Most stores – both online and offline – can’t survive solely on one-time customers. Encouraging repeat purchases prevents you from having to constantly reach out to new potential clients. It’s often simpler to convert people who have already shopped at your store because they’re already familiar with your company, plus their purchase history and behavior can give you extra information to work with. To help you build loyal customers, here are a few tricks that you can use.

Consider setting up a loyalty program

This is the most effective way to encourage return customers. It involves encouraging customers to create an account and then rewarding them with loyalty points every time they make a purchase. Once they earn enough loyalty points, they can spend these to access freebies and discounts. The value of the points is usually 1% to 5% of a purchase. There are companies that can help you set up a loyalty points scheme. 

Send out personalized promotions

Another way to get people coming back is to send out targeted promotions – usually by email – to select customers. These should only be customers who have opted-in to receive promotions. Different types of personalized emails could include:

• Cross-sell recommendations: This involves recommending products related to their previous purchases such as recommending a guitar case if someone bought a guitar. 

• Replenishment reminders: This involves sending out reminders to buy a product again after a certain period when it’s likely to have been used or expired. Examples include pet food, moisturiser or bath bombs. 

• Price drop alerts: Notify a customer when a product they have previously purchased (or one they’ve previously looked at or put in their shopping cart) has dropped in price.

• Birthday gifts: If you have a customer’s birthday information, consider sending them a voucher code on their birthday as a reward.

• Winback offers: If a subscriber hasn’t purchased anything in a long time or hasn’t opened any of your emails, consider sending out an exclusive ‘winback’ offer to entice them to revisit your store.

Stay engaged on social media

Many previous customers are likely to follow you on social media if you advertise your social media channels well. You can then post continuous content and remind customers that your store exists every time they log onto social media. Questions, polls and memes can help encourage conversation – by interacting regularly with your followers, you may be able to foster a greater urge to support you by continuing to buy from your store. You can also post promotions on social media, but don’t make your feed too promotional. 

Maintain high quality customer service

Customers will only keep returning if the customer service is continuously high quality. Work with a reliable forwarding company that can ship your product to customers within the agreed deadline. Make sure that you also have a customer service agent available to respond to queries or complaints, and make sure you have a clear return policy. Of course, your products also need to be consistently high quality and well-packaged to avoid damage.

Keep your inventory fresh

While some stores are able to keep selling the same products for years on end, most sellers benefit from constantly introducing new products to keep customers excited. This might include limited edition seasonal products and new permanent additions. Send out emails to subscribers introducing these new products.