Here is the second part of how to increase the purchase frequency for E-commerce topic:
3. The interesting deal to engage customers to come more frequently
Nowadays, offers and deals are great ways to encourage customers to buy more in your store but using them in the wrong way will not bring any profit but hurt your brand. To gain the advantages of offers and reduce the drawback of this powerful tool, I advise you some tricks to make it more effective based on scarcity.
Limit time to use: Giving an offer which is valid forever can’t encourage anyone to use it. With more time to use, customers will have more time to consider, calculate the real benefit and their current demand of your products. However, customers are too busy with their daily life, your offer will be completely removed from their mind after a few days. Finally, you get no sale from your discount campaign!
To face with this issue, I often limit the time to use coupons. In my experience, the best valid period to set is up to 7 days. I had a project with 60% of successful coupons with only 2 hours for customers to use, you can apply some kind of time limitation such as:
- 1 hour
- 6 hours
- 1 day = 24 hours
- 3 days
- 7 days
- …..
Limit the quantity: Another trick to increase the effect of using offers is limiting the quantity. In short words, this trick focuses on scarcity too, the offer won’t be though as valuable if it can be used by anyone. Customers are tired with common discounts which are useless and doesn’t bring the real benefit to them. You have to stand out of the common discount’s mess out there, prove that your discount is exclusive, valuable and for customers benefit not your sale.
One of my projects in the past limit the participation is just under 100 first customers brought a huge number of new orders to my partners. I offered 100 first customers 70% discount and in the end, I got 700 orders from over 600 new customers. This project helped me realise that customers want to achieve something is difficult and highly profitable. And my success was based on the difficulty ( customers have to buy early to be in 100 first order group) and the high benefit ( a massive discount at 70%).
Limit the event: What do you think about a company offer big deal once or twice a week? Of course, their offers are just garbage, no one want them and they are trying to cheat customers by some low-quality products. Stay away!
Yes, it is the thinking of customers when you treat them like that. So instead of spamming customers emails by daily offers, you can invest time to focus on some special event such as birthday voucher, Christmas voucher, First sale voucher ….. This will make your customers feel your deal is not common and they can miss this big deal if they want to wait for the latter one, remember, make your offer valuable and reasonable!
4. Using reminder system to drive more frequency customers
After a specific time which depends on each business from the last sale of your customers, it’s necessary to say we miss you to them!
Here is an example of Chico’s We miss you reminder email:
As you know, we have to spend too much to attract new customers to leave their contact such as phone, email, address …. but what about saving money to drive more sale from current customers by sending them a reminder email like this?
With customers who have already purchased your products and feel satisfied with your quality, it’s easier to persuade them to buy from you again, you just have to suggest a suitable one with a competitive price to get the next sale.
5. Automatically extend the contract with more sale to have an auto – frequency
This is a very popular marketing plan of hosting and domain providers who always want their customers to renew orders longer and longer.
Here is an example from Godady.com a famous domain provider with their auto renew option.
With this option, customers don’t have to come to GoDaddy once a year for renewing their domain, GoDaddy will automatically do this for them. This option does not only save time and effort for customers but avoid the lock down domain issue because customers forget to renew her/his domain.
With these convenient & saving benefit, I’m sure that no customer can deny it!
So we have finished 2 parts of the guide: How to increase the purchase frequency for your E-commerce store
