Getting new customer’s is more and more expensive with the highly competition of other brands, spending more money on advertising or decrease the price to attract customers from competitors isn’t an intelligent long-term strategy. How to develop your business with just your current customers to save the budget? There are 2 ways to grow your market without the dependence of new customers acquisition: Increase customer’s value in each order or lifetime circle.
Increasing customer’s value in each order means with your promotion, customers tend to buy more each time they visit your store. For example, some customers often buy bread from your store every week for their breakfast and you have too many eggs that need to sell out this month. Each time go to your store, they will buy both these products with a combo like discount 10% on total order if they buy bread with eggs from your store. A delicious bread with eggs each morning at a lower price a good offer for every person who won’t miss this offer.
Increasing customer’s value in lifetime circle is a solution to call your customers come back to your store and purchase more frequently. There are a number of customers usually buy from your store while others don’t purchase frequently and is there any moment you ask yourself how to get more net profit from who rarely visit your store?
In this post, we will dig deeply this issue to find the new way to drive infrequently customers back!
1. What is purchase frequency?
Purchase frequency is a metric to describe how frequently customers purchase from your store. With this figure, you can look back to your store’s performance and decide to create a strategy to grow up it.
Purchase frequency metric can be calculated by this formula:
Purchase frequency rate= Total orders/ Total unique customers
You can apply this formula for weekly, monthly calculation or total sale in a year. To identify the purchase frequency rate you have to extract total orders number and total unique customers from sale report. Unique customers are the number of different customers has purchased from your store and there is no duplicated issue. We count 1 for 1 specific customers without caring about how many products, how many times that he buy from us. With this metric you can understand more about your customer’s behavior as well as the marketing effectuation.
Another metric that you have to calculate in this post is the repeat customers metric.
Repeat customers rate = Repeat customer’s number/ Total unique customers
It’s similar to the first formula, with this second one, you can use for the weekly, monthly or yearly purpose. There are 2 numbers that you have to extract from sale report are Repeat customer’s number and Total unique customer’s number. This metric is the best measure tool to value the loyalty program of your business as well as how effectively you use your money for retaining current customers.
The ideal ratio is range from 25% to 45% for an acceptable loyalty marketing campaign.
How to know how long customers come back to your store?
It’s time to dig deeply to each customer, how to know the average time that customers will come back again to buy a new product after the first one.
365 days/ Purchase frequency = Purchase circle time.
To calculate the purchase circle time you have to estimate the Purchase frequency ratio with the first formula. With this metric you can have the average period we have to wait to see another sale from that customer.
2. How to increase the purchase frequency
Build up the friendly connection gradually
Right after customers finishing his order with your store, it’s possible that they will buy from other to try new service out there. Your mission is letting them know that only you are the most trustworthy seller as well as the friend by establishing a friendship with them through social posts, emails, blog posts … Showing off with customers that with you, they a special and unique, nothing can exchange them.
Daily or weekly emails about some tips and trick around your products or some new and niche one which may be suitable with them.
Here is an example:
With a personalized email introducing new product can be fit with them at a lower cost by discount is an ideal way to have another sale from your current customers. You can make a schedule for sending news letter email to your customers more frequently without annoy them.
Using Loyalty program for more repeat customers
Nowadays, loyalty program seems to be the most effective way to increase the frequency arriving of customers. In many meaningful ways they receive reward points, they will be more likely to choose your brand instead of other competitors out there. 
With the motivation from store owners, customers tend to buy more to get more points which can be redeemed at check out for the discount. Customers are smart, why they have to spend $100 for the same number of products from 2 suppliers while they can pay just only $90 for it if they buy all the product from just 1 supplier? The rule here is that if customers are loyal with your brand, you should reward them for it by exclusive benefits.
Magestore offers reward point system which can manage a loyalty program for every store. You can choose to reward customers by first order or special holidays …. in this way, you can make your loyalty program become more interesting and engaging with customers.
