12 Ways to Boost Customer Loyalty in E-Commerce

Are you worried that you are not able to create brand awareness and boost customer loyalty in e-commerce stores despite devising multiple strategies?

As an e-commerce store owner, you may use different strategies to attract your potential customers. This article features 12 ways that will improve customer loyalty in your e-commerce store.

E-commerce customer loyalty will help you increase sales and lift customer retention. When a customer base is loyal to your e-commerce store, you need not worry about having consistent revenue.

Overview of the Content

1. Improve Your Customer Support

2. Understand Your Target Market

3. Reward Your Customers

4. Analyze Your Customer Acquisition Costs

5. Improve Lifetime Customer Value

6. Provide a Personalized Experience

7. Ask for Customer Feedback

8. Track Your Customer Behavior

9. Expanding Customer Choices

10. Take Quick Action

11. Abandoned Cart Reminders

12. Easy Returns

What are the Benefits of Loyal Customers in E-commerce?

Customers play a vital role in marketing your brand to other shoppers. Word-of-mouth and social marketing help you create brand awareness and your loyal customers will help you do that effectively.

• Prevent losing your existing customers
• Increase in sales and revenue
• Boost your brand advocacy
• Increase brand awareness
• Ensure e-commerce business success
• Gain more returning customers

What is an E-commerce loyalty program?

An e-commerce loyalty program is one of the effective ways to build customer loyalty in online stores. Loyalty programs are discounts and exclusive offers that help build customer loyalty.

Advantages of Customer Loyalty Program

• Exclusive discounts and offers from e-commerce stores help to retain customers and increase customer lifetime value.
• There is a high chance of customers becoming repeat purchasers in your online stores.
• Loyalty programs will also help e-commerce store owners know more about their customers and their preferences.

Disadvantages of a Customer Loyalty Program

• E-commerce store owners will collect customer data quickly but there is a chance of collecting data from website visitors who are not potential customers.
• If discounts are too high, there is a chance of a decrease in profits.

10 Ways to Boost Customer Loyalty in E-commerce

There are different ways to increase customer loyalty in e-commerce stores other than running customer loyalty programs. It’s best to learn about the 10 effective ways to increase both customer and brand loyalty in your online stores.

1. Improve Your Customer Support

Customer support plays a vital role in increased loyalty. When your customers get instant answers to their questions, there is more of a chance of increasing customer loyalty. In the same way, online shoppers will provide feedback and point out issues with the products they receive.

When your customer support team resolves the issues quickly without making them wait for the response, you can increase customer satisfaction on your site. As an e-commerce business owner, you should first increase the efficiency of your customer support team.

Ways to Increase Customer Support Efficiency

• Add an AI customer service chatbot on the landing page/product page.
• Have polite responses to any negative feedback.
• Flexible checkout process.
• Easy navigation throughout the online store.
• Quick response to customer questions.

2. Understand Your Target Market

E-commerce store owners should first understand their target market to devise product marketing strategies.

Understanding your target market is also one of the easiest ways to identify customer expectations. When you understand your customers’ preferences, you can design the products accordingly. Many e-commerce store owners fail to understand their customers and that is one of the reasons why they don’t generate repeat customers.

Your target audience determines the success of your e-commerce businesses. e-commerce store owners can build healthy relationships and communicate with customers efficiently if they understand them well. Customers’ values and preferences are significant for online business owners to develop their online stores around them.

3. Reward Your Customers

Now that you have identified your target market and formulated your marketing efforts accordingly. What is the next step?

Every e-commerce store should have high spending and returning customers. To improve customer loyalty in e-commerce businesses, you should reward your customers. Rewarding customers will improve the customer’s lifetime value and excite them to purchase from your site again. Exclusive discount offers and coupons will encourage your customers to purchase more from the online store.

Rewarding your customers is one of the ways to show them that you recognize their brand loyalty. Online business owners will make sure that they are adding more value to returning customers.

Note: Rewarding your customers should not exceed your profit. Most customer loyalty programs fail because online business owners don’t use customer data properly and offer too deep of a discount.

4. Analyze Your Customer Acquisition Costs

E-commerce businesses spend a particular amount to generate more new customers for their websites. This process of spending money is also known as customer acquisition costs.

E-commerce business owners should track and monitor customer acquisition costs. In some scenarios, e-commerce store owners may spend more money on driving new website visitors but they will not ultimately convert them into buyers.

Customer acquisition costs should match the purchases that they made in the online store. The ideal value of customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value is 3:1. There are different strategies for customer acquisition. Search engine optimization, traditional advertising, and digital marketing are a few effective strategies. When you gain customers from website visitors, you will find it easier to boost loyalty.

