Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.” as quoted by Chip Bell, is true in its own sense.

A loyal customer will never consider alternatives. He won’t mind paying for premium quality products and services for his valued loyalty whereas a repeat customer will consider options.

Therefore, loyal customers are the heart of any successful eCommerce business. Trends and studies have shown that an increase in customer retention by 5% can lead to an increase in profits as high as 25%.

Below we have listed a few tools that you can use to increase the repeat purchase rate on your eCommerce website.

10 apps to increase customer retention

A new-age D2C brand needs some actionable strategies to grow its value proposition, improve customer retention, and boost eCommerce business profitability.

1. Privy

Privy is trusted by over 500K+ businesses, small and large, to capture and convert their online store visitors into loyal customers. Privy enables you to improve your conversion rate with campaign triggers, popups, coupons, abandoned cart emails, and automated email marketing.

The app allows to capture and increase conversion rates with easy-to-design drag and drop form collectors that work across all browser types – desktop, tablet, mobile, etc.

Highlighting features:

  • Customizable, mobile-friendly displays 
  • Single-use & bulk coupon code integration
  • Run automated A/B tests and start optimizing your conversion rates
  • Enable sending autoresponders & reminder messages that will turn signups into sales
  • Automate your email marketing with newsletters, abandoned cart, & purchase follow-up, and customer win-back emails.

2. Loox Product Reviews & Photos

Loox is a marketing tool for Shopify stores to collect reviews with photos from their happy customers to create an elegant online store that other customers can trust.

Loox provides an automated process that collects and showcases product reviews which incentivize customers to attach photo(s) with their review, this empowers you as a merchant and grows customers’ love for your brand. 

Photo reviews are the best form of social proof we talk about and also can be placed across the stores and multiple channels and increase the conversion rate.

Highlighting Features:

  • Collect more reviews, photos, and videos
  • Beautiful displays that make YOUR brand shine
  • High ROI: Loox is a revenue generator
  • Easy setup and 24/7 support

3. Social Media Feed by Tagembed

Social Media Widget for Shopify by Tagembed is one of the finest Shopify apps to add social media feeds on your Shopify Store. It helps users to collect, curate, customize and display social media feed content from 18+ social platforms. By following some easy and manageable steps, you can easily embed social media feeds on Shopify.

The tool is coding-free. Hence, you don’t need any technical specialists to use the app. In other words, it is effortlessly simple to operate, so even if you belong to a non-technical background, you can use the app to add social media content to your store.

Highlighting Features:

  • Customizable feeds and widget
  • Moderation feature to remove irrelevant and unwanted content
  • Responsive and mobile-friendly widget
  • Coding-free app
  • Custom CTA button
  • Wide range of layouts and themes
  • Custom CSS
  • Analytics

4. Smile: Reward and Loyalty

Smile.io provides a loyalty and reward program app for Shopify users. Smile allows you to increase sales from your existing customer base by enticing them to repeat purchases.

Because nothing can beat the loyalty you provide to your customers, as they are the ones who are always willing to stay with you. The customers will not only bring repeat customers to you but will also promote your business in more ways than you can think of.

With Smile, you are enabled to create and customize a rewards program that is easy to launch and even easier for customers to engage with.

Highlighting features:

  • Allow customers to earn points on actions like creating an account, placing an order, and even celebrating birthdays.
  • Let your customers earn points for leaving a review or donating to a non-profit.
  • Add a detailed personalized loyalty program to every email.
  • Set the points for expiration and reminder emails, encouraging shoppers to use their rewards.

5. Growave ‑ Loyalty, Wishlist +3

Growave is the all-in-one Shopify marketing app with powerful tools for photo reviews, wishlist, loyalty programs, gift cards, referrals, and UGC. Simplify buying process, send personalized emails with powerful buying triggers: drop in price, back in stock, on sale, running out of stock.

Collect photo reviews on autopilot with our review requests. Showcase review rating rich snippets on Google. Integrate with Google Shopping.

Highlighting Features:

  • All-in-one app: loyalty & rewards, gift cards, reviews, wishlist, social login, Instagram, and UGC.
  • Value for money: ONE lower fee for 5 apps (other apps charge 3x for similar features).
  • Built exclusively for Shopify: no coding needed, customizable, works simply.
  • Highest-rated with a top-notch 24/7 live chat support (Check out our reviews).
  • Proven results (Most brands see a high ROI)
  • Doesn’t slow down the website

6. Referral Candy

Referral Candy helps Shopify and Shopify Plus store merchants to reach new customers, increase their brand value with word-of-mouth strategy, and build customer loyalty through a refer-a-friend program.

Their referral programs have worked across various industries such as fashion, athleisure, nutrition, electronics, baby products, and more. They are also well supported by the customer support team, who will reach out proactively to check in and share optimization tips.

The app enables you to set up everything and get referrals in less than an hour. Your customers can easily earn store discounts or cash rewards by referring their friends moreover it doesn’t require earning or redeeming points.

