WooCommerce customer retention is still a challenge faced by many store owners. Retaining your existing customers is as important as acquiring new customers. Retaining customers is also far more cost-effective than attracting new ones. Plus, It is the existing ones who truly give growth to your business.
A study conducted by Bain & Company shows that a 5% increase in customer retention generates more than 25% increase in profits. This shows how important it is to boost customer retention in WooCommerce.
In this blog, we have put forth the 7 proven strategies for WooCommerce customer retention and top plugins to build a customer retention program in WooCommerce.
Let’s get started!
Improve your customer retention rates by showing upsells and cross-sells using UpsellWP.
7 Proven WooCommerce Customer Retention Strategies
Here are the 7 WooCommerce customer retention strategies that actually work.
1. Personalized Shopping Experience
Personalization is a powerful WooCommerce customer retention strategy where you can make customers feel valued and encourage repeat purchases from your business. You can personalize their shopping experience by offering related product recommendations, compelling offers, and targeted emails.
How to Implement it?
- Suggest related product suggestions based on the customer’s previous purchases, current browsing history, and interests.
- Offer personalized discount codes based on the customer type and their shopping history.
- Display products that are frequently bought together, complementary products, next-order coupons, and more to yield repeat purchases.
Related read: Best WooCommerce frequently bought together plugins.
2. Exclusive Discounts and Deals
Customers love a good deal, and they usually don’t ignore it. Exclusive offers are a great way to keep customers loyal and engaged with your product. This way, you can drive additional sales, recover abandoned carts, boost conversion rates, and achieve WooCommerce customer retention.
How to Implement it?
- Offer special discounts and deals to customers who are already a part of your loyalty program.
- Send personalized holiday offers to encourage purchases.
- When a customer abandons their cart, send an email offering a discount and encourage them to complete the purchase.
3. Loyalty Program
Customers come back either to gain rewards or to redeem the rewards for discounts or freebies. Either way, it drives back customers to your store and improves customer retention. Rewarding customers for their purchases builds a positive relationship and motivates repeat purchases. Plus, it improves customer lifetime value.
How to Implement it?
- Reward customers with points for every purchase, which can later be redeemed for discounts, or free products.
- Offer tier-based rewards so that customers purchase more to reach higher tiers.
- Reward customers on special occasions like birthdays and anniversaries to make them feel valued.
4. Automated Follow-Ups
Email follow-ups are a great way to keep your customers engaged with your store. You can send personalized offers, new arrivals, updates, and post-purchase follow-ups to always stay visible in their inbox and remind them of your brand when it comes to purchase.
How to Implement it?
- Segment customers based on purchase actions and interests to send more personalized emails.
- Automate welcome series, abandoned cart reminders, re-engagement emails, and more.
- Integrate compelling upsell and cross-sell offers in the emails.
Related read: Best WooCommerce cross-sell plugins.
5. Post-Purchase Engagement
Engaging with customers after their primary purchase plays a significant role in driving them back to your store for subsequent purchases. Communicating with your customers after the sale fosters long-term rapport and customer loyalty. It also creates a positive image of your brand.
How to Implement it?
- Recommend post-purchase product suggestions after their first purchase.
- Show related products on the thank you page of your online store.
- Send thank you emails and ask for product reviews and feedback.
Show attractive upsell offers even after checkout using UpsellWP’s post-purchase upsell feature and boost your retention rates.
6. Integrate Social Proof
Customers retain only when your products/services are genuine and trustworthy. When they see positive feedback, they are more likely to trust and return for future purchases. So integrating social proofs such as ratings, customer reviews, and testimonials builds trust with existing customers.
How to Implement it?
- Encourage your existing customers to leave a review after their purchase.
- Place customer reviews and ratings on the product page of your store.
- Show data on recent purchases by other customers like ‘50 people just bought it’
7. Optimize for Mobile Devices
Optimizing your online store for mobile view is crucial for WooCommerce customer retention as tremendous customers use mobile devices for shopping. This enhances both customer retention and their shopping experience.
How to Implement it?
- Choose themes that automatically adjust to mobile screen sizes.
- Test your store site on multiple devices to ensure ease of navigation, fast loading, and a simple checkout process.
- Use one-click checkout options to enhance convenience for mobile shoppers.
Related read: Best WooCommerce checkout plugins for faster checkout process.
With these 7 WooCommerce customer retention strategies in action, you can convert one-time buyers into loyal customers. This ultimately increases the customer lifetime value of your store.
How to Build a WooCommerce Customer Retention Program?
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create an effective WooCommerce customer retention program:
Step 1: You must first analyze and understand your current customers. Study their purchase behaviour, pattern and determine customers who are likely to return to your store.
Step 2: Define your retention goals like increasing customer retention rate or boosting repeat purchase frequency. This way, you can stay focused and on track with your customer retention program.
Step 3: Segment your customers based on demographics, behavior, and purchase history to implement separate marketing strategies for each group.
