Prefer to read? Check out an edited transcript of this video below:
Introduction: How to Build Customer Loyalty & Retention
Hi, my name is Aaron Ellis and I’m a Senior Customer Success Manager at Syte. Thanks for joining me for our third installment of BFCM Labs. What I want to cover today is customer retention and loyalty during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
During this period, we’re going to see a large influx of shoppers come to our website. We need to make sure that we plan ahead and set some strategies in order to capitalize during this influx of users. So what we’re going to cover are three important steps to keep in mind when planning for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Let’s get into it!
Step 1: Define Your Goals
The best place to start is defining your goals. So what we want to do is go back and within the broad topic of customer retention and brand loyalty, choose a definitive KPI to focus on. Some of these KPIs could be as simple as collecting new user emails, and some could be as complicated as raising the lifetime value of your users moving on from this point. We can also set time-based goals, meaning looking to convert a shopper within a specific time frame from the original purchase or having a shopper return on a specific date – whether it be a sale or another high traffic period.
Step 2: Create Memorable Search & Discovery Journeys
Discoverability is everything. At the end of the day, it’s going to be the first impression for new users and what you want to do is ensure that the customer experience, the user experience of your website, is not only seamless but every product is accessible — and accessible in a functional manner. Why that’s so critical is because you’re at the top of the funnel and if you’re not able to serve the right product to the right shopper at the right time, you’re going to lose them — potentially forever.
So, how can you improve discoverability?
You want to leverage tools such as visual search on your website to help cater to users who can’t textualize or verbalize what they’re trying to find. You also want to make sure that your product listing pages and your search results are sorted in a logical manner that will give your users the highest-converting items with lower return rates during this period. Because every action that your user takes is going to speak volumes on that first visit and it’s really crucial because we’re going to have a lot of new users during Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
Step 3: Provide Context-Based Personalization
Personalization helps to increase loyalty and retention quite simply by providing the right product to the right user at the right time.
So going back to our first point, we need to define the segment that we’re targeting, the shopper that we’re targeting. And with those definitions, we should be able to create a profile of that shopper. Now if we understand the profile of that shopper, we can use previous shopping habits — whether it’s of that shopper specifically or other users who have been on similar shopping paths — and then leverage that purchasing history to offer really, really relevant recommendations for that shopper in that period of time. So it’s not just history, but it’s also very relevant for what they’re looking at in this specific moment.
Summary
The three key takeaways from this Black Friday Cyber Monday video are quite simple:
First, we want to define the users that we’re targeting and set KPIs for this BFCM.
Once we have those KPIs defined, we want to make sure that the user experience is stellar. We want our shoppers to seamlessly find the products that they’re looking for.
Third, provide not only relevant recommendations but highly targeted recommendations for your users. Leverage live data. Leverage the knowledge you have of your shoppers in order to provide those targeted recommendations.
If we cover all the steps discussed today, we’ll have a very successful Black Friday not only this year, but in the years ahead. Thank you so much for joining me on BFCM Labs. Looking forward to the next one!