How to Improve Customer Loyalty and Customer Retention in Ecommerce Fashion

Let’s dive into this challenge of customer retention marketing. We’ll explore how companies can overcome common obstacles and win the hearts of their customers. By the end, you’ll know the basics of loyalty and the secret weapon smart ecommerce fashion companies use to execute on their customer retention goals.

What is the Customer Loyalty Challenge?

We’re seeing more ads than ever. Your customers are getting bombarded with content from all angles aiming to grasp their attention and engagement. This isn’t slowing down. If brands don’t get in the game, they’re going to be left behind.

Loyalty is earned in the digital commerce fashion space by providing consistent value, engagement, and attention. However, there seems to be a bit of a disconnect between what marketers believe it takes to cultivate loyalty and what actions actually attract a loyal customer.

What consumers actually care about:

RFM Lifecycle Automation

Loyal customers can vanish without warning. Create automated campaigns based on segments using recency, frequency, and monetary value as criteria. An enticing incentive at the right time is the perfect way to reactivate loyal customers, and is a part of proper customer lifecycle management, which will ensure you’re sending the right offers to the right customers every time.

Companies can only sell a new customer 5-20% of the time. Pretty weak compared to the 60-70% of the time you’ll close the deal with a past customer. So, what’s the solution?

Here’s what we shared in our use case on the subject:

Personalized Communication and Recommendations

Segmenting your email newsletters is much better than sending the same message to every subscriber. But newsletters can be customized even further, targeting individual users with personalized recommendations.

How To Foster Customer Loyalty Through Omnichannel Communication

CRM managers spend their day adding new marketing channels, and finding ways to increase the revenue from their existing customer base. It’s their mission to ensure that the customer has the best experience possible. The weight of maximum customer satisfaction rests on their shoulders.

Companies can’t ignore customers in today’s digital environment. Dissatisfaction isn’t vented through one-on-one conversations, it’s plastered across the web as frustrated Facebook rants, angry tweets, and 1-star reviews on popular web pages.

Customer reviews are the most common way to get information before deciding to purchase, as 54% of people are looking at customer reviews before buying a product.

So, if you want to foster customer loyalty, you’ve got to put in the work. People want companies who are committed to excellent customer service. When they are, customers will spend more with them. Similarly, many will try out new companies just to find better customer service.

It’s important for companies to keep track of customer interactions, behaviors, and conversations across every platform.

Omnichannel communication is a modern-day approach to customer service that ensures a seamless experience, no matter where they log on.

Tips for Fostering Customer Retention and Customer Loyalty

The fierce competition in the ecommerce fashion world means companies need to focus on branding. Brands build businesses that know how to communicate their story with the end consumer. This advantage can set you apart in the sea of competition.

Now, we’re not naive. Relationship management is a tricky business, and fostering customer loyalty is a real challenge for most businesses.

If you want to win in fashion, you need omnichannel communication. By segmenting your customers, personalizing the communication, and engaging at the right time, you can start building well-branded relationships that matter.

1. Proper Customer Segmentation

Customer segmentation enables you to run highly relevant campaigns, which can lead to customer loyalty and increase customer lifetime value. More than half (54%) of marketers worldwide reported better brand engagement because of increased personalisation efforts. Segmentation makes that possible.

Traditionally, marketers have segmented customers in four ways:

AI-powered engagement automation makes it easier than ever to gather information on your audience, and the options for segmentation are nearly limitless. It also gives you the option to predict the next actions for each customer and take action based on the probability of them completing your goals or engaging with your content.

2. Personalized Communication

Customers want one-on-one communication and will go out of their way to get it. In fact, 63% of consumers say they will share private data in exchange for a personalized shopping experience.

By gathering data on customer behavior, you can enact complex personalization strategies:

With the ongoing advancements in technology and AI, companies can now understand customer needs, provide solutions, share valuable information, and educate them on your products – before they ask for help.

3. Timely Engagement

It’s important to meet the customer where they’re at in the buying process. Website banners provide you with the opportunity to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.

Here are a few of ways you can use banners to create an engaging customer experience:

Features like the single customer view (SCV), scenarios, and weblayers (aka on-site overlays) all combine to provide users with the omnichannel customer experience that they’re looking for. Let’s take a closer look at each of those features.

