If you want to turn one-time shoppers into life-long customers, you’ve come to the right place. Keep reading and we’ll give you tips on:
How to keep valuable customers
What metrics to focus on
Ways to calculate the customer retention rate
How to follow up to make sure the strategies work
Why customer retention matters
Customer retention is closely tied to customer experience and customer loyalty. Simply put, it’s about engaging and inspiring your customers to come back and shop with you—again and again. To make this happen, you need some pretty awesome strategies and a platform with features to manage customer data and all the stuff you want to do.
But why all this focus on existing customers? Well, acquiring new customers cost about seven times more than keeping the ones who have already bought from you. Mainly because they require a lot of marketing efforts and paid media to attract.
4 customer retention tactics your brand should use right now
Onboard your customers as soon as they make a purchase! Send an email or text message with instructions on how to best take care of the product–or show complementing items to make the customer come back again.
Work with a customer loyalty program where you can easily track customer behaviors. And also reward, inspire, and send personalized offers to motivate the next purchase.
Investigate and enhance the customer experience you provide. Think everything from your website and how you display your products to paying options, delivery, and return policies.
Personalize your communication and make it nothing but relevant for every customer. Start segmenting your customers to the core—and you’ll surely see results!
Calculate and follow up on customer retention
All this sounds great, right? But one question remains. How do you follow up to make sure the strategies work? By calculating the customer retention rate (CRR)! Here’s an example of how you do it.
Let’s say you want to see the CRR of Q4. You need these three numbers:
How many customers did you have at the beginning of Q4
How many customers purchased at the end of Q4
Count the number of new customers you got during Q4
Now, let’s get down to math!
Customers who purchased during Q4 – New customers during Q4 / Number of customers at the beginning of Q4
X 100 = Your CRR
4 easy ways to increase customer retention with Voyado
Voyado is an easy-to-use customer experience platform with six main features. To scale up customer retention, utilize these tools:
1. Churn score predictions
This is exactly what it sounds like: a number that shows if your customer is about to churn. The score looks at the customer’s overall engagement—measuring things like opening rates, click rates, purchase frequency, etcetera. You want your customer to have a low score because the higher the number, the higher the risk of the customer leaving.
By looking at churn scores, you can find customers who haven’t made purchases in a while and send them some engaging communication! Set up different strategies for your communication by combining the churn score with their overall activity level.
We are excited to use the churn scores on customers because we strategically have a strong focus on our loyalty program and want to optimize our efforts to be as relevant as possible to our customers based on their behavior and try and impact it based on our customers needs.” – Shpresa Salihi, By Malene Birger A/S
2. Customer segmentation
Voyado stores customer data like purchase history, CLV, open rates, and much more—and every point of data you see on each customer profile can be used to create segments! You can, for example, create a list of customers who haven’t purchased in six months.
But remember to hyper-personalize your communication! In Voyado’s email design editor, you can create one dynamic email that will turn into different-looking emails based on what segment the receiver belongs to. You might want women between the age of 20-30, who haven’t shopped in six months, to be presented with the latest lipstick colors. And men between 30-40 to see the latest aftershaves.
3. Marketing automation powered by customer data
Now we’re talking serious effectiveness. If you haven’t fully understood the power of marketing automation—well, grab a coffee and read all about it!
To get into how you can work with marketing automation for customer retention, here is an example:
Set up a workflow with the entering criteria “customers who haven’t purchased in 3 months”
Divide the workflow into “customers who have a CLV of more than 300 euro” and “customers who have a CLV of less than 300 euro”
Give these customers different offers. The higher CLVs can get a VIP offer, and the lower CLVs can get personalized product recommendations
What better way to inspire a new purchase than by giving the customer personalized recommendations? By using Voyado’s own product recommendations engine, you just drag and drop a module into the email you’re creating. The module populates products based on the customer’s previous purchases, visits to your site, products previously added to their cart, and social media clicks. It also excludes products that have already been bought! Yes, it’s that good.
Eager to start working with customer retention management?
Of course, you are! And if you want to see the customer data platform and all the other cool features in Voyado—set up a demo.
Frequently asked questions
Some of our most common questions when it comes to customer retention in retail
What are the most crucial factors for keeping customers?
If there's one thing you should focus on, it's the customer experience. Provide the customer a seamless journey from the first to the last touchpoint. Make it as personal as it can possibly be because a customer who gets a great experience with relevant products and communication has the highest chance of shopping from you again.
What other tools are available in Voyado's platform?
Voyado is one platform with the power of six features – which all have different tools within. The main features you will find are CDP, Insights, Marketing Automation, Campaign, AI & Predictions, and Loyalty. Voyado is tailored for retailers and offers everything you need to create customer loyalty under the same roof.
How is Voyado different from other customer retention softwares, services or solutions?
For one, Voyado is built and created specifically for retailers. That means all the features are seamlessly working for anyone within the retail business. And Voyado makes the complexity of creating hyper-personalized communication very easy since the platform is so easy to use. Just to mention a few.
