Selling as a direct-to-consumer brand brings a lot of benefits to the table. You get complete access to your customers all around the world, bypassing wholesalers, distributors, and third-party platforms completely. So you must create a great content plan, integrate it into your marketing campaign, and deploy engagement strategies on social media channels to garner attention.
But all of your efforts would be in vain if you don’t retain your customers.
✔️ American brands lose up to $83M due to bad retention strategies.
✔️ Acquiring a new customer is 5 times costlier than retaining an existing one.
✔️ Loyal customers buy 67% more than new ones.
✔️ This leads to them being the sole reason for 80% of a brand’s profits.
✔️ Converting an existing customer to a loyal one has a 70% success rate.
✔️ Products and customer experience together inspire brand loyalty amongst almost all millennials.
Customer retention strategies contain a variety of tactics that help you have your customers coming back for more. But loyalty programs take the cake.
Loyalty programs are the major source of retaining your customers by providing them a personalized, enhanced user experience every time they visit your eCommerce store. After all, it is known that 50% of millennials (the biggest buying power in the DTC community) shop from their favorite brands and prefer to remain loyal.
So, how can ensure your loyalty programs do provide the gratification that your customers need to keep coming back to you? Enticing them is the key, especially if you’re a new brand launching in a market with a heavy influx of competitor traffic.
Here are some easy ways you can begin!
🏅 Reward Programs
Running regular reward programs for customers will make them feel happier, more satisfied, and loyal to your DTC businesses. Reach out to them via the app, on their inbox, or send push notifications through texts to let them know that you wish to reward them for shopping at your store. Rewards can include exclusive discounts, premium services, free trials, free samples of new products, and more.
📦 Subscription Discounts
Subscription services are ideal if you’re running a DTC business. Even though all subscription services nowadays follow the ‘no strings attached’ rule as their customer policy, your subscribers are less likely to drop off before their subscription period gets over. To entice your revisiting customers, offer them discounts on repeated subscriptions. This will definitely have them coming back for more.
🗣️ Referral Campaigns
Ask your loyal customers to refer your brand to their friends, family, and other connections. You could make it a happy deal for them by offering them reward points or free products for each referral they make.
🎁 Redeemable Benefits
You can also hook your customers by allowing them to harvest redeemable points in-app or on the website. Based on an order they make, you could add to their profile some variable redeemable points which can be used to shop online for ‘free’ whenever they want!
📸 Featuring Loyal Customers
UGC content is truly the best tool to retain AND attract new customers. By featuring your loyal customers, their user journey, customer story, and feedback (after seeking their permission of course), you can have them coming back for more as you let them know just how much they mean to your business.
Retaining customers and converting them into loyal business relationships is a gargantuan task that causes all of us to break a sweat. But if you build your foundations strong, keep your customers’ user experience simple and engaging, and provide quality services, your business is not far from becoming a successful one!
