Understanding Customer Retention in E-Commerce

What are the basics of customer retention, and how can you learn more about the techniques used to make it all work in your favor?

About Customer Retention

Your relationship with your customers is a very important one. Taking proper care of your customers is a critical issue that you need to approach carefully because losing favor with a customer means that you are probably not getting their business again for a long while if ever.

Customer retention is all about making sure that this does not happen – keeping customers interested in your business and making sure that you do not jeopardize your relationship with them. To do this well, you need to understand what they want and how you can use that to keep them engaged with your business instead of your competitors.

If you retain a customer, you are keeping them around for another potential purchase. A customer who has had a good, flawless experience with your company is far more likely to visit you again and make another purchase, then another, then another.

How Customer Retention Works

A large part of customer retention happens through software. Customer retention software ensures that brands can listen to their users both directly and indirectly, then engage with customers at a personal level to make sure that important clients are not driven away or alienated.

These tools also allow you to identify patterns in customer behavior that might point towards issues you need to solve, such as problems with getting customers to buy from you consistently. This might also allow you to get a closer breakdown of how customer loyalty works and what is causing particular kinds of customer behavior in the first place.

Your business’ retention rate is based on the number of customers who actually become repeat buyers or show some kind of connection to your business. The more customers you can retain, the more of a customer base you have available – people you can remarket towards.

How to Tackle Customer Retention

The challenge of boosting customer retention is a tough one, but there are many ways to make it possible. For example, this Verfacto article breaks down some of the ways that customer retention can be handled and some of the ways that you can improve your own retention rates as a business.

Either way, you need to understand that retention is more than just tracking. You are trying to understand what makes your customers react both positively and negatively, then using that information to influence how you interact with them on both a personal and wider-scale level.

For example, some customers may respond poorly to being treated in a certain way, or you may notice that a lot of customers leave when they visit a specific page. This helps you find areas of your business identity that are turning people off, allowing you to do a deeper dive into what the problem might be.