Proven strategies for turning one-time customers into life-long shoppers.

Many shoppers on Cyber Monday or Black Friday buy your products without any knowledge or affinity to your brand. Most of them just want to take advantage of the seasonal discounted sales offers, and nothing more. Consequently, they are likely to forget about your brand entirely if you don’t make deliberate attempts to keep them engaged.

The success effect of turning these one-time shoppers into repeat customers can be massive. As time goes on, they’ll buy more, cost much less and even develops a genuine association with your brand. As we anticipate BFCM (Black Friday Cyber Monday), your most important priority should be turning these first-time shoppers into lifetime customers.

I’ll be sharing some simple strategies to make this happen seamlessly with you.

Send engaging and interactive emails
You can grow and nurture the relationship with your first-time shoppers through email engagement. Use your welcome mail to introduce them to your brand and tell a compelling story. Your goal would be to begin to break the ice. Most businesses make the mistake of bombarding new customers with promotional emails. This is proven to be very ineffective. Let your mails be crafted and designed to nurture the budding relationship, evoke some connection, and selling to them would be much easier over time. Below are some mail categories to help you strategically nurture your customer relationship:
• Entertaining Content: Give them something to laugh about, and they’ll keep coming back. Share memes around your product offer.
• Educational Content: Give out free information you know will be of interest to your niche customers. This gives an impression that you’re much more interested in them than just acquiring sales
• Share customer stories: this could serve as word of mouth marketing and be really effective. So, share the great things your existing customers have said about your business.

Meet your Customers’ Expectations and then exceed it
The relationship between most businesses and BFCM shoppers is mostly just a seasonal opportunity for one to take advantage of the other. However, this can develop into something more. You must attempt to stand out and do something others aren’t doing.
Your business will be memorable if you stand out in their minds, and this can be an excellent platform to build a beneficial relationship with them.
We’ve outlined some few ideas that can stand you out after BFCM:
• You can send personalized thank you notes or emails to your BFCM shoppers
• Be proactive. Anticipate their needs and offer to help before they ask. It could be as simple as providing support in assembling their product.
• Increase your customer service response time significantly during BFCMs. While most businesses would slow down because of increased traffic, up your game. This could be what stands you out.
• Engage your new customers on social media. Create social media contents that keep them wanting to associate with your business brand.
• Give out Gift cards, coupons, and discount cards. This is a simple way to get customers back to your store.

Retarget Customers to Re-engage them
You can set up social media retargeting ads to re-engage customers that reached checkout. This is also an excellent way to sustain a relationship with your one-time shoppers outside of your email list and website. A small budget of $5-$10 can prove effective. So, you won’t necessarily need to break the bank to do this.
We’ve also outlined some Facebook custom ad idea to re-engage your BFCM shoppers:
• Make New Product Announcements: You can specifically create ads to let BFCM customers learn about a new product offer on your store.
• Offering a coupon, gift card or discount offer is usually a good way to get a customer’s attention. It is easy to achieve comeback sales with this.
• You can also push out unique ads to seize your BFCM shoppers’ attention, and it doesn’t have to be a sales promotion ad. Imagine a very personal ad, like, “Thank you for stopping by at our store. We hope you got all you wanted. You can also suggest products you’d want us to stock in the comment section.” These ads could prove to be excellent brand awareness and customer relationship tools.

We encourage you to try out these few strategies for upcoming Black Friday Cyber Monday, and you’d be sure to get significant results with your shoppers. While you may need to dedicate some resources to make them work, the possibility of increasing your customer retention value and boosting your revenue is even more rewarding.