Repeat Customers: How to Attract and Get Loyal Customers in an Offline Store?

Repeat customers are customers who make purchases in your store from time to time. They are called loyal customers. They are the source of the greatest profit and the greatest value for the company.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto came to a conclusion that continues to be relevant in our time. This is the Pareto Principle, the rule is true for many things. 80 percent of the effects are caused by 20 percent of the causes. So, 20% of your customers will be responsible for 80% of your business profit. Therefore, it is important to take care of your regular customers. Because they bring most of your annual profits.

Of course, attracting new customers is also essential. But you should not focus only on this process while losing current customers. Make sure the store interacts with customers correctly and shows the value of each repeat customer.

How to Get Regular Customers?

1. Great deals after the first purchase. You have every chance to turn new customers into regular ones if you offer great deals, discounts, or loyalty programs. So you will motivate customers in making future purchases.
2. Keep experimenting. Stores are different, as our customer needs. Analyze which products bring more profit. Or what products customers come to you for. What are they looking for? Are they getting what they are looking for? Take care of the constant availability of your top-selling items in the store.
3. Service quality. This is the best thing you can do for your customers—show the value of your cooperation, help in choosing, advise and do everything to make the buying process easy and relaxed.

4. Organize effective communication. Whether you have click-and-collect orders (online pre-orders for goods that can then be picked up from the store), or you have home delivery of goods, ensure that the entire ordering and receiving process is comfortable.

Remember, 80% of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases in the future after a good customer service experience. Customers should be happy after shopping in your store.

Loyal customers are beneficial to any business. If you provide all the conditions for a comfortable shopping experience, they will most likely continue to buy again and again. By the way, the demand for shopping in offline stores continues to grow. In post-quarantine times, consumers tend to buy more and more in physical stores. And according to the latest trends, online brands are opening physical stores to win more loyal customers.

What is Customer Acquisition?

This is the process of communication with potential customers. You advertise your products, store, and service, convince potential buyers to make a purchase and thus get new customers. This means that the process is focused on marketing.

The process of attracting new customers includes:

• Determination of the target audience of potential customers.
• Developing and implementing marketing campaigns.
• Tracking potential sales.
• Measuring results.

Experienced marketers say that acquiring new customers is 5 times more expensive than retaining existing ones.

A possible way to reduce the cost of customer acquisition goes through customer retention. The reality is that the customers you already have are the most profitable, and it’s worth your time and effort to keep them around!

Why is Customer Retention So Important for Physical Stores?

The concept of customer retention shows the number of customers who return to the store. Despite the fact that many retailers spend time and resources trying to attract new customers, a customer retention strategy may actually have more of an effect on success. And in this matter, a physical store is more likely to retain a repeat customer. Here are the opportunities to meet your customers face-to-face, know their needs and provide quality service. And whoever talks about the convenience of online shopping, in e-commerce it is difficult to build a special trustworthy relationship with your customers.

Repeat customers typically spend more than new customers. Because they already trust your company. In fact, the amount they spend typically increases with the duration of doing business with your company.

Retention of current customers is an indicator of customer loyalty. What should be the loyalty/retention rate?

If you translate this metric into percentages, a good rate is close to 100 percent. This means that the majority of customers remain loyal customers and continue to buy from your store.

The customer retention rate measures the number of customers a company retains. In other words—existing customers who remain loyal within a given time frame. 

And if you need to finally decide which strategy to apply in your stores. The perfect formula is always a mixture of both, efficient to combine both: retain current customers and attract new ones.

How to Calculate Customer Retention/Loyalty?

First, you need to collect data on the store for a specific period (week, month, quarter, year):

1. E — The number of customers at the end (End) of a certain period.
2. N — The number of new customers (New customers) for this period.
3. S — The number of customers at the beginning (Start) of the period.

Customer retention rate formula:
 

For example, at the end of July, the store recorded 262 customers, during this month 130 new customers visited the store, and 18 customers stopped visiting the store. At the beginning of July, 250 customers were recorded in the store.

This is an indicator of customer retention over a certain period of time. It shows the percentage of customers remaining loyal over a given period. The higher the score, the better your retention strategy works.

Some economists tell that a 5% increase in customer retention resulted in a 125% increase in profits.

Repeat Purchases

The Repeat Purchase Rate measures the percentage of customers who shop at a store after making their first purchase. In order to calculate this indicator, you need to divide the number of customers who returned to the shop (Return customers) by the total number of customers in the store (Total) for a certain period.

At the same time, you can calculate the customer loyalty indicator, which measures the number of customers who make more than two purchases.

The customer churn rate shows the percentage of customers who were not retained. This is the opposite indicator. For example, if the retention rate is 70%, then the churn rate is 30%.

Conclusions

Loyal customers help advertise your business. Nothing helps your product sell like a happy repeat customer who shares a positive shopping experience with friends and family.

Moreover, repeat customers leave helpful reviews on social media. It is your loyal customers who help evaluate the success of certain changes in the store since they have been around to note the differences. And repeat clients are often ready to share their impressions.

And most importantly, customers come back to the store not only because it was beneficial to buy the goods. They are happy to return because they have already bought from you, have had a positive experience with your store, and feel comfortable buying again.