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This blog post focuses on the category “Nurturing Customers”, as the second in a series of 4 blogs about the best marketing tactics to Acquire, Nurture, Grow, and Retain your customers.
Acquiring new customers is great but getting them to buy the second time is even better. A second purchase is a key step towards becoming a high-value customer. What’s more, it is significantly cheaper to get existing customers to buy twice than finding new customers altogether. In fact, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5-20%. Now is the time to build a relationship throughout their journey with your company, engaging them with relevant information at each stage. You want to actively move prospects through the funnel until the point where they become repeat buyers.
Easy-to-Implement Tactics to Nurture Customers:
#1 ABANDONED BASKET
eCommerce brands lose $18 billion in sales revenue each year because of cart abandonment. To gain back a significant part of that business, send automated emails to customers that started filling their basket but did yet completed the checkout process. Ensure the cart is automatically rebuilt when customers click on the link in the email. It’s a deal breaker when customers click on a “Go to Basket” link in an email only to find that their basket is empty.
Why implement this tactic?
Recover lost sales by reminding customers about items left in their basket or cart
#2 PRODUCT REVIEWS
Ask your customers to review the product they purchased (or key stages of the customer journey, if you are providing a service). This will provide you with valuable insights and improvement opportunities, but more importantly, it will show your customers that you care. Pro tip: Pre-populate the product review form with all relevant information. Any extra steps, such as asking the customer to login, will decrease the number of reviews.
Why implement this tactic?
Increase repeat purchase rates
Prevent customer churn
#3 PRICE DROP
Notify customers when the price of an item that they have been looking at has decreased. This is a great way of securing sales, because you know that they have already shown interest in the product at the higher price. Even a small price drop could nudge these customers to convert. It also creates a sense of urgency, as the item may sell out.
Why implement this tactic?
Increase revenue through additional sales
Increase customer engagement with newsletters, as price-drop emails are genuinely relevant and highly valuable
#4 BIRTHDAY GREETINGS
Send your customers a Happy Birthday message, over email or mobile, with a special gift as a token of appreciation for doing business with you. This can be a discount code, a free item, or even a personalized postcard in the mail. Regardless of how much (or little) customers have engaged with your brand in the past, everyone appreciates a personalized birthday greeting. In fact, birthday emails generate 5x more transactions than any other promotional messages and generate almost 2x the click-through rates.
Why implement this tactic?
Best performing campaign for re-engaging dormant customers
Build customer loyalty
#5 ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS
Birthdays aren’t the only reason to celebrate! Anniversaries, whether a significant milestone for your business or for your customer, are a great time to re-engage people. Sending an incentive or coupon during this time will capture their attention, without having to discount for the sake of discounting (as this devalues the perception of your brand).
Why implement this tactic?
Re-engage dormant customers
Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
#6 ANNUAL SUMMARY
Send your customers an annual summary email highlighting the key milestones in your brand relationship. It’s a great way to celebrate achievements and the impact they have made. For example, Lyft and Uber send out summaries of how many rides you have taken with them in total, what your most frequent locations were, and other fun facts. This tactic is especially effective for utilities, telco or subscription businesses, as it provides an opportunity to point out additional products and services that reflect their needs.
Why implement this tactic?
Increase customer engagement
Increase conversion rate on upsell products
Enhance customer relationship
#7 CUSTOMER JOURNEY ANALYTICS
Visualize the paths that customers take to complete certain actions, whether it is making a purchase, signing up to competitions, or downloading a whitepaper. Customer path visualization is an effective way to identify opportunities, as well as bottlenecks in the customer journey that are preventing them to convert. In fact, effective customer journey mapping results in an average increase of 54 percent in marketing ROI.
Why implement this tactic?
Enhance customer experience
Increase goal completion rates
#8 LIFECYCLE EMAILS
Guide your customers through the life cycle with a sequence of emails sent during key mileposts of the customer journey (after implementing Tactic #7, you’ll know exactly what those key mileposts are). So, if you are trying to encourage a first-time buyer to complete a second purchase, send them relevant resources, cross-sell or upsell messages, appreciation messages, new product alerts, feedback requests, referral programs etc.
Why implement this tactic?
Increase engagement
Increase product adoption
Decrease inbound calls to customer support
#9 OOOPS!
Mistakes happen to the best of us. Use your next mistake as an opportunity to increase your customer engagement by sending an apology email. Even if your customers did not spot the initial mistake, they will certainly appreciate the apology. However, it is not recommended to send an apology email if you sent the same email to the same list of recipients twice as that is a sure way to push people to unsubscribe.
Why implement this tactic?
Increase customer loyalty
Re-engage churning customers
#10 VIP CONTENT
Reward your most loyal customers with exclusive VIP content, offers, and even early access to sale items before official public release. This is a highly effective and simple way to recognize your valuable customers, as you always want to make sure that they do not feel taken for granted.
Why implement this tactic?
Increase customer LTV
Retain high value customers
#11 RFM(E) MODELING
Frequency of Engagement, as well as Monetary Value. Consistent monitoring of these metrics will ensure your customer nurture efforts are paying off. It will also allow you to stay on top of customer churn prevention activities.
Why implement this tactic?
Increase customer LTV
Decrease customer churn
Enhanced customer acquisition through deeper understanding the traits of high-value customers
While acquiring a customer is a milestone worth celebrating, it’s crucial to note that a customer’s second purchase is even more important than their first. If you do not nurture them, a first purchase could be a one-time thing only. And with it, you will be losing the chance at a loyal customer base and the revenue that comes with it. First-time customers have not yet formed a real connection with your brand, so it’s your job to carefully nurture them and create a strong customer-brand relationship. In short, keep delivering value so that they’ll buy again.
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