Step 4: Reward your loyal customers with incentives like points, discounts, free products, or free shipping. This drastically improves customer loyalty and boosts retention rates.
Step 5: Always keep your customers updated and engaged with automated email campaigns. Send post-purchase emails, and thank you emails to enhance your relationships with customers.
Step 6: Customer service plays a central role in retention as this is where you directly contact customers. Offer fast, responsive support to improve customer satisfaction. This way, they’ll ultimately return to your store for more.
Step 7: You need to consistently evaluate and adjust your customer retention program for maximum output. Regularly monitor key metrics, gather customer feedback, and make necessary modifications to run a successful WooCommerce customer retention program.
By integrating the above-discussed customer retention strategies with these 7 steps, you can improve your customer retention rate to a greater level.
Best WooCommerce Plugins to Boost Customer Retention
Some of the best WooCommerce plugins to boost customer retention are listed below.
1. UpsellWP
UpsellWP is the best WooCommerce upsell plugin to boost your customer retention. It is richly built with features to show upsells, cross-sell suggestions, order bumps, popups, and more. You can suggest related product suggestions right from the shop page to the thank you page of your store.
This offers a personalized shopping experience while encouraging additional purchases and enhancing your WooCommerce customer retention.
UpsellWP is available for free with basic features. You can purchase the paid plan for $69/year.
2. Retainful
With Retainful, you can enhance your WooCommerce customer retention by constantly updating and informing them through email marketing strategies. You can also recover abandoned carts by reminding customers through cart recovery emails.
You can personalize customer’s experiences through welcome series, post-purchase follow-ups, thank-you emails, and more. This enhances customer satisfaction which ultimately boosts retention rates.
Retainful is available for free. Paid plan starts from $19/month.
3. WPLoyalty
WPLoyalty is a points and rewards loyalty program plugin that is crucial in increasing WooCommerce customer retention. You can reward customers for actions like sign-up, purchasing, writing reviews, and more.
This plugin offers flexible reward types such as points, rewards, coupons, free shipping, and freebies. It is also available for free. Paid plan starts from $99/year.
We recommend these 3 free WooCommerce plugins to implement the best strategies we discussed above to boost your customer retention rates.
Key Metrics to Measure WooCommerce Customer Retention Success
Continuously tracking key metrics for WooCommerce customer retention is important to determine what’s working and where improvements can be made for maximum output. Some of the key metrics to focus on are:
1. Customer Retention Rate (CRR)
It’s the first and foremost crucial metric to keep track of to analyze how well you’re retaining customers. It shows the percentage of customers who make repeat purchases at a specific time. A high retention rate shows that customers are satisfied and are interested in purchasing more from your store.
How to calculate?
2. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
WooCommerce customer retention boosts CLV and vice-versa. CLV is the total revenue you gain from a customer throughout their purchases from your business.
How to calculate?
3. Repeat Purchase Rate (RPR)
This is an important indicator for determining customer satisfaction level and loyalty. It is the percentage of customers who make additional purchases or return to your store for a second purchase.
How to calculate?
Suggesting upsell and cross-sell recommendations is one way to boost repeat purchase rates. To do so, we recommend you use UpsellWP for its A-Z features.
4. Churn Rate
It is the percentage of customers who stopped purchasing from your store during a specific time frame. A lower churn rate is a good sign that your WooCommerce customer retention strategies are better performing and customers are satisfied.
How to calculate?
5. Average Order Value (AOV)
It is an essential metric to understand the purchase behavior of customers and make necessary optimizations in your retention techniques. AOV is the average dollar spent to make a purchase. A higher AOV indicates that your customer retention techniques are effective and driving maximum results.
How to calculate?
Recommend related products based on customer’s shopping preferences and improve your retention rates using UpsellWP.
Sum Up!
Beyond sales, retaining your customers is important for any business in the long run. With these 7 WooCommerce customer retention strategies and steps to create a customer retention program, you can effortlessly retain your customers. In addition to customer retention, you can also enhance your customer’s shopping journey and keep them engaged with your brand.
Related reads:
- Best ways to increase average order value
- Best strategies to increase WooCommerce sales
- Best strategies to increase sales with one-click upsells
In general, a good customer retention rate falls between 20% and 30%. However, highly functioning eCommerce stores can achieve 35-40% retention rates.
It is the total revenue a customer is expected to generate for your store over a course of their relationship with your brand.
To make your customers come back to B2C eCommerce:
1. Offer excellent customer support
2. Suggest attractive product recommendations
3. Create engaging content on social media
4. Set referral programs
1. Go to WooCommerce -> Reports
2. Under the customers tab -> Customer Overview
Here you can see the status of the customer (New or returning)
A realistic customer retention rate is between 20% and 30%.
Yes, a 40% customer retention rate is considered as good and is a sign of solid customer loyalty and repeat business.