5. Improve Lifetime Customer Value

Online business owners should understand what their customers exactly want or need. Upselling and cross-selling are the two effective strategies that will help you sell more products in online stores.

Upselling is a strategy where online business owners list out the premium products that have exclusive offers and discounts. You can increase your revenue organically with the upselling strategy. When your customers cannot find the products they like, you can recommend relevant products to them. With these strategies, customers will not leave your website without purchasing products. Hence, you can improve your lifetime customer value and boost customer loyalty.

6. Provide Personalized Experience

A properly tailored message that perfectly aligns with the customers’ preferences keeps your customers engaged on the website.

Customers will remember your business if you deliver what they expect and want. The more you communicate with your customers, the more you will know their preferences. Every customer has unique tastes and preferences.

When you know more about your target audience, you can easily understand what they like and provide a personalized experience to them. Meeting the individual requirements of your customers will help you stand out from your competitors in the e-commerce industry and create more customer loyalty.

7. Ask for Customer Feedback

Your customer feedback is necessary and vital to rectify mistakes and grow your online store. A business can only create a loyal customer base if they actively listen to customer feedback.

There are various ways of collecting feedback from customers. e-commerce stores usually send a traditional email survey to their customers and track the satisfied customers. If your products don’t meet customer expectations, you can change your strategy to grow your business. One of the advanced ways to ask for customer feedback is through an AI survey.

Artificial Intelligence technology in chatbots outpaces the traditional feedback form for customers. AI chatbots and live chat software will help you collect feedback from your customers in a conversational way.

Customer feedback will help online business owners think from the customers’ perspective and strengthen customer relationships.

Read More: 6 Ways to Gather Feedback With AI chatbots: Chatbot Feedback

8. Track Your Customer Behavior

Online business owners should track customer behavior inside e-commerce stores. You will know when a customer decides to buy a product on the website and hopefully understand why they didn’t proceed with their purchase.

While understanding customer behavior in e-commerce, you will increase the quality of services and products. In some e-commerce industry scenarios, you will see your website visitors abandoning their carts before completing their purchases. By tracking customer behavior in e-commerce, you will reduce both cart and website abandonment exponentially. Customer behavior will help you devise personalized strategies for them and boost their loyalty.

9. Expanding Customer Choices

Not all website visitors will know about your products while visiting your e-commerce store. While visiting your e-commerce website, your website visitors will know more about the products.

E-commerce website owners should expand customer choices by giving them more options to purchase their products. You can generate more revenue with existing customers and add more value to online shoppers. Online shopping is competitive, so by expanding customer choices you will retain more of your current customers and expand their loyalty to your brand. Collecting feedback is one of the effective ways to expand customer choices in your e-commerce store.

Collecting feedback is not enough to develop a good relationship with your customers. You should also take quick action after collecting that feedback.

When website visitors are coming to your online store, the customer support team should be active. Website abandonment increases when there is no response to a question in your e-commerce stores.

10. Take Quick Action

The non-intrusive customer support system will create more loyal customers on your site. If your customers get quick responses to their questions, they will value your business and you will get more loyal customers to your e-commerce store.

11. Abandoned Cart Reminders

Abandoned carts are one of the major challenges that every e-commerce store owner tries to overcome. Notifying your customers about items left in their carts is effective to encourage them to complete their purchases. Customized emails and trigger notifications are some of the best ways for e-commerce customer retention.

Online business owners use AI chatbots, Live Chat software, and emails to remind customers about their abandoned carts. The right notifications at the right time are a trigger for customers to increase their loyalty to your brand.

12. Easy Returns

The returning process in your e-commerce store should be flexible to generate more customers. Online shoppers will expect the refund and returning process to be smooth and easy.

E-commerce store owners will generate more loyal and repeat customers if the return policy is easy. Imagine that you are ordering a product from an online store and struggling with the refund process; annoying right? Would you want to purchase from this store again? Now imagine the e-commerce store making the refund and return process easy. You most likely will return to the store again – that is increasing customer loyalty.

Final Words

Customer loyalty is significant in online businesses. When you value and recognize your customers in the right way, you need not worry about your customers returning to make more purchases because you will have a fantastic brand and customer loyalty.

You don’t have to devise so many marketing strategies to boost the revenue of your online store in the e-commerce industry if you develop a loyal customer base. Consumer loyalty will enhance your business to the next level.

Latest Posts

• Chatbot vs Virtual Assistant – Which is Best For Your Business?

• Why Do You Struggle Hard to Generate Sales on Shopify in 2022?

• E-commerce Conversion Funnel – 7 Must Do Steps

• 15 Advantages of Chatbots in E-commerce

• Shopify Navigation: All You Need to Know

Frequently Asked Questions