Does Voyado's customer retention platform provide predictive churn scoring?
Yes, it does. If you choose to work with churn scoring in Voyado, you will get a score between 0,00-1,00 on all your customers where the higher score the customer has, the higher their risk of churning. Use these scores as a trigger for marketing automation flows to prevent customers from churning.
Is customer retention more effective than acquisition in retail?
It is if you look at the costs. It is about seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer compared to keeping an existing one! And a customer who has bought from you once is about 25 % likely to buy again. A customer who bought from you twice is 45 % likely to make a third purchase.
What are the most important customer retention metrics to keep an eye out for?
Churn score, Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) are all important metrics you will be able to measure in Voyado.
Everything we do – we do for our customers
If there’s one thing we are passionate about – it’s the simplicity we want to provide our customers. That’s why we have teamed up with several different brilliant partners. All in order to make implementation and daily life easier for our customers. Here they are:
For more than 20 years Askås have delivered its versatile, scalable and powerful e-commerce platform. Especially developed and designed with e-retailers and end consumers in mind to customers all over Sweden and rest of Scandinavia. Choose Askås – today and with the future in sight!
Avensia has a long-standing partnership with Voyado and has together carried out a large number of implementation projects. Avensia has solid experience within CX, Martech & Loyalty and offer a complete professional service (strategy, development, implementation and operational support) within loyalty-driven commerce. With a combination of award-winning e-commerce solutions and strategic advisory services, Avensia help B2C and B2B customers accelerate growth and improve customer experience by delivering cutting edge commerce solutions, strategy and optimization.
B3 Consulting Group is one of Sweden’s fastest growing consultancy companies with senior consultants within IT and Management. We help companies and organisations to create tomorrow’s opportunities using digital transformation and operations development.
Episerver combine best-in-class content management, commerce and intuitive data and personalization solutions. Our leading digital experience platform (DXP) empowers teams with the tools and insights they need to create and optimize in new and novel ways.
Carismar is one of Sweden’s leading platform suppliers in e-commerce. The Carismar Commerce platform is headless and comes with an integrated PIM, WMS, CMS and CRM. With open APIs, the platform is free to integrate with external services and systems.
Centra is the headless e-commerce platform that empowers DTC brands to serve advanced e-commerce globally”
Centric connect retailers and consumers so they engage successfully. With technology, the relationship and interaction between consumer and retailer can be strengthened and a retailer can realise an efficient supply chain to be successful. Our solutions erase the distinction between channels so that you can offer your customers perfect service, in the shop and online, right up to the front door.
Flowbox is a SaaS company offering a visual marketing platform to help brands leverage and distribute social content throughout the buyer journey to increase engagement, /../
Front Systems cloud based platform digitalize retail, unifies commerce and connects “best of breed”-applications to deliver a seamless omnichannel experience. It’s mobile Point Of Sale gives retailers a competitive advantage by turning brick-and-mortar stores into digital warehouses enabling the convenience and experiences todays shoppers demand.
Grebban is a branding & e-commerce agency for ambitious B2C brands. Focusing on ecommerce and web solutions, design (UX) and branding, Grebban combines business development and ecommerce expertise to offer the best possible solution in terms of execution and quality.
Norce is a Nordic leader in software-as-a-service (SaaS) commerce. We provide retailers, brands and B2B customers with powerful tools for growth. Through a composable architecture, an open platform (API-first) and cloud-based offering (True SaaS), we let solution partners and e-tailors create tomorrow’s customer journeys. Together, we accelerate the transformation of digital commerce.
Maze enable large scale behavioral change. Using the Maze APP, our clients collect continuous high volumes of customer feedback focused on specific training areas which leads to best in class customer interactions. The “Maze everyday training APP” provides our clients store associates with core training areas to convert your end customers into your best ambassadors.
Empowering others. Our mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more. We believe technology can and should be a force for good and that meaningful innovation can and will contribute to a brighter world in big and small ways.
We make you become truly data-driven so you can create smart marketing across all channels driving business value.
At NexusOne, customer experiences are in our DNA. From strategy and concept development, data integration to technical solutions, our focus is on making your customers happy. We are experts at utilizing data to pinpoint exactly what your customers need – and creating solutions that gives it to them.
At Sigma, we combine digital expertise with marketing experience to move your business forward. We draw up strategies and take off on customer journeys and come back with prototypes and production plans ready to go.
The sharpest talents in e-commerce, digitalization and digital business development gathered under the same roof – Ready to accelerate your business. As experts in e-commerce, digitalisation and business development, we work with both large and small projects, strategically or operationally – always with growth and results as our main focus.
Oculos is a martech agency that helps companies achieve their marketing and sales goals with unique ideas, cohesive strategies, and effective execution. Our company is about creating personalized marketing experiences for our clients. And we do so by creating targeted and seamless communication throughout the customer journey.
Create shopping experiences today that win customers for life. Nosto – the Commerce Experience Platform.
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