5 Strategies to Improve Customer Retention and Experience

In the world of eCommerce, everything accelerates at a fast pace and nothing stays constant. With customers having access to infinite options, you need to ensure your website is as unique as possible. It is the only key to happy customers.

Customer experiences can either make or break your business. Faulty CX can cost your brand billions, a reputation that is completely tarnished and of course never returning customers.

Failure to work on your customer experience and retention plans mean that your business is on a treadmill, constantly trying to win new customers, just because you’re losing so many existing ones – something that can become quite expensive and frustrating.

Once you are able to achieve customer lifetime loyalty – you have hit the jackpot. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Magento or PrestaShop store owner, a seamless customer experience needs to be at the top. This experience lays the foundation for future expectations from your brand. After all, great user experience means returning users and ultimately customer retention.   

In this post, we’re going to take a look at what you can do to improve brand loyalty and customer retention within your business.

Offer Live Chat
Live chat is the most preferred way of communication for people looking for support. A study revealed that 73% of customers find live chat to be the most satisfying way of communicating with a business whereas 63% of consumers are more likely to return to a website that offers live chat.

Including a little chat widget in the corner of the screen is a great way to give customers (both existing and new) a sense of satisfaction when placing an order. In fact, 77% of customers won’t make a purchase if there’s no live chat support.

The reason: In the case of product confusions, inability to find the desired piece of cloth or for that matter issues with how a particular product works, live chat can be the saviour. It won’t just clear customers’ doubts but offer them a delightful experience.

Never Ask For Too Much Information
Although online shopping is at its peak, there are instances a customer might get second thoughts while checking out and abandon their cart to shop somewhere else for a better deal – since the options are endless. The global average rate of cart abandonment is 75.6%.

Your job is to avoid this and make sure the customer completes his purchase. The best way to do this is by offering them a quick and easy way to create an account. Several websites do the mistake of offering too many fields, which, in turn, distracts customers and ends up swaying him.

Instead, start by hooking your customers with something engaging like, “Sign up now and receive a 10% discount on your first order.” Once the customer starts signing up, ask only for the required information. The longer the form is, the more sceptical they become. Ensure the fields are easy to understand and fill. For instance, fields like:

are perfect to go. If the user has to go through a series of verification emails just to sign up or enter unnecessary OTPs, you’re creating a problem for yourself.

Make Way for Good Email Campaigns
Yes, emails are tricky but you need to know the right knack.

Choosing the right set of words can engage customers and prompt them to return. For instance, you can welcome potential customers that sign up on

your website with an engaging header and a quick copy. Include a link to their cart as a way to complete a sale.

Further, make sure to send order confirmation emails. These are probably the best type of email template for engaging customers. While newsletters and welcome emails contain great content and drive people back to your site, none of them holds a candle to the eagerness with which customers click on order confirmation emails. Since customers generally read these emails for about 14 seconds, find out how to promote other products.

The cherry on the cake: Include tracking information and order items in addition to some information about related items. Try to create different email templates for different items. Provide information that showcases your brand’s uniqueness, what your brand is and how your customers should continue shopping, you can increase your conversions and retention.

Build Your Customer Experience Around Customer Data
When you start a new business, you have a specific customer in mind. But as time passes and your business grows, your customer base and their needs change. You may reach an entirely different customer base from when you started.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is not something that usually works well with eCommerce. Building customer models around different groups of people with survey results (like specific sets of interests, or product purchase history and wish list items) can help you to reach different customer bases. If someone abandons their cart while looking at a pair of shoes, allocate resources to showcase ads on social media or send them reminders, sometimes clubbed with discounts.

Another way is to track the customer’s location. Say, if you have a vast audience from South India, add elements like a person wearing a silk saree. on the homepage. This gives customers a sense of affinity and connects them to your brand.

Offer Time-Limited Promotions
Top eCommerce brands often present banners highlighting a time-limited promotion — visitors must complete the purchase within a preset amount of time, determined by the audience segment they belong to. Besides, you can automatically add the promotional gift card to the visitor’s cart and highlight the promotion during the checkout process.

The benefit is twofold: the time-sensitive promotion boosts conversion rate and the gift card brings customers back to the website to make another purchase.

Key Takeaway
Customers, today, have endless options when it comes to buying their favourite tunic or bedsheet. Even the minutest lack from your end might end up losing them permanently and you surely don’t want that.

Following a set of tactics can help you improvise customer experience and ultimately retention. Profits and sales are complimentary benefits!