Increase Repeat Purchases with These 5 Easy Tips

By Eric Melchor December 14, 2021

Learn how to implement personalized emails that help encourage repeat purchases and result in significant growth.

How you retain your customers and keep them purchasing your products can make or break your business. When it comes to increasing revenue and being more profitable, nothing is more important than repeat purchases.

But it’s tempting to focus on getting new customers to make their first purchase.

However, the focus should not be on the first purchase, but rather on what can be done to retain a customer afterwards. It’s the lifetime value of the customer that brings long-term success.

Research shows that the first six months of your customer’s interactions with your brand are the least profitable. Shopify illustrates this in a simple way with their hypothetical example:

In this graph, we see how profits can change dramatically after only a 5% increase in customer retention. Over a period of five years, a small increase in customer loyalty accumulates significant results.

When customers stay with you for more than 31 months, they can spend up to 67% more on your products or services. Growth from repeat purchases is almost impossible to match if you just focus on acquiring new clients.

So how can you encourage repeat purchases?

We’ve come up with 5 ways to increase your customer’s repeat purchases:

1 – Deliver a tailored shopping experience

If you want someone to keep coming back to check out your offer, you can make them feel like the offer is personalized, curated for them. That way, they’ll feel like they can always discover something new, something that will interest them.

By doing this, you can also cut down on browsing time and give your customers what they’re looking for without having to search for it manually. For example, if you generally wear men’s clothing, you’d likely be far more interested in always being shown the men’s line an ecommerce store you’ve already shopped at.

Pull & Bear is a great example of a brand that understands this and offers a personalized browsing experience.

When you first visit their website, you’re faced with a choice between two collections: MAN and WOMAN. Once you choose this, you never have to choose again – every time you go back to their website, you’re shown the items you’ve already shown a preference for. How about that for encouraging a repeat purchase?

2 – Improve your customer response time

What makes good customer service? For most people, it’s the response time – answering all questions as soon as possible ensures that your customers don’t get frustrated. But if you’re the only person on the team, phone calls could become overwhelming. Consider investing in live chat, which reduces the need for phone calls and streamlines the whole experience.

After every interaction, gather customer feedback. Take constructive criticism and use it to improve your process. If a customer notices you’ve changed something they’ve had a problem with for a long time, they’ll be more likely to look at you in a positive light and make a repeat purchase.

3 – Send personalized emails

Another way to impress your customers and encourage repeat purchases is to delight them with personalized emails.

When someone makes their first purchase or subscribes to your service, what they’re really doing is trusting you. They’re trusting in your product, service, knowledge, and the value you’re bringing into their life. Thanking them for this trust is a great way to build deeper relationships and turn first-time buyers into repeat customers.

Related: Learn how to tag subscribers to send personalized emails.

Personalized email element to encourage repeat business

Personalized videos

You can create simple, yet effective messages that speak directly to your customers with personalized videos. In fact, one ecommerce company was able to increase repeat purchases by 21% after they started sending personalized videos to welcome new customers using Bonjoro.

You can integrate Bonjoro with AWeber to easily make and send videos that can increase your return traffic and encourage repeat purchases. 

 Personalized offers

Personalize the offer based on previous purchases. Look at your data to determine if there are any common trends among your customer’s purchases. For example, if your customers typically purchase a specific sweater with a pair of jeans, send an email with the sweater as the offer.

4 – Implement a loyalty program

Another effective way to keep customers coming back to you is through a customer incentive program. This could be in the form of a loyalty program where each purchase awards the customer with a certain number of points. Once the customer reaches a targeted number of points, they can redeem them for a reward like a free product or voucher. 

Also, rewards don’t have to be based on points: You can reward customers for sharing on social media, subscribing to your newsletter, giving you a review, etc.

When creating a loyalty program, keep in mind:

–   What is the behavior I’m rewarding?

–   What are the rewards?

–   How can I easily provide those rewards?

5 – Keep your offer fresh

Why would your customers keep coming back to purchase from you again if you have nothing new to offer? They won’t.

That’s why it’s important to vary the products and always give them something to explore. Amazon does this – once you sign in, you can see recommended products and categories that help you discover new things.

So, for example, if you have a customer that browsed through your selection of smartphone gadgets several times before finally making a purchase, wait until you restock and target them with a new offer after a few weeks. Since this customer likes tech stuff, maybe send them an email highlighting all the new products from this category.

Now it’s your turn to encourage repeat purchases 

Getting a customer to return and make a repeat purchase is one of the best feelings you can have in your online business. Knowing that someone cares about your brand and finds it worthy of their attention and money is proof you’re doing something the right way.

That’s also the reason why returning customers are so hard to get. In such a competitive online landscape, you have to try hard to convince someone that you’re exactly what they need.

So, roll out the red carpet for each customer, address their needs, and give your messages that special personal touch with fun personalized videos.