It’s hard enough getting a customer to buy from you for the first time… So how do you get repeat purchases from your eCommerce customers?
If you increase repeat purchase rate by 5%, you can potentially increase your profitability by up to 95%!
Most eCommerce stores spend the majority of their marketing dollars on driving cold traffic and converting new customers.
But did you know that 40% of the average online store’s revenue is generated by only 8% of its customers?
When you launch, and as you grow, of course you need to attract new customers. But many ecommerce businesses would grow faster and more profitably by focusing more effort on customer retention.
(A.K.A you should try to increase your repeat purchase rate!)]
Here’s my top 3 tips to increase repeat purchases in your online store
What’s the average repeat purchase rate?
According to Shopify, the average repeat purchase rate for ecommerce is about 27% for first time customers.
However, once a customer returns to make a second purchase, they are 45% more likely to return again for a 3rd purchase. The fourth time a customer returns, the odds of them buying again jump to 56%!
So how do you get there? How do you give yourself the best chance of increasing your repeat purchase rate?
Step 1: Customer Onboarding
What the heck is ‘customer onboarding’ you might ask. Yeah, I hate jargon too. I promise I won’t do that to you too often!
Customer onboarding means – welcoming your brand new customers and sharing some content with them that is designed to help them have the best, most successful experience using or consuming your product possible.
Making sure your new customers are really happy and satisfied MUST BE the first step to increasing your repeat purchases.
In fact – providing a great first experience is absolutely critical to your bottom line!
Because 84% of customers now say that their experience is EQUALLY important as the product!
And further to that – companies that focus on providing a great experience actually grow 4-8% faster than those who don’t.
This customer onboarding thing can be done using your email marketing program.
My favourite platform to use for this is Klaviyo.
You want to include at least 3-4 emails in this campaign (don’t worry, you’re not sending them all at once!).
Within these emails, you’d welcome them to your brand family and thank them for their order.
You could include some kind of customer case story or cool video that helps to reinforce the new customer’s purchase decision, or that inspires them and keeps them anticipating the arrival of their new purchase.
I recently purchased some supplements online and the first email I received included links to two informative articles that were really relevant to my situation.
You want to anticipate any customer service moments.
For example, an email that’s scheduled to go out after the order should have arrived, asking ‘Is everything OK?’
The main goal with these emails is to roll out the red carpet to your new customers and make them feel really special. Hopefully ensuring they absolutely LOVE your stuff (ie priming the pump ready to ask them to purchase again!)
Step 2: Ask for a review
Once you’ve taken a brand new customer through the above post purchase sequence and you’ve made them feel really special and appreciated, then what?
You probably want to ask them to buy something else right about now. BUT hold your horses, you’re not ready for that just yet!
The next thing you want to do to increase repeat purchases, is to ask for a review.
We all know how influential social proof can be when it comes to growing sales. So it’s important that you ask your new customer, who is hopefully really happy with your product AND your awesome customer service, to give you a review!
The best way to do this is to automate it using the fabulous Klaviyo.
I love this app so much because customers don’t have to click back to your website or log in to leave a review. They simply need to reply to the email and Klaviyo will post it to your website for you. It even knows precisely where to put the reviews on your website!
The other cool things can do is to add a dynamic feed of product reviews on your Google Shopping feed. This kind of social proof has been proven to increase your website’s conversion rates, so you definitely want to employ this strategy!
Step 3: Time to sell!
OK your leash is off now – NOW you can go and offer these new customers something else to buy!
WARNING: Do NOT simply add these customers onto your email newsletter list! This strategy will fall flat if you are simply relying on your email newsletter to entice your new first-time customers back for a repeat purchase.
To entice your new customers back to buy again, you want to sell to them AFTER you’ve completed steps 1 and 2!
You want to automate this process to get repeat purchases from your first-time customers.
Why is this important? Because, if you can increase loyalty (ie repeat buyers), you immediately become a much MUCH more profitable business.
It costs much less to get an existing customer to buy from you again, than it does to convert that customer in the first place!
TOP TIP: Add an additional three sales emails to the above Post Purchase campaign.
Just make sure you remember to leave enough of a time-lag between the last customer onboarding email and this first sales email, to allow for your Review Request email to be sent from Stamped.
The three sales emails you include here should all make the exact same offer. That is, you introduce an offer in the first of the sales emails, and then reiterate it in the subsequent two emails. (Follow-up works guys – you’ll always sell more if you follow-up!)
For help on how you present this offer and what other content you should include in this campaign, go ahead and download my free template!
Get the Ecommerce Growth Pack
Download this ‘Scale My Ecommerce Store’ Growth Pack and get INSTANT access to our top 5 Ecommerce growth resources and tools.
