A report by Order­Dy­nam­ics has likened the chal­lenges of ecom­merce to those of mod­ern dat­ing. While repeat cus­tomers are cru­cial for gen­er­at­ing healthy rev­enues, retail­ers often find them­selves fish­ing for a sec­ond “date.” As with dat­ing, the keys to suc­cess for brands is to forge mean­ing­ful con­nec­tions (enabling effec­tive per­son­al­iza­tion), to be them­selves, and to play their cards right with the nature and fre­quen­cy of their com­mu­ni­ca­tions to give them­selves the best chance of win­ning con­sumers’ hearts.

“Retail­ing today is a lot like dat­ing.” That’s accord­ing to a report by Order­Dy­nam­ics. Cer­tain­ly there are some strik­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties. After all, the first chal­lenge in both retail­ing and dat­ing is that “first you have to attract cus­tomers. Once they’ve made an ini­tial pur­chase (or com­mit­ted to a first date) you need to con­vince them to make sub­se­quent pur­chas­es (or go out with you again).”

The prob­lem for both retail­ers and per­pet­u­al sin­gle­tons is often the same: secur­ing that sec­ond “date.” For retail­ers, fre­quent, repeat cus­tomers are a huge part of run­ning a suc­cess­ful busi­ness.

Research by Order­Dy­nam­ics revealed that “cus­tomer spend usu­al­ly increas­es over the course of [a brand] rela­tion­ship,” and “an analy­sis of the pur­chas­ing pat­terns of more than 4 mil­lion con­sumers across a sam­ple of 20 retail­ers revealed a pos­i­tive cor­re­la­tion between the num­ber of pur­chas­es, [and] Aver­age Order Val­ue (AOV)”. For exam­ple, one retail­er report­ed that the fifth pur­chase from loy­al cus­tomers is, on aver­age, 30 per­cent high­er than pur­chas­es from new cus­tomers.

Wooing Customers: The 4 Types Of Retailers

Order­Dy­nam­ics iden­ti­fied four dif­fer­ent kinds of retail­ers, based on how often they fol­lowup with con­sumers who signed up for a mail­ing list:

• Jil­ters: 55 per­cent of retail­ers did­n’t send any fol­lowup.
• Stalk­ers: 7 per­cent of the retail­ers sent up to 17 emails in a four-week peri­od.
• Des­per­a­dos: 15 of retail­ers sent between six and 10 emails in a four week peri­od on aver­age.
• The cooly keen: 46 per­cent of retail­ers sent between one and five emails in a four-week peri­od.

Are Customers Interested?

Are retail­ers advances going unno­ticed? Sev­en­ty-four per­cent of shop­pers said they read emails from retail­ers. Of those, how often do shop­pers read retail­er emails?

• Always: 22 per­cent.
• Usu­al­ly: 46 per­cent.
• Nev­er: 8 per­cent.

What can get cus­tomers more inter­est­ed?

1. Personalization

The key to improv­ing these open rates is greater per­son­al­iza­tion. After all, there’s no big­ger turn off than a date who does­n’t seem to lis­ten or con­nect­ed with things that are impor­tant or inter­est­ing to you.

Order­Dy­nam­ic’s report found that:

• 23 per­cent of retail­ers were doing per­son­al­iza­tion well.
• Around 33 per­cent were doing per­son­al­iza­tion poor­ly (one researcher “saved a men’s fleece to the online bas­ket and then received emails about women’s sweaters.” and in anoth­er case “a pet-sup­plies retail­er sent pro­mo­tion­al emails about cat and dog food after [the test user] browsed exclu­sive­ly in the fish and aquat­ics depart­ment.”

Research also revealed this amaz­ing sta­tis­tic: 74% Of Online Retail­ers Send Irrel­e­vant Pro­mo­tions.

A fur­ther 30 per­cent bom­bard con­sumers with irrel­e­vant emails.

The impres­sion it gives is a lack of lis­ten­ing skills on the part of the retail­er. Most con­sumers now expect a lev­el of per­son­al­iza­tion. Not giv­ing con­sumers what they want is a def­i­nite turnoff.

2. Be Yourself

Anoth­er area turn­ing con­sumers off is when retail­ers aren’t them­selves, and over­com­pli­cate things by intro­duc­ing third par­ties.

• Only 15 per­cent of retail­ers offer con­sumers end-to-end order track­ing through their own web­site, with­out involv­ing a third par­ty.

This is often a deal-break­er for con­sumers:

• 56 per­cent of shop­pers want order track­ing exclu­sive­ly via the retail­er’s own plat­form.
• 19 per­cent of con­sumers don’t mind hear­ing from mul­ti­ple par­ties about an order, includ­ing deliv­ery com­pa­nies.

3. Take It To The Next Level

Some retail­ers play hard to get, but oth­ers wear their hearts on their sleeves. Many retail­ers were eager to take it to the next lev­el with cus­tomers who had browsed the site or added items to a bas­ket:

• 44 per­cent of retail­ers sent a fol­low-up email offer­ing an incen­tive for pur­chase with­in four weeks.

As dat­ing can be, it’s often a game of fre­quen­cy.

• 32 per­cent of those retail­ers offered an incen­tive straight away.
• 5 per­cent wait a day and 6 per­cent leav­ing it a week or longer (these retail­ers obvi­ous­ly are wait­ing to see if the cus­tomers to come to them first).

Why Long-Term Loyalty Is So Valuable

The ulti­mate reward for a retail­er that man­ages to woo con­sumers is the long-term loy­al­ty that encour­ages a brand-cus­tomer rela­tion­ship to blos­som. A Smarter Insights arti­cle recent­ly sum­ma­rized that win­ning this kind of loy­al­ty requires per­son­al­iza­tion, rewards, and dis­counts.

Research quot­ed in the arti­cle and researched by Coniq backs up Order­Dy­nam­ics find­ings. They found that con­sumers were two times more like­ly to return with a loy­al­ty card. Loy­al­ty habits showed that 80 per­cent of 1,000 cus­tomers would return if they were offered a loy­al­ty scheme and 70 per­cent of your social fol­low­ers expect rewards.

Retail­ers that lis­ten to con­sumers and per­son­al­ize their ser­vices, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and incen­tives will give them­selves the best chance of win­ning the hearts of con­sumers.