How to continue making money off holiday shoppers long into the new year

The holiday season is great – it’s the busiest time for online shops and helps us end the year on a good note.

But the period after that is quite hard. People close their wallets and pretty much only return unwanted gifts from their aunts.

Even so, you have to try and retain holiday shoppers as customers. They’re the best starting point for regular business in the new year and you should be engaging them, nurturing and pushing at the right times to get repeat orders.

Here are our suggestions for retention strategies after the holidays.

You know about ecommerce CRM software and maybe considered getting to use one. Ecommerce is an unique and booming industry, and software solutions are fighting for your attention. Customer relationship management is becoming the differentiation between brands that nail marketing and those that just resort to the blanket approach.

But what will it give you and how to choose it? Big and small software providers with general or niche solutions… Let us help you find the best CRM for ecommerce.

13 customer segments you can identify and tailor your marketing messages for

You hear over and over that you should not be doing one-size-fits-all marketing but segmenting customers and tailoring messages instead.

Why?

Because segmenting customers based on their behavior eliminates the guesswork – they literally show you what marketing works with them so you can just replicate it and get results.

Having a community of power users and brand advocates around your products is awesome and stimulates customer loyalty. I wanted to dive into what it takes to build such a community, where to start, and how it impacts retention rates and referral marketing.

I had the chance to talk to one of the coolest Shopify experts – Jonathan Kennedy of HeyCarson.com, an agency helping Shopify store owners with small tasks on their sites.

What makes a successful brand community?

• Shared interests and value among members and the brand
• Lead with authenticity and honesty
• Bringing other like-minded brands in, too
• Build it when you have a good, stable product
• Fueled by brand advocates
• High activity
• Keeping it clean, pleasant and not spammy

Top WooCommerce CRMs compared

A CRM sounds so corporate! But big companies’ only chance to be close to their customers is organizing all the data they have about them and using it wisely. You can’t form any relationship if your info is scattered and unusable.

Why do you need an WooCommerce CRM at all?

We talked to the owners and managers of WooCommerce stores of different sizes about what made them look for such a tool and what they expect from a CRM.

They all revolved around the following:

If you don’t plan on working on retaining customers today, you’re losing money. Every customer you fail to keep has to be compensated for with 5 new acquired (in the US, or 7 in Europe).

The same report claims that about 40% of revenue for US online stores comes from repeat customers, although they make up only around 8% of the traffic.

While customer acquisition is vital in the initial stage, it turns into a rat race if it’s the main source of business. We like to compare aggressive acquisition to dating where you have to always impress someone new as opposed to being in a long-term relationship where care keeps the fire up.

Wherever you look for advice on retention, you see remarketing, extraordinary customer service, reactivating emails and the rest of the usual suspects.

However, we know you need shortcuts too.