Once you’ve successfully persuaded someone to make a purchase from your site, it’s much easier to lead them back to buy more than it is to convince a new customer. That means you should be optimizing your site and your outreach efforts to encourage users to reconvert, becoming customers again, and ideally forming a long-term relationship with your brand, increasing their lifetime value so that they’re a continual source of revenue. Here are six tactics to employ, both on your website and off of it.
1. Offer Returning Customers A Discount
This tactic predates the Internet, but it’s stuck around for good reason. Few things are more likely to get a customer to reconvert than the opportunity to save money on another purchase. And since people are incentivized by savings, that purchase might be something the customer wasn’t even considering purchasing. The question, then, is when to offer the discount. If your product has a defined life cycle, it might be best to reach out with the offer a week or so before the product is due to be replaced. This keeps your brand fresh in the customer’s mind so they don’t end up switching providers out of laziness. If your product doesn’t have an expiration date, you might want to re-engage them sooner, maybe within a month of delivery. At that point, they’ll have had time to use your product and ideally have formed a positive association with your company, and you can reward their newly found loyalty with a few bucks off.
2. Use Specifically Targeted Email Marketing
Email marketing campaigns have the potential to be customized to a wide range of different customer personae, and one factor that you ought to be considering when stratifying your campaigns is whether a person has already patronized your site. An email that includes a strongly worded encouragement for the reader to take an action (in this case, becoming a repeat customer of your business) is more likely to accomplish your goals. When planning email campaigns for existing customers, you don’t need to be as informative or educational about your product, unless it’s new or you’ve made a change. Focus on fresh reasons for readers to visit your site again, not on the same tactics that brought them there in the first place.
3. Promote Contests And Giveaways
People love competing for things, and they love getting free stuff. A contest of some type or the promise of a free product is a direct way of luring in consumers who might otherwise be one-and-done purchasers. If you can set the conditions of the giveaway so that contestants need to be registered for your email list or need to enter other information that can better help you market to them, you stand in a better position to reconvert them even if you don’t require a purchase during the actual contest.
4. Create A Loyalty Program
Every company worth its salt has a loyalty program of some kind. You can appeal to people’s instinctive drive to be part of a group, and the incentives you offer will encourage them to continually escalate their purchases to reach new tiers of rewards. Try not to invest too much in material rewards or discounts, though, as this can decimate your profit margins. If you can lure people in with the promise of status, or the opportunity to pre-order products before they launch for a wider audience, you’ll essentially earn their loyalty for free. You should also have unique email campaigns for loyalty members.
Your goal should be to make every customer a repeat customer. That starts with creating a quality product, but the real trick comes in the later stages. The techniques above can help you form long-lasting, profitable relationships with your customers.
