Customer Retention
Repeat buyers are the key to long-term success for most ecommerce businesses. Our library of customer retention articles includes tactics for subscription ideas, loyalty programs, A/B testing, enhanced customer service, soliciting feedback, and much more.
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Customer Retention
5 Social CRM Tools for Small Business
February 25, 2013 • Paul Chaney
Customer relationship management tools have existed for years. Businesses use them to manage customer interactions across channels and departments, including marketing, sales, customer service, and technical support. One area where traditional CRM systems fall short is their inability...
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Customer Retention
5 Ways to Attract New Customers
October 10, 2012 • Armando Roggio
For ecommerce merchants, new customers mean new business. There are many customer-acquisition tools available to online retail marketers. Five of the best can be pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, social media marketing, marketplaces, and contest marketing. 1. Buy Pay-Per-Cli...
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Customer Retention
Supercharge Your Search Results Page
September 17, 2012 • Armando Roggio
An effective on-site search experience will likely help Internet merchants sell more products. About 43 percent of online shoppers will use a site's own search to find products and make buying decisions, according to a study from Marketing Sherpa. Separately, a Jupiter Research study s...
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Customer Retention
QR Code Mobile App Encourages Repeat Ecommerce Orders
August 15, 2012 • PEC Staff
Ecommerce merchants strive for repeat business from existing customers. We recently spoke with Dr. Alex Heiphetz, owner of AHG, a company that has produced a mobile app, based on QR codes, to encourage repeat orders. The mobile app is QRwave. Practical Ecommerce: What exactly is a QR...
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Customer Retention
3 Ecommerce Personalization Strategies
February 20, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Personalized product recommendations may help shoppers discover products or services more quickly and boost ecommerce sales conversions. There are, perhaps, a few possible definitions of personalization. For some, “personalization is about engaging customers using technology in ways th...
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Customer Retention
4 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Conversions with Better Landing Pages
February 14, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Better landing page content and design may boost ecommerce conversions. A small difference in an online merchant's conversion rate can make a huge difference in that merchant's profit. Consider an online retailer with about 20,000 monthly visits and an average order value — sometimes c...
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Customer Retention
3 Tips for Getting Started with Subscriptions
February 13, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Product and service subscriptions give ecommerce businesses a reliable flow of revenue, predictable inventory requirements, and the opportunity to cut costs. Transitioning from a traditional retail model to a subscription service can be done in small measured steps. What follows are th...
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Customer Retention
Fake Reviews, a Despicable Practice?
January 31, 2012 • Armando Roggio
Online retailers have an ethical and legal responsibility to customers to advertise and market in an honest and legitimate fashion. But sometimes the line separating an excellent marketing idea from a despicable or even illegal business practice is not perfectly clear. Ecommerce market...
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Customer Retention
7 Post-Holiday Revenue Generators
December 29, 2011 • Pamela Hazelton
For many online retailers, the month of January is a slow one. Between consumers paying off Christmas purchases and those taking time to relax, the remaining online shoppers are seeking good deals on accessories and hoping to take advantage of clearance sales. There are ways, however, ...
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Customer Retention
‘Auto Ship’ Programs Generate Repeat Sales; 2 Examples
December 28, 2011 • Louis Camassa
Many successful ecommerce businesses focus their marketing efforts on search engine optimization, shopping feeds, email, affiliates, and pay-per-click advertising. However, websites that sell consumable products — such as supplements, batteries, food, snacks, vitamins, beverages, and c...
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Customer Retention
3 Remarketing Email Campaigns to Grow Repeat Customers
December 15, 2011 • Charles Nicholls
Getting a first purchase from a customer is always satisfying. New data shows, however, just how hard it is to build repeat customers, those that buy over and over again. I’ve just completed one of the most extensive studies ever conducted into the purchasing behavior of website visito...
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Customer Retention
‘Retargeting’ Can Boost Conversions; A Primer
November 22, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Using behavioral retargeting to aim online display and pay-per-click advertisements at shoppers already familiar with a brand or some particular products could significantly boost sales conversions, with some estimates suggesting that retargeted consumers are 70 percent more likely to m...
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Customer Retention
Engage Online Customers with SoLoMo
October 27, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Borrowing a strategy and a catch phrase from mobile applications, marketers can use social, local, and mobile (SoLoMo) promotions together to better engage customers. The term "SoLoMo" used to refer to a mobile smartphone application that combined social networking with some form of lo...
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Customer Retention
5 Tips for Better Landing Pages
September 28, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Landing pages are important online marketing tools and keys to conversion. So almost anything that a marketer can do to improve a landing page's performance will also improve the bottom line. A landing page may be defined as a page on your website where visitors are sent to prompt a co...
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Customer Retention
Understanding Basic A/B Testing
September 21, 2011 • Armando Roggio
A/B testing is a method for measuring the relative effectiveness of certain page content or marketing promotions. When properly applied, A/B testing may help marketers significantly improve conversion rates and establish a culture of improvement. In 2009, blogger Dustin Curtis conducte...
