How to Build Customer Loyalty For a Magento Store

How to Build Customer Loyalty?

What is your first priority as an eCommerce store? If you are like most business-minded people, it has got to be customer acquisition. But what happens after that? Say, you have had an outstanding marketing campaign that has brought you more customers than ever. That can’t be it. You don’t want customers every time you run a marketing campaign. You want your customers to come back.

You want customer retention. More specifically, you want your customers to keep coming back to your Magento eCommerce store. That is exactly what this article will talk about. Read on to find out how you can develop customer loyalty for a Magento store and keep those customers coming back for more, especially in these times where the customer is overburdened with options to choose from.

So how do you do that? How do you retain your customers so that they remain loyal and always come back to you? How do you build long-lasting relationships with your customers that result in maximizing your sales and profitability? We will give you the answer to all these questions. But first, let us talk about what customer loyalty is, and why it’s important to invest your effort and time into building it.

What Exactly Is Customer Loyalty?

In layman’s terms, customer loyalty is the act of preferring the products and services of the company that you are “loyal” to over those of competitors. For the business, it is creating and maintaining a positive relationship between the organization and its customers.

Loyalty ensures that the customer is willing to forgo reduced prices and promotions at other stores simply because of the level of trust he or she has built with the company. Customer loyalty also shows you that loyal customers who purchase little are better than one-time customers who purchase a significant amount of products from you.

In essence, customer loyalty is when the customer feels obliged to return to your eCommerce store every single time, because of your customer retention strategies.

Why Is Customer Loyalty Important For Your Magento Store?

You know what customer loyalty is, and you know now that it is important. But can’t one do without it? You are already running an eCommerce store, maintaining it, marketing it, working on SEO, bookmarking, etc. You are already doing so much. Shouldn’t it be enough? When will it be enough?

If you are getting traffic and also conversions, then why is loyalty so important? In theory, if it was this simple, it wouldn’t be that important, in the circumstance that you have outstanding conversions.

But the reality is, that it isn’t that simple. Marketing and SEO can only take you so far. For an eCommerce store, you don’t just want customers to come and try out your store, you want them to come again and again and prefer your store rather than any other.

Regardless of the industry, you cater to and the size of your organization, you need customer loyalty because even a small percentage of customers that frequent your store, can make a sizable contribution to your sales and revenue. Here is a list of reasons why customer retention and loyalty are important, how they can affect your business, and help it.

1.   Repeat Customers Means More Revenue

Research has repeatedly proven that repeat customers are nearly ten times more likely than first-time customers to make a purchase at any given eCommerce store. Once a customer comes again and makes a purchase again, their chances of returning yet again keep increasing as they keep coming. Also, repeat customers also spend significantly more than those who are making first-time purchases. If we talk numbers, then even a 5% increase in loyalty or customer retention can take your profits up by 50% on average.

2.   Customer Retention Reduces The Need For Customer Acquisition and Related Costs

It costs way more to acquire new customers than it does to retain existing ones. According to statistics, it costs about five times more. No one has extra money to throw away. So when you learn that a small increase in customer retention can bring you a much bigger drop in your costs, I guess you know what you want to do. It is obviously harder to retain first-time customers because they don’t know you yet.

So spending on marketing and sales at this point to get you satisfied, returning customers in the future would be a good decision. Then later, with loyal customers, you don’t have to worry about marketing, because by then, your customers know and trust you and once they’re satisfied, they prioritize your products anyway.

3.   Customer Loyalty Means Free Marketing

Customers love to talk about their purchases, and satisfied customers love to give recommendations. This is why loyal customers translate into positive word-of-mouth marketing. When customers are happy with their purchase, they are willing to talk about it, write positive reviews, and even give testimonials.

This can be word of mouth, online reviews, or even social media mentions. This can, in turn, motivate friends and family and new potential customers to try out your store. In fact, companies that encourage referrals and have formal referral programs boost their sales by more than 85% than the companies that do not.

Tips for Retaining Customers and Building Customer Loyalty For Your Magento Store

Customer loyalty doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It has to be earned. Customers don’t just randomly think that the other place has a promotion but I must purchase from this one because I am a loyal customer. In this fast-paced, competitive market, you need to devise specific strategies to develop customer loyalty and be able to retain them by building long-lasting mutually beneficial relationships.

Moreover, Magento makes it so much easier for you by giving you maximum flexibility as well as control over your eCommerce store. It actually facilitates you in building loyalty by giving options that help you in getting repeat customers and retaining them. Here are some tips on how you can do that:

1.   Automated Email Marketing

Magento lets you set up professional dynamic automated email campaigns that use live data taken from your Magento eCommerce store. Moreover, make personalize these emails to be able to build a lasting relationship with your customers and ensure that they see more of what they want to see.

Set up automated thank you emails and newsletters based on their personal shopping choices. If you convince them that you care about what they’re interested in, they will be more likely to purchase from you again.

