Online shopping is becoming more and more popular and the number of e-consumers is constantly growing. At the same time, the number of online stores is peaking and the high competitiveness results in even higher costs of acquiring customers. Marketing managers are willing to accept the higher acquisition costs for consumers in the hope that they will come back or repeat their purchases in their online store.
Below we describe a few effective ideas, the implementation of which guarantees an increase in the repeatability of e-commerce purchases and, consequently, an increase in the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value).
1. Use marketing automation
Marketing automation tools are a must-have in today’s e-commerce. Solutions such as Edrone allow you to automate marketing messages sent via e-mails and text messages. Thanks to the integration with the online store, they allow for customer segmentation as well as sending personalized offers to various segments.
Marketing automation tools require basic knowledge and experience on how to create a customer journey (sales funnel) and communication at its individual stages. Their implementation and configuration is time-consuming but the business benefits are huge.
2. Adopt a subscription model for your sales
The subscription sales model is associated with VOD services such as: Netflix. Increasingly, it is used in online stores that offer everyday products, the purchase of which is repetitive, e.g. Sundose, which offers personalized vitamins regularly delivered to your home
Subscription sales is a very attractive business model that offers both the online store and customers a wide range of benefits. In the case of the store, it increases the customer’s value over time, while the consumer pays less per product or service.
3. Create a loyalty program
Many of us associate loyalty programs with petrol stations. For each refueling, we collect points, which we exchange for various types of prizes. Online stores also use this mechanism to increase the repeatability of purchases, e.g. ZOOPLUS, which rewards customers for purchases. Points can be exchanged for extra benefits or animal charity.
Loyalty programs, however, are not a very popular solution used in small and medium-sized e-commerce – they require a lot of money and time. An effective loyalty program involves the implementation of technological solutions and should last for a minimum of several years so that consumers can receive tangible benefits from it.
4. Get involved socially
The involvement of online shops in pro-social initiatives is becoming a standard in e-commerce. Store owners see more and more business benefits resulting from such activities. These are, among others: building an image of a socially engaged brand, increasing the conversion rate and increasing repeat purchases by consumers.
This trend is a consequence of research among customers who declare that they choose products of socially engaged brands more often. Regardless of whether there are philanthropic or business reasons behind the decision to support socially important ideas, it is worth keeping up with this trend.
The simplest solution that facilitates establishing cooperation with reputable charitable foundations is DonateWise. It is a tool that can be very quickly implemented in any shop from the e-commerce sector and does not require specialist knowledge or any extra expenses. The store owner himself indicates the amount of sales that he or she would like to donate to charity – most often it is 0.1% or 1% of the generated sales. For the stores with up to a 100 orders per month the tool is completely free. The solution is available in many online stores, for instance James Hawk.
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The above examples are solutions that allow you to increase the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) in an online store. Some of them can be used in any e-commerce (Edrone, DonateWise), some are dedicated to a selected group of products (subscription sales) or require a sufficiently large scale of business (loyalty programs). However, all the presented ideas have one common goal – to increase revenues in an online store.