How to Retain Customer Effectively with Low Cost

What are top 5 cost effective customer retention strategies? Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

There are quite a few things you can do inexpensively that will skyrocket your customer retention rate – here’s my top 5:

Optimize Your Receipts

Receipt emails have an open rate of over 70%, so using that to your benefit is a no-brainer. Offering things like upsells, discounts, and item recommendations to your customers in their receipts are just a few things you can do to keep them coming back. We like Receiptful for this solution because they offer several ways to generate extra revenue from your customer’s’ receipt. Check out even more ways you can leverage your receipts here.

Focus On Customer Service

Even though you’re not a massive retailer like Amazon, it doesn’t mean that you can’t have customer service on par with theirs. Poor customer service interactions are nearly four times more likely to lead to disloyalty than loyalty, so putting a little extra effort into taking care of the customers you do have can go a long way towards boosting retention rates.

Know Your Success Metric

Your success metric is what converts your website visitors into repeat buyers. To identify the success metric of your company, look deep into your user engagement data. Using analytics tools like Kissmetrics that allow you to look thoroughly into your customer behavior is the best way to do this. Once you’ve identified the X factor that makes your customers purchase again, you can integrate it into your customer experience.

Create A Sense of Community

People want to belong. By fostering a community around your products you can create a space for your customers to belong, in turn converting them into loyal brand advocates. Feature User Generated Content on your social media profiles and blog and build your community on social media. Women’s running apparel company Oiselle is a prime example of community in action, with an active community of women runners not only online, but in person as well.

Target Gift Buyers

There’s undoubtedly customers who purchase your products as a gift, so why not target their interests as well? A woman who purchases a shirt from Bonobos for her significant other, brother, or friend may not know that Bonobos has women’s apparel brand AYR, too. But by targeting her and sending a follow-up email drip campaign featuring their women’s line, Bonobos may just make a devoted customer out of her as well.

These 5 tactics can be deployed within any budget and will help improve your customer retention rates.

Contributed by Allen Burt Founder / CEO BlueStout.com, an ecommerce digital solutions agency