How do you get repeat customers on-line?

Grant Leboff: So Graham, you’ve got a customer, they’ve been on your website, they’ve bought something – nothing got abandoned! – So how do you get them to come back? How do you try and retain customers because, obviously, repeat business is great business for any commercial entity. So how do you do that?

Graham Jones: You’ve got to be able to make sure that you create a connection with them in some way. So that’s really customising the experience to them, to exactly what they want, and also making sure that you’ve got hooks to be able to talk to them, in much the same way that you would in a real-world shop, where the shop assistant would talk to you as an individual.

They would connect with you individually and if you are in your local butcher, your local butcher would say to you, ‘Hello Mrs Jones, here’s an extra sausage for the dog’ – kind of thing – and then the next customer, ‘Hello Mrs Smith. here is a bit of extra mince for the cat. ‘ because they know them as individuals. So the one thing to do is make sure that you collect data about them as individuals, so that you can approach them again as individual people.

Grant Leboff: And what’s the best way of collecting that data? Obviously you will have the data of what they’ve bought, that is obviously key and we know that. But I’ve been on shopping sites where they ask for 500 bits of information upfront and of course, no one fills that in, you just go somewhere else. So how do you get this data and obtain it, perhaps over time, how do you do it?

Graham Jones: Some of the data you can collect; where did they go on the website? What pages did they follow? What words did they type in? All of that kind of metrics that you can collect, that’s good, that’s useful. But for them as individuals, you are going to need to collect this on a drip by drip basis. So it’s doing things like contests, where you can ask one question. It’s doing things like a little email campaign where you can ask them to fill in a survey in response for a discount code for something in the future. And with each one of those things that you do, you can pick up extra tiny bits of information that you can then add to give you a much better picture of that individual customer.

Grant Leboff: So you’ve got this information and you’re going to start to create these hooks. So how do they transpire? Do we suddenly have lots of pop-ups around the screen? How do we make it work so that we start to create this ‘more personal experience’ as they come back and use the site again?

Graham Jones: What you do, is you then get them to register for the site and, hopefully, the first purchase will have got them a registration for the site and then, when they land on the site and they register they are going to be shown only the things that they are interested in. It’s going to have their name, it’s going to have the name of their town… all kinds of things which make them realise that this is for me and nobody else. This is a shop that’s my shop not anyone else’s.

Grant Leboff: I think one of the challenges for business is to create that experience that people get so naturally off-line – because there is interaction and other things – and create something that resembles an experience online. Have you seen any other techniques that businesses utilise well, that do help keep customers engaged and keep coming back?

Graham Jones: The live chat service, where you see that little pop up in the corner come up. When that live chat is real, and when it’s a real person who works for the shop and is identified, and their name is there, you then feel as if you are talking to a particular person in a real world store, just like you would see some body and you might even mention them by name because they’ve got a badge on in a real-world shop.

Online, once you start putting the human side back in, you see a massive uplift in terms of sales and in terms of return to that site. Those sites using live chat are showing on average of about a 60% uplift in sales as a result of it.

Grant Leboff: So well worth the expenditure

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