13 Best Customer Retention Strategies for eCommerce Stores

The 13 best customer retention strategies for eCommerce stores are: learn more about your loyal customers, form a customer advisory board, run customer-centric email campaigns, stay in touch with your customers, build a brand on social media, educate customers about your product, have an onboarding program, run a loyalty program, use gamification, optimize your website, offer more delivery and return options, give excellent customer support, and invest in conversion rate optimization. This article explains each one and groups them by the job they do.

Are you struggling to retain customers in your online store? Well, you are not alone. Customer retention is the ability of a business to keep customers from defecting. It includes every activity a business uses to earn customer loyalty, and it is one of the best ways to grow recurring revenue.

This article owns the strategy list. For the marketing channels and the retention rate formula, read customer retention marketing. To build a full plan with metrics and a framework, read how to build a customer retention strategy. If customers are already leaving and you need to find out why, read how to solve common retention problems.

Why is customer retention important for eCommerce?

Businesses lose a lot of money when customers go to competitors. In its 2016 study Digital Disconnect in Customer Engagement, Accenture Strategy estimated that the cost of customers switching due to poor service is $1.6 trillion in the U.S.

At the same time, the chance of selling to an existing customer is much higher than the chance of selling to a new prospect. Your existing customers already bought once, so they know your products, your delivery and your service.

An eCommerce business must invest in both customer acquisition and retention if it wants to succeed. A successful business keeps working to build a happy customer base.

What are the 13 best customer retention strategies?

Strategies 1–2: How do you get to know your customers?

1. Learn more about your loyal customers

You must know your loyal customers and keep improving your products and services so they keep coming. Find out how they behave when they visit your online store. How much do they spend? How often do they come to the shop? Answer these questions before you launch any marketing or loyalty program.

Most marketers use the RFM model to learn more about their customers. RFM is an analysis tool that describes consumer behavior with three quantitative measures:

• Recency: When did the customer last buy? A customer who bought a week ago is more likely to buy again than one who bought last year.
• Frequency: How many times does the customer buy? Some customers buy once and never come back; others shop with you often.
• Monetary value: How much does the customer spend when they shop?

In the RFM model, you rate each customer on a scale of 1 to 5 for each measure. The most valuable customer has the highest score in each category. Nexus by Omniconvert calculates these segments from your order data and names them Soulmates, Loyal, New, Promising, About-to-Dump and Breakups, so you can see both your best customers and the ones who are starting to leave.

2. Form a customer advisory board

A customer advisory board is a group of customers who meet to advise company executives. The board gives guidance on business strategy and helps the company find solutions to problems it faces. The objectives of a customer advisory board (CAB) are:

• To gather more information about the market.
• To have customers who act as brand ambassadors.
• To create a clear marketing message for the target segment.
• To validate new product ideas and build a clear product roadmap.

A customer advisory board makes customers part of your business. They help you understand how your products benefit the final consumer, so you can make your brand more distinctive and more preferable to customers.

Strategies 3–6: How do you stay in touch with customers?

3. Run customer-centric email campaigns

Email marketing helps you keep existing customers and market your business at the same time. Customers are more likely to open and click your emails when they feel personal, for example when you address the customer by name. Always send a thank-you email to customers who shop at your store. Here is how to make your email marketing campaigns more successful:

• Survey your customers. Ask questions that help you personalize what you send. For example, if you sell wedding garments, ask whether customers are shopping for their own wedding or for a relative's. On-site surveys or a chatbot can ask these questions in a friendly way.
• Send at the right time. Many people open emails during typical work hours. Send early enough that your email is among the first things customers see when they go online, and test the timing for your own list.
• Keep emails clear and mobile-friendly. Use plenty of white space, because it improves readability. Make sure your emails look good on a mobile device, where many customers read them.
• Encourage replies. End with a call to action or start with a clear request. Keep the email brief and straightforward so the reader understands what you want.
• Segment customers by purchase history. Customers differ in how much they spend and how often they buy. Know how each segment behaves before you write its emails.
• Celebrate special occasions. Be the first to congratulate customers on a birthday or anniversary. Redbox, for example, used to send customers a birthday email with a free one-day DVD rental.

4. Stay in touch and appreciate the relationship

If you want more loyal customers, you must build customer relationships. Do not assume your customers will keep buying. If a frequent customer stops buying, make an effort to check on them, for example with an email about new deals or offers. Here are some ways to stay in touch:

• Send personalized emails about new developments, such as a product launch or a special offer.
• Write newsletters about your products and services and share them regularly.
• Invite customers to a workshop or seminar that you hold.
• Talk with customers on social media platforms, and reply to their comments and questions. Always stay positive and open.

In Nexus, customers who are starting to drift away sit in the About-to-Dump segment, which you can send straight to Klaviyo for a win-back flow.

5. Build a brand on social media

Social media is a standard marketing channel for U.S. companies, as Statista's data on social media marketing adoption shows. Your customers spend their leisure time on these platforms, so build a strong presence where you can engage with them.

• Use hashtags, mentions and direct comments to follow what customers say about you.
• Have a social media team that responds to customers' questions and comments.
• In a larger business, encourage senior staff, and if possible your CEO, to be active on social media. This helps customers trust your business.

