customer retention strategies
Customer retention strategies are focused on retaining existing ones. Getting new customers can be expensive in today’s market. It’s more profitable and time-efficient to keep the customers you already have.
In this blog post, we will talk about 22 effective customer acquisition strategies for 2025.
According to Salesforce (2023), 73% of buyers want to have more personalized interactions. This means you should stop selling in a way that doesn’t fit all people. Instead, make sure your products meet the needs and wants of each customer.
Here are some customer acquisition strategies for personalization:
We think the “Complete Your Look” function is a great example of personalized suggestions. When a customer adds an item to their cart, suggest other items that would go well with it to make their shopping experience better.
Soi Paris does this beautifully. We can infer that Soi Paris uses a combination of product recommendations and personalized offers to enhance the customer experience.
As author and digital marketing expert Kevin Stirtz says:
“Every contact we have with a customer influences whether they’ll come back. We have to be great every time, or we’ll lose them.”
That means personalize every contact with customers to build strong customer relationships. You can start to make support conversations more personal by starting personalized emails with their names in all your email correspondence.
For more personalized service, we suggest that you answer customers’ questions through a live chat pop-up or in-app message. Based on what the customer does, you can set up live chats or in-app texts to happen.
For example, if someone spends more than ten minutes on a product page, you might set up a live chatbot to ask if they have any questions about the item they are seeing.
Live chats and in-app texts can be started manually or automatically by following a set of rules. You can set rules based on details about visitors and their behavior. It such as the current page, the amount of time spent on the site, the number of views, and more.
People are willing to pay a premium for the ease and flexibility of modern shopping. As a small business owner, you can differentiate yourself by offering exceptional convenience. Here are some of our customer retention strategies to make your business more convenient:
Always offer 24/7 support availability:
Customers don’t want to work around your plan; they want to work around theirs. That’s why you should make your business more accessible, such as support 24/7 availability.
Additionally, it would help if you tried to be reachable by phone, email, social media, and video chat to make shopping easier for customers who have questions or concerns.
Simple online and mobile purchasing:
Making online and mobile shopping easy is one of the most important things that you can do to make things easier for customers. You have been making websites that work well on phones so that customers can quickly buy things to pick up or have delivered. Mobile sites should be quick to load, have clear calls to action, and be easy to get around.
Additionally, websites shouldn’t require extra steps like making users create an account, and they should provide many payment choices. You should accept major credit cards and digital wallet apps like:
Offer fast or free shipping:
You could offer to ship things faster for an extra fee, or you could offer to ship them for free but with a longer time. AlixPartners did a study and found that most U.S. customers are only willing to “wait a maximum of 4.3 days” to receive their orders. If you offer free shipping, keep this in mind.
Through customer segmentation, you can get a good idea of who your ideal customers are. These people are also called buyer profiles. You can see how people find, buy, and use your site or product in different ways by making user profiles. This helps you stay on task and plan your work.
Step 1: You can use digital systems like Contentsquare, Google Analytics, and HubSpot to check historical data.
Step 2: Then, you can use the right customer segmentation approach to make groups based on your personas.
Step 3: You can use segmentation data to make changes to your characters so that they better reflect the traits and behaviors of your ideal buyers.
Once you discover what your groups have in common, you can carefully customize people’s experiences and provide them with solutions that match their requirements.
For example, you could:
For example, Atom uses customer segmentation to make a retargeting promotional campaign for teachers and kids to get ready for school. Separate the emails you receive that end in “.edu” and let the people in that group know about a special offer just for teachers.
In e-commerce, customer onboarding is the most crucial step in getting new users started with a product or service. It creates a seamless customer experience and ensures long-term customer success.
Let’s use an example to make these ideas. The most popular one is the process of registering a user and making an account. We need to get some information from our new buyer so we can take a picture of them. This includes their phone number, email address, payment information, and more.
In reality, each flow depends on the structure of the online store (or app) and the business model. Here’s a simple example:
User registration:
Welcome email:
Like-minded fans and brand agents in a customer community can talk to each other. People use them for many things, like talking about your product, getting help from customer service, and chatting with other users.
Sephora’s Beauty Insider Community is a great example of a successful brand community. They provide a platform for beauty enthusiasts to share tips, reviews, and product recommendations.
Lucky for you, you don’t have to be Sephora to build a loyal community. In our guide to building a successful loyalty program community, we’ll show you how.
A simple way to get people to like you is to follow up with them. When someone complains or asks a question, no one likes to hear anything back. Respond to people as they shop so they feel like they have a relationship with you. This is also an excellent way for people to remember your business.
If a current customer buys something new or different, make sure they like it by getting in touch with them again. Say thanks to people who buy from you. Everyone wants to feel like they are being seen.
You can also find upset customers by following up with them after an unpleasant experience before they leave a bad review online.
With over 4.7 billion people active on social media, according to Hootsuite data. These platforms have become a powerful tool for businesses to connect with their audience.
A lot of businesses post about their products on social media. However, posting about what goes on behind the scenes can help potential customers feel more connected to your brand. Customers feel like they’re getting to know your business better when you show them how you make a product or a faster way to make a new window display.
Platforms like Instagram and Facebook Stories are perfect for sharing behind-the-scenes content.
Omnichannel customer service is all about making sure that the experience is the same and smooth across all platforms. That means the customer starts a conversation on live chat and then moves on to email. Finally calls customer service without any problems.
A Nielsen report found that 84% of people are more likely to stick with a brand that has a loyalty program.
With a loyalty program, you can offer points or benefits to customers. In return, customers redeem points for discounts, free products, rewards, or insider perks. The goal is to motivate repeat purchases and build trust between customers and businesses.
