If you have a brick-and-mortar store, you will find that some of the customers who live in the vicinity come to your store now and then. Those customers may not purchase the products in bulk, or look for costly products only, but they purchase regularly. Such customers are referred to as repeat customers.

Be it a physical store or digital one; every business loves to have such customers. They are happy with the product, the varieties you have, & the quick-service you are offering. Since they shop more from your store, you can engage them in customer loyalty programs to easily convert into loyal customers.

The average rate of repeat customers can vary between 20-40% according to many marketing researches. This rate varies from industry to industry and frequency of existing customers who have purchased products from your store.

Why Repeat Customers So Important?

The fact is every person coming to your store may or may not purchase from you straight away. The conversion rate of online stores with new customers is 2-3%. Since new customers don’t know much about your products, they are less likely to convert. This means that chasing new customers needs extra attention, and they won’t even convert easily. Whereas the first time repeat customers have 10-25% chances to convert, the second time customers have 25-35% chances, even third & fourth time customers 35-55%.

That’s why brands spend more than half of their marketing budget to sell the products to the existing customers. Since they know the quality of your products, they will at least take some time to come to your store & look at the product. The efforts you will put in the remarketing efforts will be paid off, when your first-time customers convert to the repeat customers.

Based on the products the customers have already purchased, you will have an idea about the customers’ likings. By planning the flow of customers across your marketing funnel and streamlining the process, you can improve the conversion rate of your store.

Now that you know the importance of repeat customers for your online store, let us help you with the strategies that can help you optimize such buyers’ rates.

• Understand your analytics:

From Analytics, we are not only talking about Google Analytics; rather, it refers to any tool that you are using to track the data of customers coming to your store. Irrespective of the options you select to understand and analyze the data, we recommend you to stick with two options at a time. It will give better clarity about the data and help you find the lost points if any.

Before going into the details, give yourself time to gain a better understanding of the user dashboard. When you have clarity about the information and the depth to which you have access to the data, you can better evaluate the results.

On your dashboard of the acquisition section, you will get information about the sessions in your store. You can get the count of sessions with the repeat ones as well as the new ones. The conversion rate of your store is calculated as:

Conversion Rate = Number of Visitors Who Make a Purchase / Total Website Traffic

Whereas, the conversion rate of the repeat customers will be calculated as:

Repeat Purchase Rate = Number of Returning Customers / Number of Total Customers

Don’t worry; you need not calculate things manually. The more you explore, the more access you will get to the information about your store’s performance metrics.

• Create your email list:

Emails are like text reminders to your customers that you remember them & have some good offers. Since the text messages have limitations of word limit as well as creativity, emails happen to be the present trend. The buyers in your store will leave these contact details when they purchase from you. Now, it’s your duty to arrange the contact details & create your email list to start approaching the right set of audience.

You can call it an organic way to interact with the audience. You don’t have to pay anything to send the mail(other than the internet charges, of course). The CRM software or if feature integrated to your store will help you build an email list. To start building the relations with your customers, and to know the responses, you can start with the sign-up/registration email.

Email marketing can be a lot profitable if you sort the type of customers, create customer groups, and send the emails accordingly. With the help of several online tools, you can automate email marketing campaigns. They will help you understand the total emails you have sent, the number of users who opened them, and the other ones that took action to convert.

• Add the flavor of personalization:

As we have mentioned above, email marketing can trick well with strategic customer grouping. Even when you send it to the group, don’t be generic. When you care about the customer preferences and share the product options that ‘they may like’ depending upon their purchase history or the products in the cart, they will more likely convert.

Personalization starts with greeting customers with their name, next will be the choice of products, and then the preferable time to send. You need not do it manually; the tools available online can make things easier and streamline the task. You can take the help of chatbot or any live chat software that you are using to understand better the interaction pattern that customers prefer. When you are selling on the regional level, the language of an email can also trick the customers’ minds.

• Improvise customer service:

Bringing in the new customers or counting on the old ones ultimately depends on your customer service. When you are serving online, customers can’t reach your physical store. That’s why to keep the gates for the customer to reach you from every possible medium.

The lesser will be your query response time, the easier it will be for customers to build a connection with your brand. The basic funda is to make your customers feel valued enough. Your performance as a brand depends upon numerous factors, like, delivery timing, ease of approach, post-delivery responses, actions you take towards the customer reviews, and the tenderness you show towards your customers in odd situations like ones of this pandemic. Don’t be a salesperson; try to associate with your customers. They will surely convert, in one way or the other.

• Play with retargeting ads:

As the name suggests, retargeting ads are meant to target the specific set of audience that they have already targeted. You can set the target as showing the ads to the first-time buyers. The data of your analytics and integrated tools will help you follow this ad pattern and improve the conversion rate with these ads.

The goal-oriented ads happen to perform a lot better than those of the unoptimized and non-targeted ones. Some people enable ad blockers on the web to avoid such ads. So, you need to take this idea into account and seek alternative options like using burn pixel or Facebook retargeting campaigns to target your audience in a much better way. By fixing the specific time frame & giving discounts on the same, you can drive better results from repeat customers.