What causes customers to choose one brand over another?
You can consider many factors, such as the price and quality of the products, but one often stands out: their relationship to the brand. A strong relationship with your customers is a powerful asset since it increases the chances of repeat purchases and lesser spending on prospects.
A customer’s loyalty to a brand influences their purchase decisions. Attracting a new customer takes five times as much as retaining one. With how cost-effective it is to retain a customer, establishing long-term relationships with each buyer is crucial for your brand’s success.
This article discusses customer relationship strategies you can adopt to help you grow your eCommerce business.
8 Customer Relationship eCommerce Strategies
Several eCommerce businesses and brands have used the strategies below to develop longer and stronger customer relationships. These eCommerce strategies entail improving your internal systems and eyeing the more extensive customer journey.
Consider the following if you’re looking for ways to improve your customer relationship strategies.
- Practicing transparency
Practicing transparency works for the simple fact that being honest builds trust. Customers have never complained about businesses providing too much information on their services. As an eCommerce business, you can practice transparency with your customers by informing them of their order status.
As Forbes Councils Member Jake Rheude highlights, once customers complete the checkout process, they want to know everything about the status of their orders and when they’ll arrive at their doors.
Be open about your policies and procedures, especially in handling customer data. You can also practice price transparency to help customers know exactly what they’re paying for, letting them know you don’t have any hidden fees that might catch them off-guard.
- Ensuring consistency
Maintaining consistency helps customers trust your brand more, and it also helps boost the customer journey.
An important area where you must ensure consistency is your eCommerce website. Slow-loading pages or sudden error messages during payment frustrate your customers and make them doubt your credibility. Additionally, it confuses customers even more if your mobile application doesn’t match your website.
Consider working with IT experts or trustworthy eCommerce platforms in the Philippines to create a seamless eCommerce experience for your customers.
- Managing expectations
Consistency also touches on managing your customer’s expectations. They want to receive the exact item they saw on the product page of your eCommerce store, and differences poke a hole in your customer relationship.
The eCommerce industry continues to evolve, and customers are willing to wait for fewer and fewer days until their orders arrive.
A study from Lazada found that four in ten customers (43%) expect eCommerce stores to provide next-day deliveries. Furthermore, customers found it so necessary that almost two in ten (17%) would abandon their purchases if the store didn’t meet their criteria.
These statistics may call for an overhaul of your logistics process, which may be a stressful experience. But such changes to your internal operations could be worth it if it meant increasing your customer’s lifetime value.
- Engaging with customers on social media
Social media offers numerous benefits to your eCommerce business, such as increasing the chance your products go viral and generating more sales. It’s also a platform for close interactions with your customers.
A conversation with your customers on social media is an effective way to show off your brand. Online interactions also help you cultivate a more authentic brand, which allows customers to connect with you much better.
- Listening to your customers
Social media is an avenue for audience listening—keeping your ears open to what your customers say about your brand clues you in improving your eCommerce strategies. - Asking for their feedback
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Asking for feedback lets your customers know that you genuinely consider what they think about your products, the buying experience, and the points where you can improve on.
A Lazada study found that product reviews from previous customers are essential to a new customer's buying decision. So, encourage your customers to be honest about your brand as part of your customer relationship strategies. Ask for their feedback through surveys, ratings on your eCommerce platform, or customer reviews.
- Developing loyalty programs
A widespread customer retention strategy is creating a loyalty program to reward customers shopping from your store over and over. Experts expect loyalty programs to grow in CAGR of 13.8% between 2022 and 2026.
Effective loyalty programs will ensure you have a paying customer for years. For example, you can have a rewards points program where customers earn points after every purchase or a VIP privilege program where you offer exclusive deals and discounts.
Regardless of loyalty program type, you can't afford to make it seem an afterthought. A loyal customer is invaluable to your business's long-term growth, so investing in a loyalty program will be worth it.
Create Long-Term Customer Relationships
There are many perfect ways to create a loyal customer. That said, you should always have an eye toward building long-lasting customer relationships.
Find pockets f opportunity in your eCommerce strategies to provide more value for your paying customers, such as sending a message about the status of their orders or replying to a comment on a social media post. These practices will save you more money in the long run than acquiring new customers.
Building valuable customer relationships takes time, so you should establish your eCommerce strategies as soon as possible. Start making a simple and effective loyalty program with Rush. Contact us now to learn more about it!
