Get serious with growing your repeat customers

Let's say you decided to start getting serious about growing your repeat customer base. With all the advice out there, where do you start?

There are three things I'd recommend. They are a mix of tactics that are effective, target common weak points in Shopify stores, and areas that can get you the best return on effort.

1. Create a new customer welcome campaign

Use an email campaign. Send four or more emails, one a week to your new customers. Welcome and thank them for purchasing (week 1), share details about how to use and get help with your products (week 2), share your best tip or piece of content (week 3), and invite them to your community of other customers or ask for a review (week 4).

Then send more emails to them based on your regular email marketing. e.g. product news, sales, content, community updates, etc.

2. Find out which products create the best customers

You can use a plain best-selling products report or a more lifecycle based report like the First Product Analysis in Repeat Customer Insights. Whatever it is, find out which products perform the best and focus the majority of your marketing on them. They should be on your homepage, get most of your ad budget, be in your social mentions, etc.

3. Send a product-based email before their first repurchase window

First learn how long before customers are buying a second time (Customer Purchase Latency). A week before that time send a product-based email that highlights your best sellers or most valuable products (point #2 above). Don't worry about discounts yet, just get customers exposed to other products.

It will take a bit of work to get all of this bootstrapped and running but in the end you'll have a clear path for new customers to build-up trust and learn exactly what products they should buy next. Take care of that and you can build on top of it as you go.

Eric Davis