Use Your Ecommerce Platform To Score Return Custom

In today’s post we’re going to examine how you can harness your e-commerce platform’s purchase data in a retention strategy. After all, it’s easier to get someone to repeat purchase than it is to get a new customer.

Despite this fact, growing businesses often spend so much of their efforts and money trying to acquire new customers that they often oversee a great (and often the best) source of growth: retaining their existing customer base.

Existing Customers: The Trump Card

• It’s 50% easier to sell to existing customers than to brand new prospects according Marketing Metrics
• Bain and Co recently reported that a 5% increase in customer retention can potentially increase a company’s profitability by up to 75%
• The Gartner Group predict that 80% of a company’s future income will come from a mere 20% of their existing customer base.

Sell Online?

The ecommerce platform that you use will store a wide array of valuable personal data about customers that have purchased from you previously.

Most ecommerce platforms, will allow marketers to view, download and sync the following data:

• Account creation date
• Total spend
• Average order value
• & purchase history

This data is crucial to understanding a customer database and allows marketers to perform marketing techniques like RFM analysis. If you’re not familiar with the acronym then me acquaint you:

RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis is a technique that marketers have used (for some 60 years) to determine which customers are their strongest leads by examining

• Recency of purchases
• Frequency of purchases made
• Monetary value of individual customers

What Do These Numbers Mean?

Having this data and being able to perform various analyses on the facts and figures is all very well and good, but it’s what you do with the information then that really counts…..

What if you could integrate this data seamlessly with your ESP (email service provider) so that you can harness it to power your online marketing campaigns?

Great news, you can!

If you use an eccomerce platform that can be integrated with your email service provider (like the dotMailer/Magento integration) then you’ll be able to effortlessly segment your data based on customers purchase history and previous behaviour. For example, you might decide to segment your data based on customers who purchased a certain product or by customers who currently have items left within their basket but are yet to complete a purchase and send them a promotion or offer relevant to their activity.

Top Tip: The most important thing for ensuring that this data helps to power the best marketing campaigns is to ensure that your database is up to the minute in terms of accuracy.

Whilst direct marketers might be forgiven for being slower to adapt to change, because of the speed of online marketing, people expect the messages they see and the communications they receive to be current and updated frequently.

Leverage The Data:

This customer data can be used to target sends and drip campaigns to automate your follow-up, this helps marketers to engage with their purchasers with relevant and timely content, offers and calls to action in an effort to push them to purchase more/again.

Your ecommerce provider will be able to provide you with a whole host of analytical insights on who your customers are and their purchase patterns to date, so what can you do with these insights?

Post Purchase:

Post purchase email triggers are a great tool to harness because they offer customers who have already purchased from you an opportunity to stay engaged with you beyond the transaction.

Marketers can use emails like this as an opportunity to:

• Ask customers to take part in a satisfaction survey
• Request reviews
• Up sell products
• Offer loyalty rewards
• Cross sell products related to the original purchase
• Encourage customers to follow and/or like social media profiles

Post purchase trigger emails aren’t just sent as a matter of courtesy, statistics have also shown that they can have a huge impact on future purchase decisions too. eConsultancy recently reported that Loyalty programs and rewards were the most popular factor (39%) in persuading customers to make repeat purchases, followed by strong after sales support (20%) and personalised offers after purchase (14%).

I’d love to hear about retention strategies that you’ve tried, let me know in the comments below or on Twitter to @dotmailer