5 Ways To Delight Your Shopify Store Customers

 Research has shown that it costs five times less to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one, which is why it’s essential to think about ways to delight your Shopify store customers. 

With the continued rise of online sellers via Shopify in 2019, now has never been a better way to focus on ways to ensure that customers love shopping with your online brand.

In this blog, Blend Commerce, a Shopify Expert Agency, look at 5 ways that Shopify merchants can delight customers, in order to increase retention and loyalty.

A Strong Loyalty and Rewards Program

According to LoyaltyLion, loyalty reward emails perform 14 times better than other marketing emails. When using Shopify as the e-commerce platform of choice, loyalty and retention programs can be a great way to reward customers not only for purchases, but also for interacting and promoting your brand. 

Some of the many ways that customers can be rewarded with a loyalty program like LoyaltyLion include:

• Award points for any activity performed on your site
• Allow customers to access rewards anywhere in their journey
• Use points, tiers and rewards to re-engage at-risk customers
• Encourage site visits with loyalty emails and points statements
• Alert customers to available rewards with on-site loyalty notifications

A "Thank You" Sequence that Rewards Customers

When most Shopify merchants think about a ‘thank you’ sequence, many tend to limit their thinking exclusively to email. Whilst Blend firmly believe that email based thank you sequences are critical to delighting a customer, as shown in this research by Klaviyo, tailoring your approach with other tools can work well. 

For example:

• A thank you email is sent to the customer, post purchase
• A link to review the product and offering reward points sent 1 day post expected delivery
• If the customer leaves a review, send a 10% discount code off the next purchase.

Alternatively:

• A thank you email is sent to the customer, post purchase
• If using Klaviyo, an integration with Octane AI (chat bots) can be established. If the customer does not open the email, a Facebook messenger message can be sent to reach the customer.
• For some great examples of post-purchase/thank you email flows, take a look at Really Good Emails for some inspiration.

Packaging That Makes The Customer Feel Special

In a competitive environment such as e-commerce, helpful, innovative and ‘thoughtful’ packaging can be a crucial differentiating factor to a business. Blend recently worked with a Europe based online food retailer who saw a dramatic difference in repeat orders of single products. 

When conducting customer research, they discovered that customers were unhappy that the same packaging for one product was being used for 4 products, and dislike the wastage caused by there order. Therefore, thinking carefully not only about the look and feel of packaging is important, ensuring it is fit for purpose is also key.

At Blend, we recommend interacting with Shopify specific packaging suppliers, such as Arka, who can help to advise Shopify merchants on the best custom packaging available to meet the expectations of your customers. Arka offers custom shipper boxes and mailer boxes that help your brand stand out!

Pleasing Gift Givers and Receivers

As a Shopify Expert Agency, we work with a diverse range of product niches. When working with products that are often given as gifts, this provides some unique opportunities to both retain and gain customers.

In 2018, Blend worked with a US based business that specializes in creating high end baby gifts, often given for births or baby showers. In order to maximize the potential future sales opportunities with this brand, the post-sale process looked like this:

• If the customer had indicated that the purchase was a gift, an email was sent to customers asking for the occasion e.g. birth
• This data was captured in the email service provider, and then automatically placed the customer in an email segment that would send an email in 1 year, offering gifts for the next birthday.
• In the custom gift boxes, a card was included that invited the gift receiver to ‘say thanks’. This included a link to the customers website that enabled the customer to record a video and have this sent by the brand, to the gift giver.
• During this last process, the email of the gift receiver was also collected and then used for future email marketing and targeted Facebook Ad campaigns.

Not only does this process delight the Shopify customer, but also collates captive customer data for future marketing campaigns.

The Handwritten Note

Whilst it may seem odd to be referring to hand written notes for Shopify stores, a number of success stories have been well documented. For example, alongside some candy, John’s Crazy Socks also provides a handwritten thank you note in its orders.

Alongside this, Blend has recently began experimenting with Ignite Post as a way to engage customers immediately after purchase, or to re-engage customers after an extended period of time. By going beyond the ‘expected’, Blend is looking forward to seeing the results of this approach.

Adam Pearce is the co-founder and Director at Blend Commerce, a Shopify Expert Agency, based in Alcester, UK.

Arka

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