You’re Sitting On A Gold Mine. Now Take Advantage Of It.Let’s assume you are selling your widgets both online and offline. Before moving to the online world, you were a very successful widget seller. Through the years, you’ve sold millions of widgets to thousands of customers. You know these customers and they know you. You have gathered all of their pertinent information like name, address, phone number and email address.
Now think about it. You’re sitting on a gold mine. You need to use this information to your advantage. The key is to turn your past customers into repeat buyers. How do you do this?
First, the most obvious way to do this is to satisfy your customers. You need to make sure they had an experience that makes them want to come back, be it for another great deal, your quality products, or the fantastic customer service. Any one of these can make your customers come back.
Now, assume you have great products, great services and great prices and yet your buyers aren’t coming back to your online store. Now what? One fast, efficient, and cost effective way to lure them back is to contact them via email, assuming you have their permission to do so. You might send them an email telling them about the great new products you have for the fall, a back-to-school sale, or price cuts across the board. I’m sure you’ve all seen newspaper circulars stuffed in your mailbox. It’s the same idea, only targeted to customers’ needs and requests.
An even better way to lure your customers back is to entice them with a coupon. Just like coupon cutters at the grocery store, an online coupon works the same way. After shopping, customers enter the coupon code during the checkout process and receive the appropriate discount as advertised. As a merchant, you just create the coupon that might, for example, be good through the end of Labor Day weekend that gives all customers entering the coupon code of “golf” $10 off any purchase over $50. Just like in your local grocery store, people jump on coupons. Everyone loves a good deal!
Taking this one step further, let’s say you do have many repeat customers. Now, you want to target just that smaller percentage that has not returned. Perhaps want to send them a special email with a special coupon. Great. You already have their email address. That was easy enough. But, now, how do you send that coupon to just those people who, for example, have bought from you in the past but have not made a repeat purchase in the past 6 months? The better ecommerce software will allow you to query for, and send an email just that targeted group of customers. This gives you the best of both worlds. Your regular repeat customers are coming back and buying at regular prices and you are turning non-returning customers into repeat buyers.
