Strategies to Keep Your Customers Long-Term

From flash sales to follow-ups, a handful of methods to ensure consumer loyalty in the coming year.

With New Year’s sales happening all around us, it’s critical to implement customer-retention strategies that will keep your buyers loyal beyond peak revenue periods. After all, why should Amazon be the only retailer or e-commerce brand to grab so much of the sales?

Your customer-experience strategy should also encourage customers to stick around long after January, and into the decade ahead. Here are five customer-retention strategies for long-term customer engagement in 2020 and beyond:

1. Focus on the user experience.

Customers want to enjoy shopping, but they also want to get it done quickly. That’s why they want to partner with companies that understand their expectations. The takeaway here is that you’ll most likely keep customers coming back if you offer a streamlined user experience. Consider implementing tactics such as a single sign-in, mobile optimization, guest checkout and improved search and personalization features.

2. Conduct a post-sale follow-up for in-store and online purchases.

To persuade your customer base to come back, adopt a customer loyalty strategy that, at a minimum, includes a personal thank you and a promotional incentive. This strategy also encourages customer feedback about new products to improve the service experience.

Provide a brief survey with access printed on their sales receipt as part of the online checkout process. Incentivize the feedback request with a discount or promotion that entices them to share their thoughts on the. Analytics tools can then uncover patterns in the responses that identify areas that need improvement.

Prioritize the effort to address problem areas immediately. Once you implement any improvements, announce them personally to the customer through an email or text. Also, share the customer experience changes across all public channels — e.g. website and social media — to catch the attention of potential customers and those who haven’t shopped with you for a while. 

Read more: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/344334