Today’s e-commerce brands face a unique challenge: their overabundance.
Customers can easily compare alternatives with a single click, making it difficult to build lasting relationships. When shoppers have endless options at their fingertips, how do brands appeal to customers who are notoriously non-committal, difficult to please, and even more difficult to keep?
With such steep competition and high customer expectations, retaining an e-commerce customer’s attention requires a white-glove, personalized approach.
The solution? Customer marketing - a strategic approach to help attract new customers while fostering relationships with existing ones.
Let’s explore what it entails and why it matters for your brands’ long-term growth and viability.
Customer marketing strategy strengthens customer relationships in a way that maximizes loyalty and retention while boosting brand advocacy. The ultimate goal is to turn customers into superfans.
Superfans are highly engaged customers who frequently make purchases, remain loyal, and have a higher lifetime value than average. As cost-per-acquisition (CPA) continues to rise, it has become more critical than ever for brands to keep customers engaged to stay profitable. Superfans have the potential to help brands acquire new customers with their heightened brand advocacy and influence.
Using superfans as advocates is just one piece of the puzzle. To truly drive sustainable growth, brands need a well-rounded customer marketing strategy that nurtures engagement and loyalty throughout the customer journey.
To fuel long-term growth and profitability for your e-commerce brand, your customer marketing strategy should engage the customer at most major touchpoints, improve the shopping experience, and campaign for brand loyalty.
Let’s dive into five strategies that can help achieve this:
Review programs and user-generated content (UGC) are far from novel ideas in e-commerce. Yet many brands often overlook the importance of a well-exexuted reviews program and its impact on engagement and long-term growth.
Online shoppers commonly make purchases without physically inspecting the product. They rely on just a photo and description, placing a high level of trust that the brand and product will meet expectations. A reviews program can help ease this uncertainty by offering social proof.
Rather than taking the brand’s word for it, a review program allows customers insights into how former or existing customers feel about their purchases and interactions with the brand. Reviews also create a sense of community in that customers can relate to each other on their preferences, opinions, and feedback on the brand or product.
The review program goes beyond trust-building. It provides the brand with valuable feedback that can inform personalization efforts.
Brands can use valuable, data-rich reviews with customer and product attributes to get hyper-specific with the shopping experience. For example, customers who indicate a specific attribute preference or leave reviews on a specific category can receive personalized recommendations or promotions based on their preferences.
The caveat is that while reviews boost conversions, they have the potential to impact site speed. Make sure your reviews add value to the customer experience without slowing down load times with efficient, intuitive, and turnkey designs that integrate well into your e-commerce platform.
Customers who have a positive experience with your brand and their purchases are much more likely to recommend your brand to friends and family members. This is considered organic referrals or the highly coveted effects of word-of-mouth advertising. Brands can, however, try to create a similar effect through referral marketing.
Referral marketing allows brands to actively reach out to customers and ask for referrals in exchange for rewards, such as discounts or gifts. For instance, after a customer buys something, encourage them to refer a friend in order to redeem their reward. This not only hikes up repeat purchases but also helps bring in new customers.
Referral marketing is not only effective but also economical. Instead of spending an ad budget to acquire one customer, a referral program can potentially bring in multiple customers with the same spend. Plus, when these programs go viral, the customer acquisition potential multiplies.
Referral programs also have the added benefit of enhanced loyalty and retention. They encourage a sense of community among peers who also enjoy the same brand. Referral programs create the potential for customers to have interactions with the brand through their day-to-day or social circle, even while not actively shopping.
Tip: To increase the chances of success, prompt customers to refer others when customer engagement is high, such as right after a purchase or positive review. Timing is key to maximizing brand advocacy.
To boost profitability, your brand needs to give customers a reason or incentive to level up their engagement. A loyalty program provides a clear and structured system that not only creates superfans but also encourages and increases the frequency of their desired behaviors.
According to a loyalty program e-commerce research, 72% of customers say they are willing to purchase from a brand more often if they are part of its loyalty program. Loyalty programs increase engagements, interactions, purchases as well as bolster brand reputation by showing customers that their loyalty is appreciated.
Source: Okendo
Avoid insignificant cookie-cutter loyalty programs by ensuring your loyalty program resonates with your unique customer base. The incentives should be enticing, the program easy to find, and the tiers straightforward. Earning incentives should be flexible and aligned with how your customer prefers to interact with the brand.
Consider rewarding for things like purchase frequency, purchase amount, writing reviews, or referring new customers. The incentives and rewards should also be unique and diverse, such as discounts, exclusive access to new products, early access to limited edition collections, in-person events and experiences, or free gifts with purchases.
Quizzes are an effective customer marketing tool that is often overlooked. While they might seem superfluous to the online shopping experience, quizzes can have profound impacts on conversion rates, brand reputation, product discovery, and the shopping journey as a whole.
