Did you notice that you wear 20 % of your clothes 80 % of the time? Or did you know that 20% of drivers cause 80% of all traffic accidents?
This is Pareto Principle, and it also applies in your business. 20% of your customers bring the 80% of your revenue at the end of the day. This 20% are of course the most loyal customers of your Shopify store!That is why loyalty marketing is so crucial for your business to make more money! Because loyal customers are the ones who are going to spend the most in your store.
Yes, the main point here is driving more revenue thanks to loyalty marketing, but besides, there are many details regarding how you can create this loyalty and sustain it successfully. You can learn all these details about loyalty marketing in this article! Let's start!
Here is the Table of Content:
What is Loyalty Marketing?
What is The Difference Between Repeat Customers and Loyal Customers?
Customer Loyalty Statistics: How Important Is Loyalty Marketing?
How to Cultivate Customer Loyalty?
Why Do You Need Customer Loyalty?
Customer Loyalty Metrics: How to Measure Customer Loyalty?
How to Grow Your Shopify Business with Mobile App & Loyalty Marketing?
1. Loyalty Marketing Programs
2. Social Media
3. Implementing Loyalty Program To Your eCommerce Mobile App
Final Thoughts
What is Loyalty Marketing?
Loyalty marketing is any strategy that aims to retain existing customers and engage them through incentives. These incentives could include rewards, discounts, gifts or any other innovative technique.
As a result of providing incentives, brands build trust, engage customers and increase their loyalty.
Loyalty marketing includes every part of the customer journey and it is the perfect way to create engagement and repeat sales accordingly.
What Is The Difference Between Repeat Customers and Loyal Customers?
You might be thinking these two concepts are the same, however, they are not with a small difference. A repeat customer does not have to be a loyal customer.
A repeat customer might be preferring your Shopify store due to the cheaper price, higher quality, delivery duration, etc. instead of loyalty. In other words, they don't prefer your brand because of their emotions.
On the other hand, a loyal customer would choose your brand even if these factors do not exist since they have an emotional bond with your brand.
That is why one of the aims of loyalty marketing is converting repeat customers to loyal customers. In this way, these loyal customers can visit the store more and spend more money thanks to their emotional connection.
Customer Loyalty Statistics: How Important Is Loyalty Marketing?
Your loyal customers are the ones who will follow your brand news, get excited about the new products, choose your store again and again & spend so much more money than guest shoppers. With loyalty marketing, you can keep your existing customers in your store, turn them into loyal ones and acquire new customers.
Here are some impressive customer loyalty statistics that prove the significance of loyalty marketing:
- According to Harvard Business School increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. That means there is a huge possibility that you can drive more revenue with customer loyalty marketing.
- According to the 2 year study of Motista, a loyal customer with emotional connection to your brand, averagely has a 306% higher lifetime value than a normal customer. That means, the average amount of money loyal customers are expected to spend with your store is so much higher than normal shoppers.
- According to Accenture, customers included in loyalty programs spend 12% to 18% more than non-included ones each year. It is an opportunity for you to drive more revenue!
- According to Antavo, 62.1% of the merchants say that loyalty programs have helped to keep their customers engaged during the Covid-19. Since shoppers' behavior has changed dramatically during the pandemic, it was so crucial to keep the existing ones.
- According to PwC, 26% of the shoppers consider loyalty programs a factor to remain loyal to a brand. So if you want to turn more normal customers into loyal ones, you might consider applying loyalty marketing strategies.
How to Cultivate Customer Loyalty?
Building trust and keeping the customers happy are the most significant factors to cultivate loyalty. To achieve that and to create an emotional attachment, you have to provide for their needs and expectations. Here are the fundamental points of brand loyalty in marketing.
A. Seamless Shopping Experience
You have to stand out among your rivals in eCommerce and providing a seamless shopping experience is one of the best ways to achieve that. If you provide a qualified shopping journey with great UI/UX, it is highly possible that they prefer you to shop again.
B. Product/ Service Quality
Shoppers will not continue to buy your products if they think they have low quality. So it is significant to have high-quality products to create customer loyalty.
C. Accessible Customer Support
Your customers should be able to contact the support team easily and solve their problems & requests in a short period of time. Otherwise, they won’t keep purchasing from your Shopify store or keep using your service if they have other choices.
Why Do You Need Customer Loyalty?
Customer loyalty brings so many benefits to your store as you can them below:
1. Decreasing Customer Acquisition Costs
With loyalty marketing you can retain your existing customers, increase repeat customer rate and decrease customer acquisition costs. You can also achieve that with a mobile app by using push notifications. You can create a direct connection with your customers, remind yourself of them and get them back to your app without paying for expensive ads.
2. Retain Customers Who Spend More
Generally returning and loyal customers spend more money than normal customers. According to Media Bain, a shopper's fifth purchase was 40 percent larger than the first, and the tenth purchase was nearly 80 percent larger than the first.
3. Increase Customer Engagement
You can collect data about your customers and provide them with a more personalized experience by using them. As a result, you can increase engagement. Also, you can increase engagement & your sales by offering your customers rewards to spend more money on your store.
4. Acquire New Customers
Loyal customers tend to refer your Shopify store to their friends and family. In this way, you can acquire new customers thanks to loyalty marketing solutions.
5. Re-engage Risky Customers
You spend huge amounts of money to acquire new customers to your Shopify store, we know what. It is disappointing to lose your existing customers, that means losing all this acquisition cost, too.
