Customer retention is one of the most overlooked eCommerce growth strategies. The customer lifetime value can be greatly increased through retention. So many of us spend a huge amount of time and expense in getting new customers and we totally forget about increasing sales from past customers. Getting past customers to repeat purchase is way less costly than acquiring a new customer and can be really simple.
There are various means of retaining customers and getting past customers to repurchase. As I’m an email marketing consultant and trainer I’m primarily concerned with how email marketing boosts retention (and subsequently sales). Email marketing is a very successful means of engaging past customers and is extremely cost effective.
Get more sales with Mailchimp E-Commerce
A recent Shopify survey found that customer retention, one of the three ecommerce growth multipliers, [was] a major struggle for respondents. Fortunately retention doesn’t have to be a struggle; Mailchimp has advanced marketing capabilities especially if you use Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop or BigCommerce for your eCommerce. Once Mailchimp E-Commerce is enabled between your online store and Mailchimp it is simple to setup customer retention and repeat purchase marketing.
To maximize customer lifetime value, a company must not only convince customers to buy its product or service once; it must also retain them. MIT Sloan Management Review
With all our marketing we should be aiming to keep the customer acquisition and retention cost as low as possible (and of course have a high ROI). My clients that use Mailchimp E-Commerce with their online stores have been pleasantly amazed at how low the cost, and how positive the influence on sales, an email marketing retention strategy can be. According to McKinsey & Company, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter; we can therefore use email marketing for customer retention and to drive repeat sales.
Mailchimp Automation to get more sales
First of all Mailchimp has various E-Commerce Automation workflows that, with just a bit of effort, can be set up to automatically engage past customers. Workflows exist for sending abandoned cart messages and many other eCommerce related marketing initiatives. It’s also very easy to create a workflow that is based on buyer activity; my favourite is automatically sending people who purchased consumables a reminder to repurchase.
Mailchimp Campaigns as retention marketing
Automation, as above, is set and forget marketing (also called drip marketing). Mailchimp also make it very quick to create and send an email campaign to past customers. The Mailchimp campaign builder includes content blocks that can be dropped whereby dynamic content will be added to your campaign. Once Mailchimp E-Commerce has been integrated between your eCommerce store and Mailchimp then product recommendation, product and promo code blocks (promo codes only available with the Shopify integration) will become available. These are such easy ways to engage your past customers and entice them to repurchase.
If you need help integrating your eCommerce store and Mailchimp then contact me. Get your past customers repurchasing today!
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