Just about everyone who researches the effectiveness of returning customers vs new customers comes to the same conclusion: Repeat customers are better in almost every way. So why is so much more attention given to acquiring new customers? I can understand the volume argument, the “my repeat customers aren’t enough to keep my business going …
Tag: customer retention
Retention-first
Awhile back the idea of “mobile-first” websites started to grow. It meant a change in how websites are build. Instead of building a website for a regular desktop user and then trying to shrink it all down to fit on a phone, developers would build the phone-sized system first and then scale it up for …
Tracking retention for different types of Shopify stores
Yesterday I was going through the sales process for Repeat Customer Insights and assigning one metric to watch for each stage of the process. I’m doing this so I have a focus for optimizations. At a glance I can see where problems arise and the overall health. (I’m also using the Green/Yellow/Red light system which …
Even the best marketers forget about retention
Savvy marketers will calculate their Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) to make sure they are acquiring customers cheaply enough to turn a profit. Most of that goes towards upfront costs like advertising or paid deals, leaving very little to actually retain a customer. Which is silly because retaining the customer will boost how much they spend …
Send your customers a goodie package to boost customer retention
I had to upgrade one of my infrastructure services for Repeat Customer Insights. It out-grew the plan it was on. Instead of just locking me out or upgrading me automatically, their support reached out to me. We ended up having a conversation about trying to squeeze back into the old plan but I still couldn’t …
Spend more on retaining your existing customers
Many stores spend a lot of resources on customer acquisition. How much does it cost on average? What about an online store customer vs POS vs Facebook? Does it increase over time or stay within a band of costs? But acquisition costs are only part of the picture. You’ll want to look past the first …
Plan to lose the majority of your traffic and customers in the long-term
I’ve planted a few hundred beans in the garden this year. Every time I plant beans, only about half of them survive past the baby stage. I’ve learned to expect to lose many of them to slugs, squirrels, and poor soil in general. I can do some things to minimize the losses but nothing works …
Start more than what you need
Over winter I planted about 20 trees and shrubs, most of them dormant. Now as spring starts to warm everything up, the majority of them have come alive and started to grow. But a few haven’t. I don’t know if they didn’t like being uprooted and shipped, the area they are planted in, or if …
Measure, tweak, and keep the winners
Today marks the start of the spring planting for early vegetables in Portland. Plants that can take a bit of cold and wet still. But that’s not a hard and fast date. Each plant has different needs and the weather is never perfect. That’s why I already have 524 seedlings started outside. Some are ones …
Too busy for customer retention
I heard from a Shopify store that they are too busy for customer retention because all their time is focused on customer acquisition. They didn’t realize that they were the ones creating the problem with their business. When you ignore customer retention, customers will leave. Some might stick around but those will be the minority. …