How to retain your shoppers after the BFCM

All your e-commerce marketing strategies should now be targeted at getting maximum customers for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales.

Agreed! After all the previous sales numbers for these two days are impressive. Many e-commerce businesses rake in the moolah in these two days. But the issue is when businesses focus purely on acquiring new customers through the door and boosting sales while overlooking the importance of building a strategy to retain them for the long term.

You may have so many amazing plans focused on brand discovery and awareness for acquiring customers. But when the customers visit your platform, introduce them to not only the products but also to a holistic approach encouraging them to take a longer-term view of your brand.

Let’s look at some points on how you can retain your shoppers after the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales.

1. Send a thank you note

79% of the customers buy products from brands that understand and care about them. Show some love to your customers for getting in sales during the BFCM. Reach out to them via emails thanking them for their purchases. When in competition, it is always better to go that extra mile and see that your customers are satisfied. You can also ask for feedback regarding the shopping process during the sales so that their reviews get you enough fodder to improve the strategy for the coming year.

2. Introduce new customers to your brand

Many new customers may have hurriedly purchased from your online store without knowing the entire range of products available or your store’s USP. Onboard them in a proper way until customers become genuine advocates of your brand.

Apps play a crucial role in retaining customers just after onboarding them. Send your customers app push notifications informing them of customer loyalty programs, recommending them products of their choice, and engaging them constantly with offers. And you don’t have to spend a fortune to build an app. The no-code app builder Swipecart uses your existing online store to create apps with ease. With an app, you strengthen your customer engagement tactics and retain them long after the initial euphoria of the BFCM dies down.

3. Build solid customer loyalty programs

E-commerce businesses are latching on to customer loyalty program trends. The U.S. alone has around 4 billion loyalty memberships. How do these programs benefit e-commerce businesses to retain customers after the BFCM sales? Simple, people now have more time to spend on the internet searching for products and comparing their prices. Relying solely on discounts during BFCM sales will not suffice to stand up against massive competitors. This means you have to offer good prices on your products and also an incentive to lure customers back into your store.

Build a solid e-commerce loyalty program to keep your customers engaged, so they will shop more often, buy in higher quantities, and thus interact with your brand more frequently. Tiered loyalty programs based on the customers’ shopping activities help you identify and segregate customers and maximize conversions.

A good start to your loyalty program is building a mobile app for your store. Through this, you can offer app-only discounts and points redefining the buying process and making online shopping feel seamless. Swipecart, a no-code app builder, makes this transition of converting your online store into a feature-rich app smooth, fast, cost-effective, and easy.

On your app or online store emphasize exclusivity through loyalty programs such as-

This will encourage tremendous word-of-mouth publicity and build trust increasing conversions and overall customer lifetime value. Also, the customer profiling got from such loyalty programs generates rich data which can be used to boost other marketing activities such as personalization.

4. Personalization

Research shows that customers have a strong viewpoint on personalization. 72% of them expect businesses to recognize them as individuals and know their interests. What’s so special about personalization? Customers associate it with positive experiences of being made to feel special.

How then do you achieve personalization for your customers?

Personalization is effective at driving repeat engagement and loyalty especially soon after the BFCM sales when you don’t want customer excitement to wane off abruptly.

5. User segmentation

The backbone of personalization is user segmentation. Segment your customer list based on different parameters such as

There’s virtually no limit to the ways you can segment your customer list. You can choose to combine parameters to create new segments and find out which works best to retain customers. Create separate push notifications and emails for different user lists. Analyze the results to recognize loyal customers who have the potential to stay with your business for a long period of time. It’s important to know which customers are the most valuable for your business. Once you identify them, you can use personalization tactics, and loyalty programs to let them know they are valued.

6. Merge experiences

Don’t assume your customers are going to visit your website, stay on it, and purchase from it. They like the convenience of switching the shopping channels that best suits their needs. Some may browse through the products in your local store while purchasing them from the app. Others may prefer “click-and-collect” wherein they shop online and pick up the parcel in your physical or network store.

To make your customers’ shopping seamless across all your shopping channels, merge customer data to a central database. So, even if your customer shops in the physical store, the points are accumulated and added to be visible in every other channel. They can redeem those points when they shop in your app, the next time.

7. Targeted content

You need to prod your customers to shop again from you. If you feel that your customer is inactive after the BFCM shopping, it is a good time to send out targeted reminders emails, push notifications, SMS, or sponsored ads with a special offer to entice them to re-engage with your brand. Let’s see the various ways you can win back customers-

The re-engagement process allows your brand to appear in front of customers so that they engage with your store. By regularly getting in front of them, you prevent them from drifting in the first place.

8. Create a mobile app for your online store

We cannot stress enough the importance of having a mobile app for your online store. This isn’t something that you can act on later. When each of your customers is on their mobile, why don’t you reach them where they are instead of them coming to you? Create feature-rich apps for your store with the no-code app builder Swipecart. Your app is ready and running in a couple of days.

Businesses that operate in a highly competitive market need to put in extra effort to nurture customer loyalty. A mobile app allows you to do that increasing repeat business opportunities as well as improving referral rates. Mobile apps can improve customer satisfaction and retention at a low cost.

Wrapping Up

Customers who have shopped in your store on the BFCM sales are extremely valuable. Don’t let them slip from your hands. Work on the above tips to keep them coming back.

It’s important to engage customers with your wider offering and demonstrate why they should keep coming back. Introduce them to new communication channels such as social media platforms and an app. The no-code app builder Swipecart serves this purpose well. It easily converts your e-commerce store into an engaging app so that you retain your shoppers after the BFCM!