10 Tips to Get the Most Value From Your Customers

A customer enters a store. This is how the story begins, but the story has an open ending. While in your store, they may fill the shopping cart or leave without buying anything. While the latter is much less common in conventional retail, it’s quite common in e-commerce. 

Does the customer return? Return visitors are, on average, incredibly profitable, and what is this customer lifecycle that everyone is talking about?

These are just some of the questions you’ll ask while trying to get the most value from your customers. Let’s see if we can provide you with some of the answers so that you can have better results.

1. Understand customer lifecycle

First, you must figure out whether you’re in a one-purchase industry. If you’re selling chess sets, these are the items that you sell just once, and your interaction with the customer is over. Still, if you’re not selling chess sets, furniture, musical instruments, or cookware, you must nurture a far longer relationship.

The majority of customers will approach you from the standpoint of curiosity. They’ll encounter your brand, check you out several times, and perhaps even shop around before buying from you. 

This is why you need to optimize your approach for different stages. This will ultimately lead to the best outcome.

2. Personalization

Customers love personalized treatment. They also love it when you save all of their previous information so that they have a quicker checkout process.

For instance, on a video game marketplace like Steam, you can save your payment info and purchase a matter of a few clicks. Also, you’ll get highly targeted suggestions (games similar to what you’ve already purchased/played).

Customers don’t want to be distracted by items they’re not interested in. The only way to know what interests them is to study them carefully.

3. Don’t insist on registration

The majority of people hate having to register to make a purchase. Ideally, you want them to register since you can develop a higher level of personalization, get them to subscribe to your newsletter, etc. 

Having to register before buying is one of the biggest reasons for a high shopping cart abandonment.

However, you would greatly benefit from registered users, so you might want to consider incentivizing registered users. Start a point system or introduce special privileges. This will also help with your community building. So, while you want to incentivize it, you don’t want to insist on it.

4. Start using a CRM tool

Knowing your customers is a prerequisite to building a great relationship with them. A tool like CRM (customer relationship management) is designed for this purpose. It’s a centralized database of all previous customer data and analysis tools strong enough to turn this data into actionable information.

Now, while there are a lot of criteria when choosing a CRM tool, a list composed by Techopedia shows how to easily choose between them, with reviews of some of the best. Even if you don’t pick one of the platforms from this list (which you should do), you must do your research. This way, you’ll develop a reference point and understand exactly what you want.

5. Become better at upselling and cross-selling

It’s much easier to convince a person to increase their purchase than to make someone visit the store. Once they’re already there, they might as well spend some more. Still, these upselling and cross-selling offers need to make sense to work. 

The bottom line is that you need to understand what your customers are doing on your page. Registration and cookies are great ways to do so; just make sure you do the latter completely legally.

You may also want to give people a chance to wishlist items. This way, you can notify them when there’s a discount, which will benefit everyone.

6. Become better as post-sale follow-up

About 80% of all your profit comes from just 20% of regular customers. Moreover, they say it’s five times less expensive to convince a person to return than to convert a new customer. Moreover, according to some stats, the order value increases with each subsequent purchase, partially because of increased trust.

Some will return on their own (even without any kind of follow-up). If your UX is decent, they’ll want to do business with you again.

Still, why not be proactive about it?

Send them an email with a new offer, thank them for their purchase, or tell them they’ve qualified for some special program. Everyone loves attention, and everyone wants preferential treatment. 

7. Analyze your shopping cart abandonment

What makes people leave your e-store without making a purchase? You need to answer this serious question to improve/upgrade your business model. 

Most commonly, the complicated checkout process or a lack of guest checkout drives people away (a topic we’ve already covered). If not, it’s either an unexpected shipping cost or a limited number of payment options.

Also, not all abandonments are permanent; sometimes, buyers want to check if your offer is the best on the market. 

Just bear in mind that while these statistics indicate a potential problem, the truth is that your customers may have a different experience. This is another reason why gathering customer feedback is so important. 

8. Reward loyalty

Give your customers a reason to return to your site. Sometimes, this can be as simple as not wanting to allow their points to go to waste. The way this works is simple – you reward them with many points they can redeem for a discount in your store for each purchase.

The incentive this creates is so powerful that people might be willing to look past the fact that, even with the points, the discount may not give them a better price than one of your competitors. The idea of wasting points activates FOMO, automatically winning the case for you. 

9. Start a referral program

You don’t have to wait for a customer to become a brand ambassador to bring others in. Why not give them a financial incentive to do this right away?

The biggest challenge is organizing this so it’s not prone to abuse. You see, you need to give rewards upon the first purchase of this new customer, not as soon as they register. Otherwise, a malicious customer could just mass-register to exploit the system.

In the long run, a referral program is always worth it, even if the rewards are hefty. 

10. Watch out for friendly fraud

Not all customer reactions are going to be positive ones. Some of your customers are out there to defraud you. This is the problem with friendly fraud – no account takeover will set off your alarms. Your customer uses their password, account, and financial information via their device. It’s just that they’ll play naive later on, and you have no way of knowing whether they’re honest. 

There are two things you can do to stop friendly fraud. First, you need to start using the right tools. Modern tools are so great at spotting signs of friendly fraud (unusually large purchases, purchases from a category they’ve never visited before, etc.) that they may even give you a head start.

You also don’t want your return policy to be too lenient. 

The customer journey doesn’t start and end with a purchase

Just because someone bought something from you doesn’t mean this is their first interaction with your brand. Just because they’ve already paid for the product/service doesn’t mean they’re done with your brand. In other words, you need to observe the customer journey as a whole and figure out the best way to get the most value out of your customer base. Driving new customers is important, but working with your current base is also incredibly lucrative.