5 Ways to Turn One-Time Valentine’s Day Shoppers into Loyal Customers

As with many other holidays, Valentine’s Day brings in a lot of first-time shoppers for many online retailers. But what you should be focusing on should be ways to turn them into loyal customers. During these peak seasons, you probably have your online marketing game kicked into high gear, right? These new shoppers probably caught wind of one of your campaigns while they were hunting for the best prices or searching for a unique gift idea. That’s great.

But that’s not why you’re here.

You’re here because you want to know how to turn these one-time shoppers into repeat customers once the holiday is over.

Why is Customer Retention So Important?

In online retail world, not all customers are created equal. In fact, your e-commerce business is more likely to rake in the big bucks if it focuses more on retaining existing customers than on wrangling up new ones.

Believe it or not, acquiring new customers actually costs 7 times more than keeping current customers around. And the likelihood that a one-time customer becomes a loyal customer increases by about 54% after the second purchase. Plus, a Bain & Company study reported that customers that come back year after year spend an average of 67% more than first-time shoppers.

In other words, there’s a direct correlation between how long a customer has been shopping with you and how much money they spend. So, while attracting new customers is always good, your work shouldn’t stop once they’ve made that first purchase. Instead, you should think about how to get them to come back for a second, third or fourth purchase.

That’s why you need a clever post-peak season strategy to make sure those first-timers stick around for more.

5 Strategies to Turn One-Time Shoppers into Lifelong Customers

This Valentine’s Day, give your e-commerce business a little love — by turning those one-time-only customers into ones that’ll keep coming back. The best way to do this is to make your online marketing strategy as thorough as possible. That means retargeting on all touchpoints.

Remember: online shopping isn’t just limited to your online shop. It’s about each and every way you make contact with your customers. So let’s go over the onsite and offsite strategies you’ll need to turn those one-time Valentine’s Day (or Cyber Monday or Christmas) shoppers into loyal customers for your online business.

1. Collect Emails from Anonymous Customers with Discount Popups

One of the first steps to retaining customers is to identify who they actually are, and that often involves collecting an email address. But in this day and age, pretty much everyone’s inbox is constantly overflowing, and the last thing anyone really wants is another item they have to either open or move to their trash folder. So, you when have it make it worth their while.

A great way to do this is to offer a discount to anyone who signs up for your email list through a pop-up on your homepage. First of all, you’re giving this new customer a reason to make that first purchase. Second, this new customer is now going to receive regular emails from you about new products, promotions, sales, etc., making them even more likely to buy again.

2. Use Smart Recommendation Campaigns for 404 Pages

In e-commerce, 404 Error pages are an unfortunate inevitability. When these peak season customers find their way to these dead ends on your site, you want to be sure that you guide them back to the main attraction while easing their frustration.

One great strategy is to turn those cringy 404 pages into pages that showcase different recommendations for these new visitors. Luckily, you can easily do so with a number of Segmentify algorithms. For example, you can remind them of which products they last visited or show them some “highlights of the week” based on your most popular products.

3. Activate the “Smart Offers” Algorithm

In order to to get recurrent customers, you need to convert first-time visitors into first-time buyers. From there, these customers have the potential to become second or third-time buyers. Activating the Segmentify “Smart Offers” algorithm on your home page enables you to track the activity and interests of every visitor the second they land on your site. From there, it can give your first-time visitors relevant product recommendations. This makes the shopping experience highly personalised, and it’ll drive your customers to keep coming back for more.

4. Send Personalised Emails

One of the most effective ways to improve customer retention is to drop extremely relevant messages into your customer’s inboxes with the help of some advanced behavioural tracking. Not only do personalised emails help you keep in touch with your customers, but they also make your customers feel like you truly understand them.

You can use email to remind customers of items left in their shopping cart, send them complementary products or discounts right after they make a purchase, and keep them in the loop on price drops and sales. A targeted email campaign can also remind customers who haven’t visited your website for a while that you exist. You can suggest popular products based on their browsing history or send them a little 10% off deal to increase engagement. In short, personalised emails are great ways to retarget one-time customers.

5. Implement Personalised Push Notifications

Lastly, you can use personalised push notifications — on both web browsers and apps — to help turn those one-time shoppers into repeat customers. The benefits to personalised push notifications are similar to personalised emails, but it all happens a lot faster.

You can use push notifications to link directly to relevant products for a specific user based on their browser history. This will entice customers to act instantly on the notification, thus driving increased conversions and reminding dormant customers that they like to shop at your store. With personalised push notifications, you’re putting what the customer wants right in their face. It’s a total instant gratification game. Plus, it’s an efficient and effective marketing strategy for you. They take less time to prepare than emails and deliver substantial results.

Customer Retention is All About Personalisation

With online retail, you don’t make that face-to-face connection like you would in a brick-and-mortar shop that might turn a first-time customer into a loyal customer. But e-commerce personalisation plays the role of an offline shop assistant. So you have to connect with them differently. You have to personalise their online shopping experience.

Think of the 5 online marketing tactics above as ways to connect and identify with your new customers much like you would if you were making the sale in-person. If you make these one-time holiday shoppers feel welcome and understood with some personalised messaging and retargeting, then chances are high you’ll soon be able to call them loyal customers.