How to Keep Existing Customers Happy and Buy More from You ECommerce Articles | January 2 Wholesale Steelers Shirts , 2008 Businesses are spending fortunes for aggressive marketing campaigns to acquire new customers. This is nice and okay, as long as the existing customers are not forgotten. Make sure that the customers that you already have are getting the same attention and rewards as new customers, keep them happy and they will reward your efforts with loyalty and increased spending with you Wholesale Steelers Jerseys , instead of your competitor.
Introduction
It is not a secret that it is much harder and more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain existing ones. Retaining customers is not a passive thing and many businesses fail to do it right and sometimes to do it at all. To prevent decline of their business, companies often increase their efforts and spending by expanding existing customer acquisition strategies. Such increase is often connected with increased cost for the additional volume and also tends to become less and less effective the more you do it, creating a vicious cycle that can lead to the failure of the business when expenses reach a point that profits get reduced to nothing and then turn into losses that will take away from the businesses substance and equity until it is too late to salvage what is left and change course.
Spending time and money on retaining existing customers and leverage the relationship that was build over time to increase their spending with you instead of somebody else is much more profitable.
Doing a good job with that also impacts indirectly your customer acquisition efforts in a positive way Cheap Steelers Hats , because happy long term customers of yours are more likely to recommend you to their friends and colleagues than customers who have no relationship with you and only moderate or not happy with you at all.
1. Customer Service
It is only possible to retain a customer who is a happy customer or a customer how has no other choice (which is one of the reasons why a monopoly is a bad thing for everybody, but the company who has it). Forget about the customers that are impossible to make happy. They are in the minority and their number is insignificant. If you think that it is in the double digit percentage range, have a closer look at your marketing and advertising campaigns and what sales is doing. Customer expectations that are too high to meet are most likely the result of false promises made during the conversion process.
While presenting ones product and company in a good light is understandable and not a problem Cheap Steelers Hoodies , are exaggerations of key elements of your product or service that are critical to your customers doing more harm than good. You might get the initial sale, but you will probably lose the customer as soon as they can away.
If you did all of this wrong, good customer service will not help you very much to make a customer happy and retain him.
Good customer service can do exactly that in cases where something is not clear to the customer and requires explanation or clarification. Nothing is 100% perfect all the time and errors and misunderstandings happen. This is usually not the end of the world and can be fixed easily without letting it escalate. Good customer service is critical in those cases to resolve the issue quickly and without having the customer go through a complicated and lengthy ordeal. Doing a good job here will turn an upset customer into a loyal customer and even evangelist for your company and your services.
2. Usability of the Site Make it easy for new customers to find their way through the site and get them to convert. At the same time keep in mind the existing customers who already purchased from your site and know their way around. Make it also easy for them to get what they want quickly.
2a. Customer Profiles
Allow users to create a profile to store address and billing information. This sounds obvious in this day and age Cheap Steelers Shirts , but there are still plenty of sites that do not provide this capability. Allow customers to store multiple shipping addresses with their profile. It is not unusual that people use their home and work address depending on the things they order. Also keep in mind that people buy more and more gifts for friends, family and business partners or customers (B2B) online, not just for Christmas Cheap Steelers Jerseys , but also other occasions, including birthdays.
2b. Expedited Checkout Process
A multi step checkout process that is simple and easy to follow for a new customer is great, but can be annoying for an existing customer where you have already everything needed to complete an order on file. Even if you pre-fill every page in the process Terry Bradshaw Hat , it does require several clicks too much to get the customer to "place" an order. Show one page with the existing and default data from previous purchases or defaults the customer specified and have links from there to pages to change individual parts like shipping address, billing information, payment method Jack Lambert Hat , gift options etc. Shipping method and coupons should be editable right from that screen. This will allow the customer to complete an order in a single step, if the defaults can be used for the current order.
2c. Save for LaterWish ListsGift and Wedding Registries
People don't always buy immediately something, even if they are interested in the product. Make it easy for them to save it and come back at a later time to complete the purchase. Let people create wish lists and gift registries like wedding registries if your products or services can be sold as gift. You do not only get more business from the customer Javon Hargrave Hat , but also have the potential to acquire new customers. Why is that? If you allow customers to create those lists, also provide the means that the customer can notify other people about this list to purchase items for him from that