Truth be told, repeat customers are the bread and butter for eCommerce businesses. You could have new customers streaming in every day, but if your die-hard customer loyalty fan and are leaving like a leaky cauldron, you might as well shut shop.

Don't believe us? Look at the following eye-opening statistics:

• Pareto 80/20 principle: According to Fundera, ” 80% of your future profits will come from 20% of your existing customers,” so investing in marketing, sales, and communication strategies for your existing user doubles up as a sound financial decision.
• Costly affair: Research by Annex Cloud claims that ”Building a long-term business relationship with a new customer is 16X more costly than cultivating the  loyalty of an existing customer.”
• Skyrocketing profits: Finally, data claims that a 5% increase in customer retention can lead to a 25% increase in profit or more.

Clearly, catering to repeat customers should be every eCommerce brand's short- and long-term goal. In this blog, we will look at how brands can boost their conversion rates for existing customers and enhancing customer loyalty by using tried-and-tested strategies.

How to Drive Better Customer Retention and Conversions: Top-3 Strategies
In this section, we'll look at the top-3 strategies for customer retention and showcase real-life examples of brands that have driven higher conversions.

#1. Focus on the right segment and create a buyer persona.

Hubspot suggests that segmenting your user base by personas can improve the shopping experience by making it more personalized and eventually drive conversions. By successfully satisfying your existing user base, your brand can leverage increased ROI, customer loyalty, and customer acquisition. Further research suggests that 80% of companies today use customer buying personas to improve their value proposition:

So what do eCommerce brands need to do to leverage the multi-purpose benefits of a buyer persona? For starters, to categorize the customers, you need a robust AI-powered platform that can capture critical user data such as buying behavior, personal preferences, demographics, etc., in real-time. Argoid’s cutting-edge personalized recommendation system does just that. Its powerful AI technology:

• Creates customer personas automatically based on the customer’s buying behavior
• Curates best products to buy for each user in various scenarios such as:
• Customers wanting to repeat the purchase: The engine showcases products to buy based on repeat buyers.
• Customers who wish to continue shopping: Oftentimes, customers have the intention to buy a product but end up forgetting all about the ‘original intent’ due to multitasking and/or opening tens of tabs simultaneously. They might start browsing a product only to forget about it later on. But what if the product in mind re-appears when your customers open the e-commerce site the next time they visit it? It would be brilliant, right? This kind of contextual shopping allows customers to literally pick up the shopping experience from where they left it off, without any hassle or added effort. This, in turn, can boost sales and improve customer loyalty.
• Multiple scenarios: In addition to this, there are countless scenarios that eCommerce marketers can leverage to their advantage on the website such as “Based on your browsing trends,” “Best in shirts,” “You may also like,” “Wondering what to buy?”, and so on and so forth.
• Here are a few examples of in-depth eCommerce buyer personas for a skincare brand for your reference:

The learning: To cater to your 'whale' customers (the repeat customers who bring 80% of the profits), you need to leverage the power of real-time data and intuitive AI tools to drive a hyper-personalized user experience. The data extracted from analytics and heatmaps can throw light on important metrics such as the most profitable channels as well as the customers who can bring maximum value to your business.

#2. Offer perks, incentives, and rewards to loyal users.

If you think you can keep your loyal customers engaged with a ”one-size-fits-all” generic marketing strategy, think again. As per Annex Cloud, 56% of consumers improve their opinion of a brand that offers personalized rewards.

This is where segmented email marketing and personalized push notifications come in handy. In fact, according to research, a staggering 80% of businesses rely on email marketing for customer retention.

Here's an example of a tailor-made email from Forever 21 that ticks all the boxes for on-point personalization. It offers the customer inciting discounts, provides personalized product recommendations through the section ”What You Love,” and highlights the benefits of shopping such as free shipping, etc. towards the end:

You can also drive target users directly via personalized push notifications to boost user engagement on the platform and increase sales, monetization, and CTR. Here's an example of a customized push notification campaign by Amazon that targets users with the right messaging at the right time:

At the end of the day, remember that your e-commerce app serves as a treasure trove of invaluable user data that can be used to create a personalized user experience that's super-fueled with actionable data.

The learning: Personalized marketing has emerged as an industry-standard to boost user engagement and drive conversions; it is no longer a nice-to-have. The idea is to 'go personal' with your retention strategy (pun not intended) and wow loyal users with customized offers, rewards, etc.

#3. Understand the gap for low conversions with A/B testing.

To understand what’s working and what’s not, you need to do A/B testing of your marketing initiatives. It will help you to understand why your customers are churning in the first place so that you can pivot your strategy and boost its effectiveness.

Here's a real-life example of an eCommerce landing page where the target group comprised of people who needed loans. The brand conducted A/B testing of the CTA button on the homepage to understand which variant would perform better:

• According to the results, the 'Submit' button fared well as it sounded more reliable and welcoming as opposed to Apply,’ which implied that the prospect could be rejected.
  
  The learning: eCommerce brands in particular need to invest in an A/B testing tool to analyze what their user base is liking (or disliking) with respect to their marketing initiatives, which includes emails, push notifications, website pages, etc.
• Wrapping Up
  
  There are thousands of ways to boost your customer retention. There is no templatized or standard approach. It all depends on your brand's strategic business goals, type of product, type of user base, competitive landscape, etc.
  
  That said, eCommerce brands looking to scale their operations, maintain a hold on the market share, and cater to their existing as well as expanding audience should invest in the right AI-powered tool to optimize their operations as well as sales, and boost customer happiness, enhance customer loyalty each time the customer hits the 'Buy Now' button.
  
  If you are unsure about how or where to begin, connect with us at and let's talk about how Argoid's AI-driven product recommendation system can cater to your eCommerce customer retention and growth needs.

FAQ's on rewarding loyalty to improve conversions

How to Drive Better Customer Retention?

A hassle-free user experience is crucial for every eCommerce store. Businesses often lose customers due to poor customer experience. If you don’t retain your customers, your business will lose a lot of money. Providing great customer experience is just one of many customer retention tips.

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Does personalized marketing ensure customer loyalty?

Personalized marketing can be used to boost engagement and drive conversions; it can also ensure customer loyalty. If you 'go personal' with your retention strategy and wow loyal users with customized offers, rewards, etc. you can definitely ensure customer loyalty.

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What is the connection between A/B Testing and low conversion rates?

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A/B testing is the process of comparing two versions of a web page, email, or other marketing asset and measuring the difference in performance. You need to do A/B testing of your personalized marketing initiatives. It will help you to understand why your customers are churning in the first place so that you can pivot your strategy and boost its effectiveness in turn improve conversions.

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