Real-time Segmentation

Being able to differentiate between your customers based on their various attributes (likes/dislikes, purchase history, etc.) will help you create personalized content. Being able to do it in real time means you can create truly impactful customer journeys that keep them coming back again and again.

Having real-time segmentation gives you the ability to create deeper analyses of your customers and their preferences, and also uncover trends in real time. As a result, you’ll be able to automatically trigger personalized campaigns and even predict your customers’ next steps (e.g., what time they’re most likely to open an email or what offer they’re most likely to convert on).

Single Customer View

It’s impossible to manually track your customer interactions across all the different platforms. True omnichannel communication means connecting on several social platforms, on the phone, in a text, through email, in person, and even at local events.

A single customer view (SCV) is a collection of user data profiles. Each profile includes the user’s purchase history, site activity, product recommendations, and more — all in one easy-to-use location. All of this highly detailed and organized data makes it easy to create highly detailed segments from your customer base. A true SCV is scalable, flexible, and updates itself in real-time — ensuring that your segments and customer communications are always up-to-date and relevant to each user.

Scenarios

When it comes to timely engagement, scenarios are a lifesaver. They’re an easy way to connect with customers throughout the journey through emails, push notifications, or webhooks. Think of them as a series of “if, then” statements you can use to cultivate the experience.

3 Top Customer Retention and Customer Loyalty Strategies

We’ve mentioned quite a bit of technical jargon here today. Many guides of this nature tend to leave the reader without instructions on how to use the pieces and parts.

We don’t want to do that to you. 

In fact, we’ve dusted off some of our favorite strategies from Bloomreach work with clients. Think of the following like your three “starter strategies” for omnichannel communication.

      Improve Conversion Rates With Price Drop Emails

If you’ve ever shopped for a sweater or shoes online but have just been a bit taken aback by the price of said item, then you’ll love this use case.

If your company had Bloomreach Engagement’s watchdog automatic price drop alert use case, the chances of selling the aforementioned sweater or pair of shoes would significantly increase once the company put them on sale. That’s because Bloomreach automatically adds these products as “watchdog items” to a customer’s profile once they are viewed and not purchased.

When they go on sale, if the customer has opted in for communications, they receive a personalized email letting them know the product that was previously viewed is now on sale at a discounted rate. This use case can drive exponential revenue for items on sale and can make your customers feel as if you understand their preferences.

       Improve Engagement With AI-Based Recommendations

Proving you know your customers is a massive step towards achieving customer loyalty. One of the best ways of showcasing this customer knowledge? Using AI to offer hyper-relevant product recommendations.

Bloomreach Engagement product recommendations leverage all customer and catalog data to find the most relevant and suitable items for each individual customer in each situation. And it happens fast. Bloomreach customers can deliver product recommendations to repeat consumers or first-time visitors in real time (or within 0.1 seconds, to be exact), resulting in what feels like magically personalized experiences for customers.

When you’re showing the right dresses, shoes, or accessories to your customers, they are significantly more likely to make a purchase.

       Increase On-Site Conversions With Contextual Personalization

While A/B testing can be effective for personalization, Bloomreach can go above and beyond the impact of A/B testing with contextual personalization.

A/B testing will serve your customers the overall best variant of your tested campaigns based on average performance. Contextual personalization serves what is best for each customer based on the contexts given by the testing. Essentially, it solves the multi-armed bandit problem.

Contextual personalization allows ecommerce fashion companies to use AI to determine which offer a customer is most likely to convert with. This leads to increased conversion rates and happier customers.

Improving Customer Loyalty and Customer Retention With Bloomreach

If ecommerce fashion companies want to stay relevant in the coming decade, it’s time to start taking AI-powered marketing technology seriously. It starts with a hyper-focus on building customer loyalty and to do that, you must have a deep knowledge of your customers and how to best serve them.

The power of personalised, automated, omnichannel communication has a direct impact on your bottom line. If you’d like to find out how Bloomreach can simplify your processes, solve problems, and elevate growth, reach out today to request your personalized demo. We’d love for you to be our next success story!