Online engagement also teaches you what people like and dislike about your business. Nike is a well-known example: the brand has used Twitter (now X) to answer customer questions and Instagram to inspire and motivate its customers.

6. Educate your customers about your product

Not every customer, especially a first-time buyer, knows your products well. If you sell a new product, your main job is educating customers about the product. Create content that explains how to use it and what the benefits are. When customers understand what they bought, they are more willing to buy again and stay loyal.

• Explain product details simply. Use language customers understand, and be precise.
• Choose an approach for each segment. Some customers prefer a written guide; others learn better from a video tutorial.
• Create a blog. Use it to explain your products and how to get the most from them.
• Hold webinars. Online webinars let customers ask questions and give you feedback about your products.

Strategies 7–9: How do you onboard and reward customers?

7. Have a customer onboarding program

A customer onboarding program guides your customers to learn more about your business and the products you sell, which increases their loyalty. Building one takes planning:

1. Define the goals

   Set clear goals that fit your business plan. Assign subject-matter experts and a project manager to oversee the program.
2. Map the customer journey

   Use customer journey mapping to find what new customers need to learn, and when.
3. Create the content

   Build a learning course or other content that teaches customers about your products.
4. Make it interactive

   Add quizzes, puzzles and graphics to keep customers engaged.
5. Test, then launch

   Edit and test the program with real customers before you launch it.

8. Implement a customer loyalty program

Loyalty programs may seem like an old way to retain customers, but they still work. When you launch a loyalty program, you give customers a reason to come back to your store. Common loyalty program types include:

• Exclusive deals for loyal customers
• Exclusive lifetime membership
• Discount coupons
• Cash-back offers
• Gifts for first-time shoppers
• Reward points

Include any of these in your program, and your customers will soon be coming back to buy again. Before you launch, consider these factors:

• Make sure your business can afford the program.
• Set loyalty goals first. They help you choose the right program. For example, your goal may be to bring more customers back with coupons and discounts on bulk purchases.
• Choose personalized rewards that make customers appreciate your brand.
• Give a dedicated marketing team responsibility for running the program.

9. Leverage the power of gamification

Gamification adds game mechanics to your marketing. Examples of gamification in marketing include randomized giveaways and spin-to-win promotions. It is a less-used technique, which makes it worth trying.

Gamification works on a reward principle: every customer who takes part gets a reward for what they achieve. Ask customers to act in a way that earns the reward. SkullSplitter, for example, built a reward program that gives customers points for interacting with the brand on social media, reviewing products and buying.

Strategies 10–13: How do you fix the shopping experience?

10. Optimize your website for user experience

Your online store should be easy to navigate. A good eCommerce platform, such as Shopify or WooCommerce, gives you many of the built-in features you need. Work with UX and UI designers on navigation: a UX designer makes the site work the way it should, while a UI designer designs how it looks. Both roles help you build a user-friendly store. To improve user experience:

• Make the website easy to navigate, and use exit pop-ups to reduce cart abandonment.
• Keep checkout simple and optimize your site for better conversion rates.
• Reduce the number of steps a customer must complete, and keep forms short.
• Make pages load fast.
• Make sure the site works well on mobile, because many customers shop on their phones.
• Show quality, up-to-date content to reduce bounce rate.

11. Provide more delivery and return options

Customers shop online because they want products delivered to their door with little effort. Make the experience easy: offer faster delivery and flexible returns. For example, offer a one-day shipping option for customers who need their order quickly.

Amazon is the best-known example of using delivery options to improve customer retention. It offers choices such as same-day and one-day delivery in eligible areas, and locker or pickup-point delivery for customers who do not want a package left at home. You do not need Amazon's scale to apply the idea: give customers more than one way to receive their order. And for customers who feel they bought more than they need, a free returns option helps them trust you with the next order.

12. Offer excellent customer support

If you want to retain customers, give them the support they need. Once customers trust your support desk, they will want to come back. Many customers stop buying from a business after one bad experience with its support team, and many judge your brand by how fast you respond. Decide on your multichannel customer support strategy and set up a team to run it. To improve support:

• Communicate clearly when customers ask for help.
• Practice active listening, so you answer the real question.
• Empathize with customers, so they can explain their problems freely.
• Use respectful, positive language. When a customer is angry, stay calm.

13. Invest in conversion rate optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate is the share of visitors to your site who take an action, such as buying, filling out a form or adding an item to the cart. It shows how well your website serves your customers, and CRO is the practice of improving it.

Omniconvert Explore helps you understand what customers do on your online store and make it easier to use. Explore combines A/B testing, website surveys and personalization, so you can ask customers what stops them, test a fix, and show returning customers content that fits them.

Which customer retention strategy should you start with?

You do not need all 13 strategies at once. Use this process to choose:

1. Analyze your retention KPIs

   Look at repeat purchase rate, churn and Customer Lifetime Value, and compare them with your goals.
2. Find what does not work

   Look for the source of low retention. For example, one product may cause dissatisfaction and a high churn rate in one customer segment.
3. Match the strategy to the cause

   If you do not know your customers, start with strategies 1–2. If customers forget you, use 3–6. If they buy once and stop, use 7–9. If they leave after a bad experience, use 10–13.
4. Monitor and adjust

   Track the same KPIs and adjust the strategy as often as needed until you find what works for your store.

Frequently Asked Questions