If you run a Shopify store, we recommend using BON Loyalty. This Shopify loyalty app offers a user-friendly platform to create and manage your loyalty program, with features like:
A great way to kickstart your loyalty program is by offering a discount welcome to new members. A simple welcome reward, like a discount or exclusive offer, can encourage sign-ups and foster loyalty.
For example, H&M offers a 10% discount on the next buy for new members of their loyalty program. It’s a straightforward and effective way to entice customers to join and start earning rewards.
Referral programs are a way to market your business by getting current or former customers to tell their friends and family about it.
Your company gives a reward to the first customer who brings in a new customer who buys something. These programs are a great way to get new customers and keep the ones you already have coming back.
You can find more ideas in our article, which includes 40 best referral program examples by industry.
Besides the loyalty program, you can launch subscription business models. It is based on the idea of selling a product or service to receive monthly or yearly recurring subscription revenue.
Especially if your store sells items like:
For example, Birchbox sends monthly subscription boxes containing two to six cosmetic goods from over 200 companies. Customers fill out a survey at the start to personalize their boxes, and they never get the same goods again.
Customers trust a brand when they believe in the company and its goods or services. Customers believe a business based on its image, how open and honest it is, how much it benefits them, and so on.
Be active & refine your presence on social media:
For businesses to build trust, it’s important to have a strong presence on famous sites like Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok. This means sharing high-quality content that is useful to your viewers on a regular basis.
For instance, if you run a clothing line, you could share fashion tips or ideas to show that you know what you’re talking about and love what you do. You should answer comments or reviews right away, whether they are good or bad. It shows that you care about your customers and are ready to listen to them.
Be authentic:
Say, if you mess up, you should admit it and say sorry. Do not try to hide it or give reasons. This will only hurt your image and make people not trust your business.
Tiered loyalty programs put customers into different groups based on how much they spend or how much they interact with the brand. Customers get special perks and rewards as they move up the tiers.
Most tier-based rewards programs have three levels:
To learn more about tiered loyalty programs and see real-world examples, check out our article “Tiered Loyalty Programs Explained & 7 Best Examples.“
Customer feedback is the views and information that customers give you about their experiences, how they see your goods or services, and what they expect from your business as a whole.
It’s the voice of your customers, letting you know they’re happy and making ideas. It’s basically the link between your business goals and the real experience of your customers.
We’ll talk about the two main ways to get good customer feedback often:
Surveys are by far the most well-known way to get feedback from customers. You can get detailed comments on problems you want to work on through a poll. Write questions that will get people to tell you about the problems your business is having.
You can also make surveys very easily with free tools like:
However, there are some problems with customer polls as well. People don’t like filling out long surveys, so they probably won’t answer if yours is too long or doesn’t make it clear right away how long it will take to finish.
To prevent this, make sure your polls are short and to the point. You should only ask questions in a feedback poll that you really need to know the answers to.
With feedback boxes, you can easily get feedback from your visitors without getting in the way of their shopping. They are one-question forms that you put on your website in a place that everyone can see.
You can get the feedback you want from polls, but feedback boxes can give you information you didn’t expect.
In a comment box, for instance, customers often report bugs and other issues with how they use a product. You can use this to find problems that you might not find in a more organized poll.
When Kissmetrics asked users what could be done to make things better, they used an open-ended question.
Sometimes, the best way to understand your customers is to watch what they do. We recommend you use heatmaps to visually represent how users interact with your website. They show you:
These tools help you make the experience better for users based on what the heatmap shows. If people get stuck on a certain page of your website, make it easier for them to move around on that page. Or, think about getting rid of or reorganizing areas to give your customers more value.
You can learn things about your visitors that you wouldn’t usually ask about—and your customers wouldn’t normally talk about—if you watch what they do to get feedback.
It’s not enough to have great goods or services these days if your customers don’t want to be a part of your experience. Customers now say they will only stick with brands that give them the experience they want. If they have a bad experience with your brand, they will go to one of your competitors.
In the image below are 9 steps to improve customer service. For more detailed instructions, we recommend you read the article by Forethought.
The act of sharing thoughts, details, or news with a customer before they need them is called proactive customer contact.
For example, you could let a customer know how a product is coming along or suggest a solution for their problem.
Don’t just sit there and wait for someone to complain. We recommend you use your tools on your own and write down any issues you find. Then, fix them before they happen. Making things easier for the customer will save you stress in the long run.
A fractured view of the customer is caused by different data sources spread across areas. It’s hard to get a full picture of who your customers are when data from CRM, marketing, and customer service software is kept separate. It gets hard to find new customers and leads.
That’s why all our above customer retention strategies will work better if you have unified data management.
Since customer information is already stored there, your CRM is a good place to start. It’s possible to use a specialized customer record tool, but if you’re starting out, a CRM is the easiest way to get started.
Statistics from Wisernotify show that 72% of customers trust a business more after reading good reviews and tips. That’s why you should integrate reviews and testimonials into your homepage, just like LaCroix.
We have an article with instructions on 14 ways to get more customer reviews.
You set a long-term goal when you know you want to do something in the future. Most of the time, long-term goals need more time, planning, or steps than short-term goals. A long-term goal is something that might take a year or more to reach, while a short-term goal is something that you can reach in less than a year.
Check out our blog for more customer retention strategies in the future.
Lindsey Nguyen is a Content Marketing Specialist at BON Loyalty, specializing in digital marketing and eCommerce. At BON Loyalty, she crafts content that empowers Shopify store owners to build and sustain thriving customer relationships through innovative loyalty programs. Her articles, often featured on the BON Loyalty blog, provide valuable strategies and insights that help businesses enhance customer loyalty and increase customer lifetime value.
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