Looking for long-term revenue? Lock in long-term customers with a strong retention strategy.
The DTC world loves the next new thing—with one exception. Old customers come with benefits that outweigh new ones (well, the cost of acquiring new ones).
Finding new customers is more expensive than turning current customers into repeat buyers. So how can you grow your business without overspending on customer acquisition? Sell more to the customers you already have.
When you retain a customer, you win in a few ways:
- Higher revenue: 52% of customers will buy from the business even if another company is cheaper and more convenient
- Lower costs: studies show that it’s 5x more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one
- Customer loyalty: up to 86% of loyal customers will recommend your business to friends or family, and 66% will write a positive review
Ready to ramp up your retention strategy? Start with these 3 tips:
- Use cohort analysis to better understand customer behavior
- Create a dedicated reorder experience
- Use subscriptions to drive recurring revenue and customer loyalty
Tip 1: Use cohort analysis to better understand customer behavior
One of the best ways to understand customer behavior and plan out your retention strategy? Cohort analysis.
A cohort is a collection of customers grouped together based on specific criteria (typically the month they made their first purchase).
Cohorts help you answer key questions about your business. For example:
- Once a customer buys, do they continue to buy, or do they churn?
- Is there a cohort that’s buying more often? If so, why?
- Are there products or campaigns that outperform others? Should you double down on those?
- Is there a cohort that’s frequently dropping off? If so, why? How can you reduce churn?
- How can you refine your retention strategies to increase LTV?
Diving into cohorts is one way to see where you should focus your efforts—acquisition or retention. Look to see if the number of new customers (and sales) is increasing over time. If these numbers aren’t rising, it might be time to double down on acquisition efforts.
Using filters, cohort analysis can illuminate your best-performing products. Determine which products bring in the most customers, drive the most repurchases, and increase your average order value.
You might find that one product is most effective at getting people in the door (acquisition), and another is better at keeping your customers around (retention).
Tip 2: Create a dedicated reorder experience
Send retention efforts to the right spot. Email and SMS are the most used tools for retention and have their own attribution windows (unlike Facebook). The channel you choose to operate in is just half of the reorder experience. Where are you sending returning customers? A PDP, category page, your homepage? Make sure that the path you send customers down is converting into repeat sales.
Creating a dedicated reorder experience for returning customers makes them more likely to convert. Brands that build their dedicated re-ordering experience with an app like Repeat end up seeing a 15% increase in conversion rates and a 20% increase in AOV compared to sending returning customers to a product detail page.
Tip 3: Use subscriptions to drive recurring revenue and customer loyalty
How do you keep your customers engaged and coming back for more? One lever you can pull: Subscriptions.
Subscription programs are a tool for acquisition and retention (most notably). They drive recurring revenue while boosting customer loyalty. Analyzing your subscription program can help you find new opportunities, gaps, and strategies for reducing churn.
How?
Talk to your subscribers—most importantly, the ones who’ve churned.
Go directly to the source. Reach out to customers who’ve churned, and understand their pain points and the reason for their cancellation. Collect this feedback, and then share it with your team. Here are a few questions to ask churned subscribers:
- What is the reason for your subscription cancellation?
- What was your overall experience like?
- What would’ve made your experience better?
- What, if anything, would make you keep your subscription?
Implement subscriber retention incentives into your email flows.
Highlight the benefits of your subscription program, such as access to exclusive flavors, discounts, gifts, and more, in your messaging. Or, you can offer an email subscriber exclusive gated content if they become a subscription customer.
Pair incentives with effective segmentation to guide customers to take advantage of your subscription program. Who’s the perfect candidate for your subscription offering? A customer who leaves a five-star review. Using your email service provider (ESP), you can segment customers based on reviews. This is a practice Jones Road uses to tailor their messaging to the right person at the right time.
Level up with Tydo
Leverage Tydo’s free Platform. Tydo connects all your data sources (the tools and channels you love) in one spot to create a single source of insight—making it easier to see where to focus your retention efforts. We help world-class brands like Madhappy, Birthdate Co.,and Dose supercharge growth!
Or, if you’re looking for a more custom solution, check out Tydo Custom. Get paired with one of Tydo’s on-demand data analysts, and we’ll build you a dashboard fit for you and your business needs. If you’re interested in chatting with our team, you can book time here.