The growth of ecommerce has meant the world of products and services becoming increasingly accessible. Unlike brick-and-mortar stores that could draw only so many people, an ecommerce establishment can be accessed by millions at any point of time. This advantage, however, seems to be offset by a unique challenge that almost every ecommerce business faces at some point or another:
The one-time buyer.
The one-time buyer is someone who purchases only once from an ecommerce business and does not come back. Here’s a quick look at some common reasons that often lead to the one-time buyer problem.
The ultimate aim of every ecommerce business is to get over the one-time buyer challenge and convert such buyers into loyalists. In this piece, we explore how that can be achieved.
All online purchases create and in turn depend on data. It is how any business gathers, interprets and creates actions based on data, that determines how its customers will respond to its efforts. However, what’s also true is that a considerable number of ecommerce businesses find it highly challenging to gather and organize data.
ACTIONABLE #1
Focus on gathering, processing, analyzing and finally cleaning your data. All the subsequent action steps will lean heavily on this one.
Once you’ve scanned through reams of data and identified all your one-time buyers, you’ll have to seize the opportunities that will potentially make them come back.
Here are a few steps that can help you maximize your efforts at creating opportunities for one-time buyers to come back.
ACTIONABLE #2
Invest time and effort in coming up with an iterative process that focuses on creating a hypothesis, running tests on the hypothesis and verifying the results based on what the data is saying about one-time buyers.
You can have endless data sourced through various processes, but when it’s about converting the one-time buyer, you’ll have to know what to do with it. Data that has not been interpreted and analyzed for insights is practically useless. Additionally, you’ll also need to narrow down the customer segment to be able to understand the data. So, the next step you need to focus on is building insights into your customer retention program.
ACTIONABLE #3
Create small actions to cultivate interest in your brand or business. Look into the data to achieve this - did someone come back only to abandon their cart? Could they be sent an email triggered by this? Is someone browsing through a particular category of products but not buying again? Could they be sent communication that talks of stock replenishment?
Once you’ve figured out small actions to cultivate the interest of the one-and-done segment, it’s time to launch a lifecycle marketing program. This kind of a program will ensure you cover both online and offline touchpoints to connect with this segment.
ACTIONABLE #4
Put parallel focus on achieving an optimal strategy across channels and personalization efforts and tracking incremental improvements through testing.
By running various tests to assess performance across criteria, you arrive at the most workable solutions. This is when you apply the best discoveries from your marketing efforts to deeper use. Here are a few points to remember and implement.
ACTIONABLE #5
Implement a winning marketing campaign, but also look at going beyond. Mobilize your entire organization to make customer-centric decisions, including elevating product offerings and improving overall customer experience.
In the high-stakes action of everyday ecommerce, it’s natural to lose and gain customers. However, if we have to go by statistics, it’s clear that attracting new customers is way more expensive than retaining existing ones. ThinkJar research performed by its founder Esteban Kolsky confirmed that attracting new customers is at least 6 to 7 times more expensive. And this is why, if you can convert one-time buyers into loyalists, it will have a direct impact on your bottom line.
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