Probably these kinds of customers leave your store since they have dissatisfaction. With loyalty programs, you can send highly personalized emails, understand the problem and take action regarding that.
For instance, if the customer is not happy with the prices, you might offer discounts or rewards, etc. Also, you can build trust by mentioning your team is there if she/he has any problem.
6. Decrease Cart Abandonment
With your Shopney mobile app, you can detect customers who left products in the cart and send them abandoned cart notifications after a while.
Or with a loyalty marketing program, you can send emails to these shoppers and send them loyalty marketing emails to remind them of the rewards/ points they could gain with this purchase. In this way, you can decrease the cart abandonment rate and drive revenue.
7. Generate More Reviews
With a loyalty program, you can reward customers with points, promotions etc. for leaving reviews. Reviews are so crucial since they create social proof for other shoppers, build trust and encourage them to try your product/service.
8. Increase More Revenue
All the points above are the ways to increase revenue with loyalty marketing services & programs & mobile apps or different strategies.
Customer Loyalty Metrics: How to Measure Customer Loyalty?
If you can measure the customer loyalty of your brand, you can notice your weak points, create new strategies to fix them and increase the customer loyalty level. Also, you can use these metrics below for loyalty segmentation then check whether your existent strategies are working or not.
A. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
There may be people who recommend your brand to others as well as those who do not recommend it. The significant point here is the rate of these promoters & distractors.
You can measure NPS with online surveys by asking “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this brand to others?” Then you can categorize shoppers who answer between 0-6 as distractors, who answer 7-8 as passives and who answer between 9-10 as promoters.
B. Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR)
With RPR, you can understand how many customers shop from your store multiple times in a year. We can say that a rate between 20-40% for RPP is good and here is how you can calculate it:
C. Upsell Ratio
Loyal customers tend to shop for different products from your store. Upsell ratio helps you to understand the ratio of these loyal customers and you can calculate it with the formulate below:
D. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer Lifetime Value is the average amount of money customers are expected to spend with your Shopify store over time. It is natural that your most loyal customers have the highest customer lifetime value and spend more money.
This data is useful to understand how much money you should invest to acquire new customers and retain existing ones.
E. Customer Loyalty Index (CLI)
It is the measure of customer loyalty over a specific period. To measure Customer Loyalty Index, you can ask your customers:
- How likely are they to shop for the same product from your store again?
- How willing are they to try out other products from your store?
F. Redemption Rate
Calculating redemption rate helps you to understand whether your loyalty program is engaging your customers enough or not. In other words, you can observe whether it is encouraging your customers to shop more often from your store.
In your loyalty marketing program, if your customers spend their points on rewards and experience the value there, this means they are engaged with your brand. On the other hand, if they are not redeeming points, we can’t say that they are engaged with your brand.
How to Grow Your Shopify Business with Mobile App & Loyalty Marketing?
1. Loyalty Marketing Programs
Loyalty marketing programs are the tools that aim to increase customer retention and repeat sales by using rewards & incentives for shoppers’ loyal behaviors.
These behaviors could include shopping, referring the brand to someone else, following a social media channel of the brand, etc. And the rewards could include loyalty points, promotions, discount coupons, gifts, etc. In this way, you give them a reason to come back to your store and spend money.
Loyalty marketing metrics show that these kinds of programs help you to know your loyal customers, create loyalty marketing strategies for them, increase their lifetime value and drive more revenue to the brand.
Also, it is the perfect way to publicize your store, differentiate it from other eCommerce stores and create an emotional attachment with your customers.
2. Social Media
After you create a loyalty program for your Shopify store the next step is promoting it and using social media is one of the best ways to achieve that. You can tell the advantages of being a member of your brand’s loyalty program to your followers instead of trying to do a hard sell on social media.
In this way, you can reach more shoppers and turn them into loyal customers. Besides, you might reach some influencers related to your sector, encourage them to join your loyalty program, and promote your Shopify store.
3. Implementing Loyalty Program To Your eCommerce Mobile App
Mobile apps are the platforms that your most loyal customers download and prefer to use. That is why it would be so meaningless if you can’t offer the loyalty programs in your mobile app.
Reaching the existing customers and retaining them becomes harder and more expensive day by day. By implementing a loyalty program to your mobile apps attract your customers back to your store.
Since we know the significance of this issue, Shopney is integrated with the best loyalty program apps such as LoyaltyLion and Smile.io.
By implementing these loyalty marketing apps, you can encourage your customers for their loyal behavior in your mobile app too and stand out from the competition. Also, rewarding loyal customers for mobile app spends is a way to make your customers feel special as a mobile app user and engage them more.
It is a fact that smartphone users prefer to spend 88% of their time within mobile apps instead of browsing the mobile websites. That means, mobile apps are great tools to engage your customers. Don’t you want to make this engagement stronger?
You can start using loyalty programs in your mobile app, increasing the loyalty level of your mobile app users. Mobile apps convert between 2x-22x higher than mobile websites. Increase the loyalty level of your customers and use this potential!
Final Thoughts
Since the 80% of your revenue came from the 20% of your customers, it is crucial to have this loyal customer base who bring the most money to your store. There are some points you should be careful about and some strategies that you can apply to create this loyalty level that you want.
First, you should provide seamless shopping experience, high quality product & customer support. Then as the next steps you can use loyalty programs in your website & mobile app, and promote it through social media.
We hope everything you should do to increase customer loyalty is clear, now it is time to start to apply them! As a first step, turn your Shopify store into a mobile app today and integrate it with the best loyalty marketing programs!
