loyalty program’s points and rewards.
This strategy is also good if you’re looking to expand your customer base.
Retaining Your Current Customers is Especially Important During Times of Crises
The COVID-19 pandemic has left many people struggling to stay safe while they still get what they need to survive. It’s best to align your emails to the current situation, show your customers you care with properly optimized retention emails.
To top it all off, why not automate your customer loyalty program emails? This way you can both maximize your email returns and maximize customer loyalty simultaneously.
Are you already enjoying the benefits of email marketing but you still believe your emails can still do much much more? Schedule a free 30-minute strategy call and let us help you bring out the best of your email marketing.