At this point, we do want to add that automating email marketing can be challenging for novice store owners. However, if you hired web designers specializing in Shopify or Magento for designing your store, it’s best that you ask them for help. This is because they have various technologies that can help automate marketing emails as well.

2.   Store Credit

Store credit can be beneficial but not if it’s only issued sparingly. Be generous with offering refunds to your customers and they will graciously accept it as store credit. Store credit is a way of ensuring that the money the customer has spent stays within the company and the customer gets an exchange instead of a refund without it being obvious.

3.   Return Merchandise Authorization

Magento allows you to let your customers submit RMA requests and be able to return their purchases by shipping them back to you. The more convenience you will offer your customer, the more chances you have of having them purchase from your store again. Customers always trust the store that lets them return and exchange without any fuss.

4.   Targeted Promotions

Have you ever received a promotion on something that you left in your cart? Encourage your customers to return and purchase with personalized and targeted promotions solely based on abandoned carts and shopping history. With Magento Commerce, you can even build segments easily on the basis of your customer base. Always exceed the expectations of your customers so that they keep coming back to you for more.

5.   Reward Programs

A well-designed loyalty and reward points system is an extremely effective customer retention strategy. Your loyal customers deserve something for their loyalty and what’s better than a reward program? Reward points boost customer engagement as well as motivate your customers to keep purchasing from your store. They enable you to show appreciation for your loyal customers.

Furthermore, Magento lets you base your rewards redemption on various factors such as order history, conversion rate, and account balance. A good rewards program enables you to allow your customers to earn points not just by making purchases, but also by engaging in other ways, such as subscribing to the newsletter, referring products, following your social media pages, and even by writing reviews for your products.

6.   Coupons

Create custom coupon codes for different social media marketing campaigns and email campaigns. Magento lets you design various coupons and incorporate custom codes into them before sending them out to your customers.

7.   Customer Service

You have to offer excellent customer service in order to retain customers. Statistics show that customer service is what brings back 75 percent of your customers. Half of them simply leave because they haven’t been satisfied with the service they received.

Hence, it is not just important for your website to be easy to navigate and organized, it is also necessary to be able to talk to the customer service team without any hassle and keep your customers satisfied. In today’s day and age, good customer service is when you go above and beyond the expectations of your customers.

8.   Newsletters

Build various newsletter templates beforehand so that it takes minimum time to create and send newsletters in order to stay in touch with and engage with your loyal customer base.

9.   Social Media Engagement

Engage with your customers on the social media channels you are on. Make sure you have an active social media presence and that your customers have subscribed to your page(s). Encourage them to like your pages and also share their personal shopping experiences with your eCommerce store.

You can also motivate any activity shown by them with incentives such as giveaways. Also, always take your customers’ feedback. A customer who feels heard and appreciated will always return to you even if he didn’t have the best experience.

10. Customer Referrals

Magento enables you to empower your customers by letting them get incentives for referring you to their friends and family, for instance, if they’re getting a new product. If you keep your customers happy they will always refer you more.

Some Magento Extensions for Improving Customer Satisfaction

Like Shopify plugins development, Magento stores can also vastly benefit by integrating various extensions available for Magento stores to improve customer satisfaction. Below, we are sharing a few extensions that are hugely popular amongst Magento storeowners to optimize the customer shopping experience and achieve greater customer satisfaction. So let’s check them out!

• Salesforce – This extension can offer access to cloud computing technology which helps reduce unwanted upkeeps. In addition, it is perfectly suitable for small as well as large-scale businesses across various industries. Not to forget, there are four different pricing plans available with Salesforce, and each plan delivers unique features that match your business needs
• Zoho – This extension will follow the entire sales funnel to improve the purchasing experience. There are blueprints available so that you can use them and manage the sales processes. There are different sales tools available to improve the sales percentage, while AI tools can be leveraged to track the sales and generate more leads
• Vtiger – With this extension, the Magento store owners can optimize the store and improve lead generation. In addition, it can help with inventory management through the synchronization of product details and pricing. Not to forget, it allows internal communication in your team for greater efficiency
• HubSpot – This extension offers a free plan with which can support an unlimited number of users. The Magento store owners can track the email engagement and automate the sales & marketing campaigns. In addition, there are bundle options available for different business industries (the pricing is different for every bundle)

In Conclusion

We hope the tips this article provided helped you determine how you can retain your customers and keep them coming back. Customer loyalty and trust are of major essence to your company if one of your goals is sustainable success. Customers that are loyal to you contribute quite significantly to your sales and profit and making a lasting connection with them only helps you in the long run.

These tips are pretty self-explanatory, but if you need more help understanding the world of Magento and optimizing your store to be able to build customer loyalty, you can always hire a Magento optimization services company or even a Magento customization company to help you.

Moreover, if this article convinced you of migrating to Magento or going for Magento integration services to connect your store with your third-party apps, you can always opt for an experienced Magento 2 development company to help you through the process.