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Customer Retention
14 Customer Feedback Tools for Small Business
June 3, 2011 • Sig Ueland
Feedback is essential to running a business. It tells you what’s working and what’s not. It provides you with fresh ideas on ways to improve your business. And it gives you insight into the needs of your customers. Here is a list of customer feedback tools. Some of the tools collect f...
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Customer Retention
6 Things Consumers Hate About Ecommerce Sites
April 11, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Ecommerce websites should inspire trust, engage customers, and make it easy to shop — ultimately leading to more sales. Unfortunately, too many online stores fall short in one or more areas. In this article, I am going to describe six things consumers — including me — hate to find on e...
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Customer Retention
Consider the Subscription Model for New Revenue
January 25, 2011 • Armando Roggio
Selling to a customer once is great. Selling to a customer every year, month, or week is even better. This mantra of sorts — along with apparent growth in consumer demand and several new subscription-specific billing solutions — is creating opportunity for ecommerce entrepreneurs large...
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Customer Retention
The PEC Review: Ethnio Helps Understand Customers
December 27, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Successful online retailers are often customer-focused service companies rather than just purveyors of products. Put another way, many successful retailers are successful not just because of the products they offer or the effectiveness of their marketing, but rather because they do a g...
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Customer Retention
Advanced Search Techniques Improve Ecommerce Sales
August 4, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Depending on which expert you ask, something like 40 to 70 percent of online shoppers will navigate an ecommerce store using a product search, making on-site search extremely important even if the most conservative estimates are assumed. Not all site search is the same, however. Rather...
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Customer Retention
Using Offsite Trust Marketing to Build Site Traffic
May 19, 2010 • Armando Roggio
Consumers buy from online retailers they trust, and unfortunately, nearly half of American consumers probably don't trust your business. Data from the Edelman Trust Barometer shows that in 2009 only 36 percent of Americans surveyed said that they thought U.S.-based companies were trust...
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Customer Retention
The PeC Review: SeeWhy.com Helps Capture Exiting Shoppers
October 6, 2009 • Armando Roggio
A six year-old, real-time analytics firm seeks to help online merchants boost conversions by enabling stores to follow up with potential customers after those shoppers leave the site or abandon the shopping cart. According to SeeWhy, sending shoppers a customer-service-oriented email a...
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Customer Retention
Ecommerce Know How: Public Relations 101
September 15, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Public relations is the art of managing your business' public reputation through media engagement, and it is an important and often overlooked part of successful ecommerce marketing communications. In public relations (PR) the aim is to build relationships with media outlets and blogge...
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Customer Retention
The PeC Review: Runa Converts Reluctant Website Visitors
August 21, 2009 • Armando Roggio
By some estimates, fewer than 20 percent of online retailers have conversion rates above 5 percent. Most Internet merchants experience sales conversions of only 2-to-3 percent. To compensate for such low conversion rates, many companies make significant advertising investments to boost ...
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Customer Retention
Ecommerce Know-How: Marketing to the Hispanic Community
August 10, 2009 • Armando Roggio
The Hispanic community is one of the fastest growing online consumer segments in the U.S. It represents some 11 percent of the total U.S. online market and it is, therefore, an important segment for ecommerce marketers to consider. According to comScore, an Internet trend tracking firm...
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Customer Retention
Ecommerce Know-How: Turn Customers Into Members
July 14, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Focusing a portion of marketing efforts on reselling existing customers or acquiring frequent shoppers could help boost sales for many online merchants. Often online retail marketing focuses on increasing site traffic and converting visitors. This strategy is really the heart of sellin...
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Customer Retention
PeC Traffic Report: Four Good Web Tools to Identify Traffic-Building Trends
June 11, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Participating in trends that matter to your customers can attract significant website traffic, but knowing what trends to follow (or even how to interact with those trends) is a difficult task. In January of this year, Practical eCommerce published a column about developing customer-ce...
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Customer Retention
Ecommerce Know-How: Six Ways To Improve Your Online Store
May 4, 2009 • Armando Roggio
An online merchant's most important marketing and sales tool is a content-rich, visually interesting, and factually accurate website. In this edition of "eCommerce Know-How," I am going to propose six ways to improve your site, and I am offering these methods exactly five months before...
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Customer Retention
Ecommerce Know-How: Developing a Postcard Campaign
April 15, 2009 • Armando Roggio
A postcard marketing campaign can be inexpensive, and it could increase your store's sales next month. Almost every weekday at about 2 p.m., I trot out to my mailbox, wave at the retired Marine smoking cigarettes on his porch across the street, and collect my U.S. mail. I sort out the...
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Customer Retention
PeC Traffic Report: The Direct Mail Solution
March 2, 2009 • Armando Roggio
Direct mail marketing is one of the oldest forms of modern promotion, but don't let its age deceive. Mailing coupons or even catalogs to potential customers can significantly improve site traffic and sales conversions. While the exact origins of direct mail marketing are in question, t...
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