Understanding Customer Behavior
What your customer wants today, is not what they wanted yesterday. Think about that - just because you offered the last season’s collection at a discounted price doesn’t mean it’s going to fly off your shelves this week too. Which means, knowing your customer is sort of a myth, but understanding how their behaviour changes with each day is not. People in the fashion world are used to second-guessing customers by simply looking at patterns - but not everyone has that innate sense.
Now, let’s say, you’ve finally figured out how to get into the psyche of your audience. If they walk into your store because they’ve seen a new launch announcement on social media, you have to know how to keep them engaged. What do they usually like buying from you. Do they seem like the kind of people who’d appreciate a “we missed you.
” message. Have they recently purchased something from your competitors instead. There are so many questions to ask when it comes to understanding the journey of a buyer - and with tools that help you automate some of these tasks, you can focus on answering the most important ones instead. The thing about knowing what your buyer wants is that you could either make it or break it for them.
Sometimes, an upsell can do wonders for both your business and their shopping experience, other times, it could leave them with a sour taste in their mouth because you tried to cross-sell with something irrelevant or unnecessary. If there’s anything I’ve learnt over the years, it’s that brands who treat their customers like real people and actually care about them are the ones who tend to fare better. Businesses built on integrity and trust will always survive any wave of uncertainty - even if this means engaging in healthy competition with other brands.
Of course, there’s only so much we can do as businesses sometimes - people change their minds all the time and sometimes all we can do is listen and watch. More or less.
How else do we learn.
Creating Irresistible Offers
There’s something about the right offer at the right time that has shoppers acting like dolphins around a tuna net. Well, not that bad. But you know what I mean.
The temptation becomes too difficult to resist. In retail, making frequent sales often comes down to how good your offers are. People know what they want and if your price is close to what they’re willing to pay, and if there’s just a little bit extra thrown in, they will buy it.
But the key thing about an irresistible offer is that it needs to feel special and limited in some way. If you’re constantly running offers, customers get desensitised and go into this ‘meh’ mode. This is exactly why brands should be careful about their messaging - being too pushy or being seen as always on sale makes you seem like a ‘discount’ brand which doesn’t work if you’re going for premium or even affordable luxury.
And then there’s the question of value. If someone is getting something free with their purchase or if there’s an exclusive discount code because it’s payday Friday, for instance, you need to make them believe that you’re making a special exception for them. For creating irresistible offers, brands need to put themselves in their customers’ shoes - will they take a second look at this offer. Is it something that would make them excited to buy.
I mean sure, we all love a deal but those deals can’t be happening all the time because they don’t feel special anymore. There’s an art to creating irresistible offers and while there are a few rules to keep in mind, it also comes down to understanding who your customer is and what would appeal to them.
Leveraging Email Marketing
I've noticed email marketing is one of those things that people love to hate, but still works. And when it comes to making customers purchase again and again, you’d be hard pressed to find anything quite as cost effective or easy to set up. Done well, email outreach can absolutely help you sell more often - especially for brands whose average order value is seldom lower. There’s a fine line, though - too much, and you’re an inbox spammer; too little and your customer’s already forgotten they ever purchased from you in the first place.
And it can be a tad tricky to get right without all the fancy tools. What I’ve found works fairly well is using your CRM’s filters and custom tags to segment and personalise your messaging - even if it means sending a few lists out instead of just one.
The real kicker here is timeliness. You don’t want to send out a batch email to everyone that talks about a reorder when only half the people receiving it have received their products yet. Automated emails are quite clever in this regard - allowing you to set up a sequence based on triggers such as products purchased or time elapsed since delivery - but there’s lots of ways you could do this manually as well. Try having ready-to-send email templates that don’t sound as boring or formulaic, and schedule them for when a customer might actually need to repurchase from you again.
It seems like some brands have got this so spot-on that customers will wait for an order confirmation or scheduled reorder mail before they make the next purchase. Don’t go rushing into it though, at the risk of annoying or overwhelming them with too many emails. You’ll want something that leaves enough room for them to breathe and enjoy your products while also keeping you top-of-mind (when done right).
Implementing Loyalty Programs
A loyalty program is a bit like a friendship bracelet. I Suppose it's meant to bind customers to you, making them feel unique and valued. It adds sparkle and fun to the fairly dismal transactional process of shopping as a client.
You give them things for free (such as points or dollars-off discounts) because they're special (they buy your stuff). You keep track of their spending, what they look at, and how frequently they browse your store. More or less.
I think it seems like a loyalty programme can kind of sound a bit complicated and perhaps not worth it unless you run a larger business, but you'd be wrong. Customers are quite a bit typically more likely to do more shopping at your store if you're giving them cashback or fun birthday gifts just for being who they are. After all, think about what positive reinforcement does to the human psyche; we feel seen and validated.
You may now choose to sign up for a loyalty programme with a third party or create your own. Either way, a little goes a long way.
Utilizing Social Proof and Reviews
Seems like people are quite busy and have less time to check every single review or listen to the salesperson. But, almost everyone trusts the experiences of other customers. You can say customers are a bit more, umm, honest about the product than any company could ever be.
Sure, there is a chance you might stumble across someone who was only too happy to leave negative feedback (maybe because they were having a bad day), but more often than not these reviews are honest. We have all heard about websites where customers blindly follow what influencers and brand ambassadors tell them. Yes, you could use that to your advantage, but that will take a chunk out of your marketing budget. On the other hand, you could always encourage your loyal customers to share their experience on your website and social media platforms with their network.
Create the environment for them to become your unofficial brand ambassador. It is seldom always better when someone vouches for your product based on their first-hand experience rather than someone who’s been paid for it. Your potential customers will also believe it more readily than if it was shared by an influencer or the company itself. But then again there is no harm in using all three methods - brand ambassadors, influencers and user-generated content - as part of your marketing plan.
Each has its own benefits with user-generated content having a slightly bigger advantage if you’re looking for frequent purchases from existing customers and attracting new ones at a regular rate. Sort of.
Optimizing the Purchase Experience
We might have all had that experience where buying something seemed more difficult than it needed to be. Slow loading, confusing buttons, long wait times - we would probably just close the tab and decide it wasn’t even worth the effort. But I think when everything goes smoothly, you feel like you’ve made a good decision and look forward to doing it again.
Any brand or business that can make purchasing easy and pleasant can almost guarantee that a customer will come back for more. And it’s usually a combination of things. To start with, browsing has to be fun and seamless - you don’t want your customers to feel like they’re lost or frustrated before they’ve even bought anything.
More or less. And then come easy payments, good shipping partners and quick turnarounds.
The less effort your customer has to put into their purchase, the more likely they are to feel positively about their experience. And this goes beyond just the online purchase as well. When it comes to clothing especially, offering free in-store pick up is an option that can help ease the uncertainty of buying online while also giving people a real world look at what you have on display.
Other techniques like AR try-on or virtual shopping assistants also go a long way in making the purchase experience interesting and memorable. Although I think there is a growing preference for self-service in some ways, people still need personal touches at every step. Personalisation can change how a person feels about their purchase and make them come back to explore again.
More or less. And optimising the entire purchase journey from browsing, to trying on, to carting and payment is really what makes people want to shop from you again.