They allow brands to give customers personalized product recommendations based on their answers to the quiz prompts, thereby tailoring the experience while guiding the customer through product discovery.
Here are some examples of interactive quiz questions:
Customers who opt into and complete your brand’s quiz are displaying a high level of engagement and interest. By offering them an interactive and entertaining experience, your brand has the potential to increase conversion rates with personalized suggestions tailored to individual customers’ preferences.
A quiz also serves to educate the customer and provide a guided tour of your product assortment. Customers may begin a quiz having no familiarity with any of your products but end a quiz knowing exactly what product is best suited to their needs and preferences. This not only increases awareness of your assortment, but also ensures customers have a high level of confidence that they are choosing the right products.
Surveys are crucial tools that help brands improve the shopping experience for faster growth and with the long-term strategy in mind. They identify friction points in the shopping experience as well as help brands gather zero-party data and customer feedback that can inform where the brand concentrates their efforts for improvement.
Surveys allow brands to strengthen customer relationships. A brand that asks for customer feedback shows trustworthiness, mindfulness, and consideration of the customer base’s experience and perspective. The brand is proving to customers that it intends to improve and keep their feedback in mind.
Every brand should consider implementing these three types of surveys:
Customer marketing strategies can look different for every brand. Check out these real brand success stories that highlight how different brands have used these strategies effectively.
The Beauty of Joseon is a skincare brand that recommends the full skincare routine to customers through a quiz. By asking about customers' concerns and preferences, the brand provides ideal product recommendations while also educating customers and enhancing product discovery.
This approach was especially effective for first-time customers and achieved an 8% conversion rate post-completion – more than double the sitewide conversion rate.
Source: Okendo
Dixxon, a specialty apparel company, introduced a tiered loyalty program to its customers. This allowed them to create an exclusive fourth tier for its superfans and strategically enhance the rewards and perks in accordance with tier levels. Loyalty customers now make up to six purchases, whereas non-loyalty customers make up to two purchases on average.
Source: Okendo
Known for its artisanal soft pretzels and Belgian waffles, the food brand Eastern Standard Provisions wanted to understand its customers on a deeper level. They strove to improve the customer shopping experience and refine its marketing efforts.
With the help of surveys, Eastern Standard Provisions learned that 38% of first-touch customers came from paid social and that the “high quality ingredients” claim was key selling point in their ad messaging.
Source: Okendo
Love Wellness is a supplement brand that provides non-toxic, non-irritating wellness products focused on women’s health. It pursued a tech stack revamp and consolidated its reviews platform provider with its surveys provider. In that, it prioritized a speedy load time for its reviews widget and achieved a 100% increase in order-to-review rate. with its new integration.
Source: Okendo
The Collagen Co. is a collagen supplement brand that sought to turn loyal customers into superfans through the use of a referral program. The brand allowed customers to receive a $25 credit for referring the brand to additional customers. After the launch of their referral program, The Collagen Co. achieved a 9.7% conversion rate and over 20 times ROI after the first 90 days of launching referrals.
Source: Okendo
While each customer marketing strategy can deliver great results on its own, combining them amplifies their impact. Here’s why integrating all five strategies leads to optimal success:
When your customer marketing tools - like reviews, loyalty programs, and quizzes - work together as part of a cohesive strategy, they tell a consistent story. This repeated messaging builds trust and awareness of the most important elements of the brand’s message.
Consolidation also helps save time and money by making operations more efficient, automatic, and simplified. Instead of working in and out of separate platforms, brands can work with one consolidated platform.
By having reviews, quizzes, surveys, referrals, and loyalty programs all exist in one place, you create a single source of truth for customer data. This unified data pool lets brands keep track of their customer profiles, reconcile data, improve accuracy, and analyze the customer base in a myriad of ways. With stronger analytics and improved accuracy, your brand can make better decisions and more easily achieve the goal of turning customers into superfans.
The benefit of employing each of these strategies is that they comprehensively improve the customer shopping experience from end to end. Each tool or strategy addresses a key point of the customer shopping journey and creates a focused and consistent message that puts the customer first.
With this enhanced and mindful customer experience, customers will have a better opinion of the brand and be much more likely to become loyal customers or even superfans. Consistency, reliability, and putting the customer at the center of decision making fosters customer loyalty for long-term success.
A successful customer marketing strategy focuses on the customer above all else. Instead of seeking revenue growth or increased profits, customer marketing prioritizes the customer experience with the understanding that financial results will follow.
By using these five strategies together your brand will build genuine customer relationships and create positive experiences that will build long-term loyalty, returning customers, brand advocacy, and sustained growth.
Ready to spend less on marketing? Learn how retention makes it possible!
Edited by Monishka Agrawal
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