Highlighting Features:

  • Automate your referral program and grow the conversions
  • Deliver a branded customer experience
  • Detect suspicious transactions and take action on them
  • Connect your favorite marketing apps for power-ups
  • Use Referral Candy for your affiliate marketing program

7. Loyalty, Rewards & Referrals

Loyalty, Rewards & Referrals is the app that helps you to reward your customers, build loyalty and grow referral sales. The app enables you to launch a loyalty program and start to reward your customers for their purchases, referrals, and more. It also motivates your repeat customers with holiday bonuses, birthday rewards, special points events, weekend “2X” and “3X” extra points campaigns, and more!

Highlighting Features:

  • Easy-to-use rewards and offers like pay with points, free shipping or percentage, etc.
  • Holiday campaigns and bonuses, and special event bonuses.
  • Multi-language support with Langify & Weglot integrations for more languages like Chinese, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish.

8. Spently: Post‑Purchase Emails

Spently is a Shopify tool used by thousands of small and large eCommerce businesses to increase their repeat purchases with their most valuable email channel.

Spently is optimizing these email templates for your new sales like a no-brain required. Using its drag and drop builder, you can customize your Shopify email notifications including the logo, color, layout, and social links for your email to match your brand.

Highlighting Features:

  • Increase sales from customers with product recommendations
  • Incentivize customers with dynamic discounts
  • Trigger automated follow-up email campaigns
  • ROI-based reporting & analytics

9. Recom.ai- Upsell, and Cross-sell

Recom.ai is one of the most popular apps for upselling and cross-selling on Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce eCommerce stores. It helps to deliver personalized suggestions to existing customers, creates credibility, motivates purchasing, and boosts the conversion rate for your eCommerce website.

Recom adds to your store AI-powered product panels that help your customers find the most relevant products. This further helps to increase your sales even further by adding a non-intrusive in-cart upsell offer. 

Highlighting Features:

  • Highly customizable widgets that work automatically
  • Flexible rules for impactful upsell and cross-sell widgets
  • Display your customers with more products on every visit
  • Various formats for product recommendations are displayed.

10. Shipway: Track Order & Notifications

Track Order & Notifications by Shipway is an automation tool for the eCommerce merchants through which they can provide order tracking and its regular updates to their end customers. Track Order & Notifications by Shipway is an automation tool for the eCommerce merchants through which they can provide order tracking and its regular updates to their end customers. The app allows you to provide your customers a real-time track of their purchased orders alongside their notification updates on email, SMS, and WhatsApp. The order tracking page feature enables you to create a premium post-purchase experience for your customers by displaying the tracking page on your website continuing your brand theme.

The app also allows you to schedule reviews from your customers after the successful delivery of their purchased orders to enhance customer engagement and relationships.

Highlighting Features:

  • Proper & real-time tracking updates
  • WhatsApp, Email & SMS delivery alerts.
  • Highly customizable order tracking page with customized URLs
  • Automatic shipment status pushback in Shopify
  • Get order reviews/feedback from your customers
  • Reduces customer queries and improves user experience

Why do new-age brands are focusing more on customer retention, and how?

Repeat customers on average spend 33% or even more per order. eCommerce brands can acquire loyal brand advocates that would easily help the business with other benefits than customer retention such as brand awareness, customer acquisition rate, and good PR.

Email Marketing 

Email marketing can be a powerful tool to keep your customers engaged with your brand. Send welcome emails to your customers after their first purchase, abandoned cart recovery, and personalized or birthday emails, along with cross-selling and upselling opportunities to showcase your products and encourage repeat purchases. 

Customer Loyalty Program

Customer loyalty programs are something that every eCommerce business swears on. Be it exclusive discounts, free shipping, subscription services, or free gifts, the result achieved is unbelievable. It is a lot simpler to retain your customers through exciting loyalty programs like these. You need to ensure that the rewards or incentives you are offering are enticing enough that customers participate.

Engagement on Social Media Channels

Social media is the most scrolled by everyone and can be used in an excellent way to keep your customers engaged and encourage them to make repeat purchases from you.

They might not have purchased from you till now, but they observe your brand on social media, analyze you, and read your reviews. Therefore, through social media platforms you can nurture your existing as well as potential customers in various ways:

  • Share links and images for your popular products.
  • Share honest reviews you got over these popular products.
  • Share exclusive discounts and offers for your social media followers.
  • Carry contests on special occasions to keep your customers engaged.
  • Engage with your customers through 1-on-1 messaging, interact with them in the comments section. 

Personalized Customer Experience

Personalization is a major key to increasing your low customer retention rates. There are various ways to offer a personalized shopping experience to your customers such as offering personalized recommendations at the time when they visit any of your product pages, using a CRM tool to segment your customer base based on their interests, demographics, and pain points, target these lists of customers with personalized messages and emails, identify customers who have abandoned carts, send personalized emails offering some discounts to ensure repeat purchases from your brand.

Leverage User-Generated Content

User-generated content strategy is where your customers themselves create content for you. So, for good quality content, you can incentivize your customers for doing that – a win-win situation for all.

Incentivize by featuring the best pictures on your social media or website homepage, etc. ensure to make your campaign as fun and interesting as possible.

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