Customer retention how you keep the customers you're already acquired.
While it's mostly used with businesses selling subscriptions (e.g. memberships, software), almost all of the advice about it can be applied to any Shopify store. In subscription businesses, customer retention is the positive aspect of churn (retention is keeping customers, churn is losing customers).
Retention is an ongoing process
Customer retention is a regular, ongoing business process. It's like customer acquisition, you're always doing it and always trying to do it better.
(It's also like taxes but without all of the blood-sucking)
Customer loyalty is often given the spotlight more than retention but in reality, loyalty is just a hyped-up flavor of retention. With customer retention, you have a lot more control and levers you can pull versus loyalty where you can only nudge and hope for customers to improve.
Articles for further reading
The following are various articles on Customer Retention. Make sure to read through the customer loyalty ones too, as they can be more tactic-based.
The newest articles are at the top.
- Customer retention programs should improve customer behavior
- Retaining customers with RFM segmenting
- Prove yourself to your customer
- Real example of building customer loyal with a note
- Use social proof to retain repeat customers
- Prevent customer defection with one-off outreach
- Check on your Shopify store's customer retention regularly
- Understand customer retention for long-term success
- Customer retention in Shopify is tough
- The compounding advantage of Repeat Purchase Rate
- Automatic segments help smaller Shopify stores retain customers
- Starting repeat purchase analysis in Shopify
- Track your Repeat Purchase Rate as you work on customer retention
- Measure your per-customer retention costs
- Getting the 2nd order from one-time customers
- Win back defected customers who have spent the most in your Shopify store
- Using Lifetime Value (LTV) as your retention metric for your Shopify store
- Customer support is not your loyalty emergency room
- The grass of customer acquisition
- Retention-first
- The five core marketing metrics
- Tracking retention for different types of Shopify stores
- Even the best marketers forget about retention
- Send your customers a goodie package to boost customer retention
- Spend more on retaining your existing customers
- Plan to lose the majority of your traffic and customers in the long-term
- How marketing strategies mirror plant lifecycles
- Start more than what you need
- Measure, tweak, and keep the winners
- Too busy for customer retention
- Is it cold in here?
- What actions are you taking to bring customers back to your Shopify store?
- What will you do to keep customers this week?
- Analyze how your holiday customer behavior was different
- No way to ignore it, you have to send that email
- It's time to shift into brand building
- Co-marketing during the slow periods to boost traffic and sales
- Do you review your reviews for review purposes?
- My #1 tip to improve customer retention for Shopify
- The cheap and fast personalized touch
- Encouraging your best customers to buy from your Shopify store again
- Remarketing strategies to acquire and retain new and repeat ecommerce customers
- The tiny hinge that swings your customer retention process
- How much additional revenue do repeat ecommerce customers contribute? 10%? 20% 40%?