June 16, 2020

Seven Tips to Retain High-Value Customers with Digital Marketing

Ricardas Montvila, Senior Director of Global Strategy at Mapp, gives seven tips on retaining high-value customers.

There are many ways to improve your digital marketing in order to grow revenue and increase customer engagement. The challenge, however, is picking the right tactics – the ones that will provide the most uplift with the least amount of effort.

More importantly, you need to find the ones that will not compromise the future growth of your business.

One opportunity that is often forgotten in digital marketing is the retention of your existing high-value customers. Remember – by increasing customer retention rates by five per cent, you can increase profits by 25 per cent to 95 per cent. So, you are missing a trick if you focus most or all of your marketing efforts on acquiring new customers.

The goal is to turn one- or two-time purchasers into loyal fans who will act as advocates for your brand. The magic bullet here is the customer experience: a positive experience is guaranteed to boost retention.

Here are seven tips that can help you to turn one-time purchasers into true fans.

1. Email re-engagement

If it looks as though a customer has abandoned their purchasing process, send messages to them. In particular, you should do this where the customer’s activities have indicated considerable intent to complete a purchase that is of significant value to both the brand and the customer. In doing this, you can help to retain valuable customers while also reducing call-centre enquiries by pre-empting customer questions.

2. Abandoned basket

Send an automated email message or a sequence of messages to customers that started filling their basket but have not completed the checkout process.

Recover lost sales by reminding customers about items left in their basket or cart.

Ensure the basket is automatically rebuilt when customers click on the link in the email, because it is not a great experience when customers click on a ”View Basket” link in an email, just to find their basket is empty!

3. Exit intent

When it looks like a prospective customer is about to leave the page without completing their desired goal, display an overlay/pop-up. This can be triggered either when the customer is moving the mouse to close the tab, or when AI is predicting a high likelihood of the session being abandoned. The outcomes of this tactic include decreased session churn, alongside decreased cost of retargeting customers with paid media.

4. Churn prevention

You should aim to re-engage customers that are very likely to churn, something that may be obvious because they have disengaged with your newsletter communications or are exhibiting a significant drop in repeat purchase rates. Churn prevention campaigns are a highly cost-effective way to retain customers that otherwise may stop engaging with you altogether. This will definitely help you to increase your customer retention and customer lifetime value.

Want to bring your session churn down? Add in a display overlay that is triggered when the customer moves the mouse close to the tab, to prevent your prospects leaving without completing the desired goal.

5. Basket top-up

Want to increase your average basket size? Offer products that are frequently purchased together with the main item on the check-out page. Incentivise your customers that are about to check out to increase their basket size with a timely and personalised offer. For example, calculate how much more they need to spend to qualify for free shipping and suggest recommended products that are just above the price point to qualify them for this offer.

Offer supplementary products on the checkout page that are either part of the same range, or products that are frequently purchased together with the main item in the basket. Ensure the recommended add-on products are within the same relative price range as the products already in the basket. You don’t want to be recommending £150 shoes with a £50 dress.

6. On-site personalisation

Decease your website bounce rates by showing your customers something they’re interested in. Use interaction context and customer profiles to personalise your banners and blocks of content. Personalise content based on interaction context, as well as the customer profile. Deliver individualised teaser graphics, attention-grabbing layers, and interactive web elements. Recommend the best products and content based on previous purchase history, as well as viewed products across multiple visits and interactions. This will ensure that customers’ web experience reflects the desired outcomes.

7. Improve rather than replace

Improve your digital marketing, rather than replace your existing solution. Consider taking on an insight-led customer engagement platform that will ensure your digital marketing activities are fueled by insights rather than gut feeling.

These tactics are provided from Mapp’s Digital Marketing Playbook, a list of 100 straight-forward and easy-to-implement digital marketing tactics that are proven to deliver results. You just have to pick what your objectives are for the next 12 months and this playbook will guide you through the strategies on which you should focus.


Written by

Ricardas Montvila,
VP, Global Strategy at Mapp Digital