Returning eCommerce visitors: How to improve customer retention rate

In this blog post, we will give you some fresh ideas which will help you reduce lost customers, provide you with a few tricks and methods for preventing customers from inactivity and switching notification OFF.

But keep in mind that maintaining user satisfaction is the best prevention!

So, if you’re looking for a high-quality digital commerce solution, we’d like to help you out. Reach out to us and we’ll make sure your digital business offers the highest level of user satisfaction!

If user engagement is low, this is a red alert for your business, because that user can be easily lost, and what’s the worst part of this – the customer will go to another eCommerce shop and spend money there.

Best way to interact with users is through push notifications. User feedback is the cheapest way of getting fresh ideas, and it will keep your user happy.

Gather more data about user behavior

To have better results and understanding of your users, you need tools which can provide you with correct data. We are talking about the data that usually includes information about the user like gender, birthday, place, etc. and user events in the app. Besides that basic information, create Events about your user.

Events will show us user behavioral pattern inside an app and will tell us how the user finds and buys items in our store. With this kind of information, we can have changes in design and set buttons in a more attractive place like a home screen where it would be easier to buy.

Also, Events can provide us with more important data about the notifications – are they disabled or enabled; is user active or not; and which part of the application user don’t use. With all this data we can plan our prevention strategy.

Communicate with your customers – they will appreciate more than discount

You collected all the data from the users, invested money in development and here you are; brand new features in your application but how to spread the world about them?

Most of the useful and new features are not well explained to users, or users even don’t know how to use the app and also don’t know if some feature can help them. People often think that Google Play description “What’s new” in-app version is enough.

So after every update with new features, we can make some intro like a short video or a showcase. In this video or showcase, we can explain to users how to use new features and what that feature means to them.

Pro tip about the context of the message – show customers how much money they can save while using your e-commerce mobile application. With this approach, users will feel satisfied and more loyal to your shop.

Personalization with the power of analytics

We can prevent losing our users by permanently discount some items which users buy often.

This is a good idea because your competitor is always looking at price changes and he’ll surely be ready to give users better offer. Users will recognize your gesture and discount, and also aware of how much money you save for them.

Listen to your customer feedback

Best way to return user is prevention and knowing why they left your shop. To collect customer feedback, we can send email or notification to all inactive users and ask them for feedback. We need to tell them that we are willing to cooperate with them and give them a feeling that we care about their ideas.

If the response to this action is low we can offer some price discount if they provide us with feedback. With this, we solve multiple problems and improve our bound with customers.

How to nudge customer who turned OFF notification?

Push notifications are essential for eCommerce owners. If push notifications are disabled, we can’t send our special offers, and our user engagement is decreased. We think it’s pretty clear why customers turn OFF push notification – it’s because of spamming and receiving notification in inappropriate time. But, if you’re in this kind of a problem – we have ideas to help you out.

We can create a special section in Settings for push notification; the user can pick time interval in a day when he wants to accept notifications in a unique window.

Maybe you think – What if notifications are sent in the time when the user is not in that specific window? Well, here we can have a little help from analytics tools. In the analytics tool, we can check which time is most common to all users and then hit the send notifications button!

For users with already turned OFF notifications, we can make a special widget on a home screen. This widget will show up every two weeks if notifications are disabled.

In this widget, we can show to users how many offers and discount he miss and how much he could save if he used those coupons or discounts. To have better user experience, below text about coupons and discounts, we can ask them to turn ON notifications.

Loyalty program

This is the best way of prevention, but it can take some time and money for developing it. Most of the shops keep this feature pretty low on the priority list because setting good loyalty program is hard, but in the end, results are great.

The loyalty program will reward user which show loyal buying behavior, and it will get an opportunity to other users to become loyal users and give them all benefits. This is great because you keep users on your shop and users get something from you in return. Most important is that both sides are winners.

Are you thinking about how to increase customer loyalty? Some of the ideas to have a great loyalty program are creating a Value proposition, build an engaged community, and have the best social media profiles. Do your research and choose wisely.

More ideas for turning your inactive customers

When your prevention failed, and you are on edge, the battle is not over. There is still more space for you.

Resurrection strategy should be based on your prevention. Usually, recognition, why your prevention has failed, is your answer in the resurrection process. But we can’t know that so we will give you some common method and when is the best time to resurrect your ex-users.

Reminders for lost customers

This is the most common technique for bringing back lost users, but it has temporally success. The most of users will read email, install the app and like before, uninstall it.
But we can fix it with few tricks.

We can make email more personal and show the user how we upgrade our application through time. The best example is a Pokemon GO.

Pokemon GO resurrect users with excellent fun features like a pokemon buddy system, party boss raids, style shop, etc. We can archive this by sending user email with a nice personal message and with a pdf file with some statistics and new feature showcase. This will convince our user that we improved our application and we are working on a better user experience.

Sending special offers

This gesture could be our redemption to the user. Most of the users stop using an app because they don’t like something: prices, bad loyalty program, bad UX, etc.. With special offer we show our user that we care about them, and we have a unique offer just for them!

With good and fair individual offer user certainly would install an app and get the offer. But there is the trick; we must prevent losing it again. So the plan is to repeat this few more times in the next couple of months. If a user stays about two months active, then we can stop doing this and hope that our redesign and features will do the trick.

Which day is your favorite day?

For most people, it’s their birthday. People like when they get some attention from another person especially when it’s our birthday. Birthday is an excellent opportunity to send some nice notification or personalized email.

Email should be sent if the user doesn’t have installed an app. In email should be some special offer because for a birthday we often expect some gifts. This friendly gesture would recover trust between customer and shop.

If the customer has installed the app, we can send birthday notification with special offers covered with some beautiful, warm words from all company.

Pro tip – be careful about the context of the message, especially when you’re sending them to the woman part of your shoppers – they don’t think their age is something people need to talk about. 🙂
Sending birthday emails and notifications can be part of your loyalty program, and it could prevent losing a customer again in the future.

How to promote your online shop during holidays

Holidays are a perfect time for sending emails and notifications because on these days customer needs us most. According to e-commerce spending in the holiday season,  it is the right time to resurrect users.

As mentioned before, give them good personalized offers if you have some analytics data, if you don’t then send them notifications which contains the most common sold product at that time. Try to offer an additional discount if they buy more items at once. Customers will appreciate that.

To summit it up for you, use our checklist full of ideas for online retailers to improve customer retention rate:

Do you have some other ideas on how to return more visitors in e-commerce mobile application?

We’re recognized as a top app design companies on DesignRush so if you want to talk more about your ideas for iOS development or Android development project – please contact us!