How to turn first-time buyers into repeat buyers

New customers, they’re exciting aren’t they?

They bring with them the potential for new purchases, recommendations, content, and data.

But all of this can fall flat when marketers focus their efforts on generating new customers, at the expense of turning them into happy, loyal customers.

Repeat buyers are worth their weight in gold (well, almost). They cost less to maintain, refer other customers, and are an ongoing source of content and information. 

Which is why customer loyalty should be a top priority for any brand.

In this blog post, we offer email tips and campaign ideas focused on improving customer loyalty. Helping brands to build a positive relationship from that very first purchase, and foster happy customers that want to shout about their experience.

Get to know your audience

Before you dive headfirst into crafting killer email marketing campaigns, you need to understand who it is you’re sending to. After all, one size doesn’t fit all. And your new customers may well have different tastes to your long-termers.

Begin by understanding how they engage with your website, your brand, and your products. This can be achieved through analytics, preference centres, or even by sending out exploratory surveys to ask the questions you really want to know.

Once you have gathered your insights, this information can be used to personalise email marketing campaigns in a variety of ways, from timing to segmentation, personalisation to product recommendations.

Offer a warm welcome

Remember the days of high street shopping?

When you’d go into a store and (hopefully) you’d immediately be greeted by a warm smile and a friendly “hello!”. Maybe even a tester or treat.

This personal approach should also be emulated in your email campaigns to ensure you make the very best first impression.

Fortunately, a welcome campaign or ongoing series offers the perfect opportunity to do just this. A one-off send is useful for getting the basics over to your new buyers immediately. But you can improve on this with an ongoing welcome series that drips feeds useful information such as contact details and delivery information, popular products, and reviews.

And, as well as offering a positive experience for new customers, welcome emails are also highly successful. They have been shown to be 50% - 86% more effective than regular email newsletters, and generate up to 320% more revenue per email than other promotional emails.

Win, win!

Be supportive

As well as welcoming first-time buyers with their own series, consider incorporating ongoing email sends that support them in their follow-on purchases or user journeys.

Content is key to achieving this, so ensure that your new customers are offered how-to documentation, buying guides, usage statistics, as well as subtle sales sends. 

And you can get a little more sophisticated in your support through segmentation and automated campaigns. Maintain the focus on new customers by creating a ‘single purchase’ to ‘second purchase’ segment. Then automate relevant email campaigns that encourage them to buy again through useful content alongside cross-sell, upsell, and recommended products, services, and upgrades. 

Get personal

Personalisation is the secret weapon for email marketers.

In fact, 71% of consumers expect personalisation, and 76% of consumers get frustrated

when they don't find it.

At the start of this post we discussed gathering data on your audience, and now is the time to use it.

Personalisation can begin with simple segmentation, separating recipients into groups based on similarities such as demographics, preferences, or purchasing behaviour. This enables marketers to send emails that are targeted at these groups with relevant content, imagery, and product recommendations.

However, if you boast more sophisticated data capabilities, you can get really smart with personalisation.

Utilising dynamic content enables marketers to emulate a unique experience for each individual recipient. Populating emails with language, imagery, pricing, and product recommendations that are specific to each individual.

So, if the recipient is provided with a one-to-one shopping experience and displayed the exact items they want to purchase, why would they go elsewhere?

Celebrate the good times

Keeping with the theme of making customers feel special, anniversaries and special occasions are the perfect excuse to show your new customers a little love.

Even better, they’re simple, but can be highly effective. With just a little data, brands can send emails celebrating special occasions to remind their new customers of their brand, and help to build that long-term, positive relationship.

And of course, any extra sweeteners that can be offered, such as a discount code or freebies, act as extra encouragement to come and purchase from your brand once again.

Add a little peer pressure 

New customers often rely on the wisdom of others to make buying decisions.

For instance, studies have shown that 91% of respondents read at least one review before making a purchasing decision on a product, business, or service.

So, encourage your happy customers to leave reviews, ratings, and testimonials about their experience with your products and services. And promote these through email to your newest customers.

And you don’t have to stop at simple reviews and testimonials. Promote customers’ relevant own user generated content (UGC), such as social posts, haul videos, and product tips to provide new customers with truly valuable information to help make their purchasing decision.

As well as supporting customers’ product research, positive feedback from others helps to improve your reputation as a trustworthy brand to purchase from. 

Next steps

If your business is suffering from a leaky bucket; bringing in new customers but failing to maintain them, then we can help.

As a dedicated email marketing agency, we know all about fostering customer loyalty. And are confident we can turn those exciting first-time buyers into loyal brand advocates.

Get in touch with our friendly team of experts to find out more.