How to Combine Holiday Promotion Customer Retention with Loyalty Marketing in Order to Grow Engagement & Incentivize Repeat Purchases in 2021
You likely know that the holidays not only bring good cheer but also big potential for a boost in your company’s revenue. With a larger volume of potential customers primed to make bigger, more online generous purchases, optimizing your online shop for conversions gives your annual sales an additional boost.
But your conversion rate optimization (CRO) efforts need to go beyond just getting sales. It’s much more worthwhile to focus on customers who consistently engage with your brand and pay for your products all year round - which means continuing to communicate and build relationships with your customers long after the holiday season is over.
As you consider post-holiday campaigns and your marketing strategy in 2021, keep in mind that one-time purchases are not the only conversions that matter. In fact, a loyal customer base brings many more benefits when it comes to creating sustainable business growth, expanding the reach of your brand, and improving revenue.
Go beyond traditional CRO - optimize for customers instead of sales.
How to boost customer loyalty in 2021 after previous year holiday conversions
#1 Develop metrics that reflect your business and customer loyalty goals
The first step to improving your bottom line is understanding your data, but there is often a difference between pure conversion rate data and customer loyalty data. You likely have a lot of data already, but you need to organize and hone in on the most important customer loyalty KPIs for your particular business.
A few examples of relevant customer loyalty KPIs are:
- Customer purchase frequency
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- New vs repeat ratio
- Conversion rate by time period
- Average time between purchases
- Number of VIP customers
- Churn rate reduction
- Increases to basket size
- Reduction in customer issues or complaints
If you’ve already developed these KPIs in the past, compare their performance across this year. Or if you’re newly setting these for 2021, consider both how you can achieve them, as well as measure them in future years.
#2 Follow up with engaging content
Your website content is one of the most important resources in gaining loyal customers and growing your business. So in order to improve customer loyalty among holiday-specific conversions, your content has to be crafted with the goal of relationship-building as opposed to selling.
Focus on truly getting into your customers’ heads and understanding their emotional needs. Learn more about what motivates them, what their personal interests are, and try to determine why they chose your brand over your competitor.
For example, if they’ve just purchased a new electronic device such as a smartphone, send them more information about how others have enjoyed using the same product. It’s also a good idea to ask for their feedback about what they liked and didn’t like, as well as make sure they concretely understand how to ask customer service for help (this last part in particular ensures they also don’t return the product!).
#3 Determine where you can improve your customers’ shopping experience
Your previous promotions worked well enough to get the first conversion, but you need to make sure your website and marketing strategy are primed for getting further conversions in the future, which means continuing to give them a seamless and delightful shopping experience - even after the holidays.
One of the most important elements that can’t be overlooked is going through your check-out process and looking for areas of friction. Do your customers have to click through multiple pages to get to their cart? Are there too many steps between choosing a product and paying for it? Do you offer a wishlist option to save their favorite products for later? The less energy they need to put into buying your products, the more they’re likely to become repeat customers.
You might also consider if you can optimize areas such as:
- Site speed
- Mobile-readiness
- A well-designed navigation system
- Easy access to customer support
- Offering more payment options
Boost your customer loyalty with a seamless shopping experience
#4 Segment your audience and created personalized content
The best way to stay top of mind in 2021 is to have a highly-engaging and converting nurture funnel based on audience segmentation. Your audience appreciates and acts on customized and tailored messages and the way you can give them that is through micro-segmentation.
How you go about audience segmentation heavily depends on your industry, products, and type of audience you focused your promotions on. To keep things really simple, you can even start by creating an audience segment for the new conversions and subscribers from the holiday promotions and then using site and sales data to suggest the best products, content, and ads for them later on. Micro-segmentation then comes in once you learn more about this audience and create further segmentations from within this group as time goes on.
Overall, the most important element of personalization is to share the most relevant information for them. For example, if you’re in the pet industry and your customer bought their dog a new toy for Christmas, they wouldn’t want to receive follow up content about cat products.
#5 Combine CRO with loyalty marketing
While most people view loyalty marketing and CRO as two separate strategies, they are actually rather complementary.
As you make the most of the 2021 post-holiday season to stay in touch with new subscribers and customers, make sure you’re taking advantage of email, SMS, and Messenger. These three channels are the most powerful ways you can communicate with your audience so you’re always sending the right message at the right time.
As a second step, bring loyalty marketing into play with something like a referral program, as this is a great opportunity to create mutually beneficial relationships between your current customers and future new customers, which often translates into the most effective form of marketing in existence: word of mouth.
By combining the hugely effective methods of CRO and loyalty marketing, you get the full-scale benefits of better conversion rates, while also ensuring that those customers come back in 2021 and beyond.
Ready to optimize your shop and boost customer loyalty over the holidays?
