5 Tips To Drive Loyal Repeat Business

Loyal, repeat business from your best customers is the cornerstone of any business! No business can grow without incentivizing its best customers to become loyal brand advocates. The data shows that perfecting your repeat business is a winning strategy!

• Existing customers spend more than first-time purchasers.
• New customers cost more to acquire. Depending on the industry, it could be up to 25 times more costly to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing customer.
• Increasing customer retention by 5% may increase profitability up to 25%.

Trust is a huge factor in any purchase decision and your past customers know your brand can deliver. That relationship with your brand is why it’s so easy to see great results with existing customers. However, marketing to existing customers is different than reaching out to new customers. You already have their trust, which is a blessing, but you need to ensure you don’t come across as pushy when you try to upsell these customers. We put our heads together and created the following tips to guide you through the remarketing cycle!

Read On To Learn How To Grow Your Best Customers! 

Create A Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs are one of the best tools in your tool kit for driving repeat business. We all love incentives, right? The right loyalty programs are an amazing way to find your perfect customer and offer them rewards for continuing to frequent your brand. But how do you actually implement the right customer loyalty program?

There are, of course, a few hard and fast rules. A coffee shop will offer a very different loyalty program from that of a hardware store. However, there are some trends to keep in mind.

• Figure Out What Motivates Your Customers: You may immediately default to offering a certain product with a certain number of purchases but then discover down the road that another product is more popular with your frequent customers. Maybe your customers don’t even want a product, but rather exclusive services.  Whatever the use case, determine what exactly works for your best customers in this loyalty program.
• Make It Easy To Redeem: Everyone hates not having their loyalty card on them when they try to redeem. Refusing to respect rewards if the customer doesn’t have their card on them will make your brand look bad. To get around this roadblock, try to tie the program to a constant like a phone number or unique program ID.
• Be Willing To Evolve Your Program With Needs: What may have worked when you created the program might not work. For instance, you might require that customers purchase 19 products before they receive a discount and you may find that this is too high a purchase requirement. It’s important to get customer feedback, but it’s also important to determine how much revenue you’re driving from the program.
• Incentivize Word Of Mouth Marketing: Referral marketing is an amazing way to take your loyal customers from frequent shoppers to brand advocates. “Refer-A-Friend Programs” work so well because consumers trust people they know more than advertisements. No one likes being the recipient of a sales pitch and customers are naturally skeptical of marketing materials. Referral marketing circumvents this objection entirely. The best referral programs usually are as simple as “Receive a gift card if you refer a friend,” but feel free to custom-fit the program to your needs!

Create A Recall Campaign

Email marketing is a perfect tactic for repeat customers. You need customer contact information to make email campaigns run successfully, after all, so why not use automated email campaigns to guide your past customers through the sales cycle for repeat business?!

• Ask For A Review: A recall campaign is designed to reach past customers, who coincidentally are the most likely to leave you positive reviews. Consider asking for a review immediately after purchase and linking directly to your Google listing from that email.
• Promote New Offers: Your past customers are much likelier to purchase again and most businesses are willing to offer good discounts and unique promotions to drive incremental business from their best customers. Offer a unique deal to them in this email marketing campaign. If you’re able to segment the consumer out by their past purchase (i.e. delineating polo shirt purchasers from sweatshirt purchases if you sell college merchandise), even better! The more you can cater your email campaign to the past purchases of that specific consumer, the likelier you are to drive repeat business.
• Sweeten the Deal: If you have set your email campaigns to send out a new offer to your past customer, consider sweetening the deal if the customer does not bite at first. In our past clothing example, let’s assume you send out a “buy one sweatshirt, get one 25% off” email. You can then follow that up with a “buy one sweatshirt, get one 35% off” to those who open the email, but don’t click. You could even send out a “buy one sweatshirt, get one 50 off” to those who don’t open the first email at all to try and incentivize the purchase.
• Don’t Pester: No one wants an email every day. Don’t have your campaign set up to send out emails at a rate that will annoy your recipients. Generally speaking, one or two emails a week is best for engaged customers. If it has been a bit since you’ve had contact with the customer, a few emails a week is too much and you can probably slowly reduce the number of emails sent over time.
• But Don‘t Neglect: The optimum amount of time between purchases or visits per business will vary dramatically with the industry. You don’t see your podiatrist as regularly as you might buy craft coffee, for instance. Set your campaigns up to ping your customers with a check-in email if it has been a while since you’ve heard from them, depending on your industry. This is probably 3-6 months for most service-based businesses, but every few weeks is probably alright for most products. (Think about our college clothing example.)

Utilize Social Media Exclusive Offers

Social media remarketing is a tricky tactic. People get on social media to socialize and have fun, not necessarily to buy. That doesn’t mean that you can’t promote products on social media, but you do need to walk a fine line with the amount of time you promote your products versus engaging with your customers. That said, offering coupons or exclusive deals via your organic social media is still a fruitful tactic.

• Make The Offer Unique: You can’t just display the same coupon code that you have on your website. If you’re trying to incentivize your past customers, make the offer exclusive to channels like social media and email marketing.
• Differentiate The Codes: You can offer the same deal, but with different coupons across tactics. For instance, in our college merchandise eCommerce store example, you could use different coupon codes for social media, email marketing, and direct mail to properly track which channel works best for your brand.
• Keep It Short And Sweet: Don’t make the world’s best sales pitch when posting social media coupon codes. The average post on social media, regardless of platform, should be under 100 characters. Ideally, under 50 characters is better. Remember, these are your past customers. You don’t need to make the type of sales pitch you would to a new customer. A pithy and compelling snippet with an enticing discount and an eye-catching visual is all you need for this social media marketing tactic.

Personalize Your Marketing

One of the biggest advantages you have when trying to drive repeat business is your relationship with your customers. They trust you and know that you won’t let them down. Capitalize on that relationship.

• Honor Anniversaries: This could be the anniversary of their first purchase or a birthday. Regardless of the date, customers love seeing that you care and remember them. Possible options include sending out a “Happy Birthday Email” or offering a discounted or even free product for an anniversary.

• Remember Past Purchases: This goes back to our email marketing tips mentioned previously. Segmenting your customers out increases your ability to personalize your offers to the individual customer. Knowing what your customers bought allows you to show great discounts on similar products. Even better, if you’re able to track cart abandons, you can ping the client via email about the product still in their eCommerce cart and possibly even offer a deal to sweeten the deal.

• Take Feedback: You should, of course, ask for reviews for your Google listing whenever possible, but it can be advantageous to solicit advice from your best customers. If you have the time and resources, consider sending out an email to your most frequent customers and ask them what they like about your product. You should call out that they’re a great customer and ask for their feedback as a favor. This sense of exclusivity is really exciting for some customers. The feedback you get will help guide your marketing, but it also will cultivate a sense of brand loyalty from these top customers. Again, to sweeten the deal, offer an exclusive deal for these top customers so that your audience feels that they’re receiving something from the transaction.

Increase Repeat Business With JSL Marketing & Web Design

Are you ready to craft the perfect remarketing & customer cultivation campaign? Do you want to see your top customers increase the number of purchases they complete in a year? Call JSL Marketing & Web Design ASAP to plan your perfect marketing strategy now.

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