Auctiva Commerce Blog

Your loyal customers can be a critical channel of revenue for your store. Auctiva Commerce can help you retain customers by helping indentify the most valuable customers and encouraging them to continue shopping on your store.

Why Promote Loyalty?

Just because you have repeat customers does not mean that you necessarily need a customer loyalty program. Some stores may get repeat business because they offer hard to find products, or shipping to a region that no other store can provide. Before you start cutting your customers a deal, understand the risk and opportunities that are associated with promoting customer loyalty with coupons and other savings.

As a general rule, customer loyalty programs are focused on retaining customers who might otherwise do business with a competitor. The sole purpose is to help a business keep its current customers. Are you doing business in a competitive market? If so, you should strongly consider investing some time and money into developing a customer loyalty program that will help keep your customers coming back to you.

Even if you don’t have a lot of competition, you can always consider giving loyal customers something in return to show your appreciation. Just make sure that your promotion is in line with your business goals. If there is really no risk in losing a particular customer, you probably should not consider giving them a deep discount. That will eat up your profit margins. In this case, you may want to consider a customer loyalty program that simply adds value using means other than discounting prices with coupons. A simple Thank You email message is a great way to show your appreciation and it won’t take anything out of your profit margins.

What Customers Should I Target?

The important customers to target for loyalty programs are the most valuable customers that are at the highest risk of shopping somewhere else. Valuable customers can be shoppers who frequently make purchases or shoppers that have only visited once, but made a large purchase. Sales volume is usually the metric you’ll use to determine the customer’s value. In Auctiva Commerce, you can view a customer’s shopping history and see just how much that person has spent on your store. We’ll show you how to do that later in this post.

Determining which customers are at risk for shopping with a competitor is much more difficult to do. If you’re in a very competitive marketplace, you could assume that all your customers are at risk. Or, you might find that buyers of a certain product might be able to get a better deal elsewhere. Knowing your level of risk requires that you’re an expert in your field. Spend some time reviewing the competition and what threats there are to your market share. Don’t think that you need to compete on all levels. Also review your opportunities (i.e., areas of strength over the competition). Your customer loyalty program should focus on promoting your store’s strengths. Ask yourself what qualities of your store attract these high value customers and think about how you can expand these qualities into a promotional campaign to keep them shopping on your store.

The Loyalty Club

Now let’s create a User Group in Auctiva Commerce that will allow us to group these valuable customers together and create a coupon that will only work for them. Follow these instructions to create a new User Group:

1. Log in to your Auctiva Commerce Administration.
2. Hover your mouse over the Admin menu and click on the User Groups link.
3. In the Add Group box, enter “Loyalty Club” (without the quotation marks) for the Group Name field.
4. Do not select any permission options in the Permissions field. This is for Administrators only.
5. Click on the Save button. Your new User Group will display in the box on the left side of the page.

Now we can find the most valuable customers and add them to the Loyalty Club User Group. There are a variety of ways to sort your customers using the Reports feature in Auctiva Commerce. In this example, we’ll Top Customer Report. Let’s generate that report now.

1. Hover your mouse over the Reports menu, choose the Customers option and then click on the Sales by Customer link.
2. In the Time Period field, choose an appropriate time period. If you’ve been operating your store for awhile, choose a longer period of time, such as the “Last 90 Days” option. The Top Customers Report will return a list of customers that is broken down by their email address, number of orders made and the total order amount.

With these numbers you will be able to quickly glance at your existing customers and see who is doing a great deal of business with you in terms of frequency and sales volume. While frequency is a signifier of loyalty, the Order Total field is the most important metric for determining the value of the customer. By default, the Top Customers Report is sorted by Order Total. Review the list of customers and see if there are any who are worth investing in with this promotion. If you having a tough time deciding the value of the customer and the risk of them shopping elsewhere, you can view each customer’s Order History by click on the email address link for the customer. We recommend that you right-click on the email address link and choose to open the link in a new window or new tab so that you don’t have to use the back button to regenerate the report. To find the customer’s Order History, scroll down the page (after you click on the email address link) and you’ll see the Order History box. Click on the Details link to view the actual order.

Now let’s add these valuable customers to our Loyalty Club User Group.

1. Return to the Top Customers Report, right click on the email address link and choose to open the link in a new window or new tab. The Edit User page will load.
2. In the Groups field, select the Loyalty Club option.
3. Then click on the Save button. This user has been added to the Loyalty Club User Group. Close the window or tab to return back to the Top Customer Report and repeat this process to add more users to this group.

Next, you can create a product coupon or order coupon and assign the Loyalty Club User Group to the coupon. This means that these users will need to log in to your store and apply the coupon code to receive the discounts associated with the coupon. Take a look at the step-by-step tutorials for Product Coupons and Order Coupons to learn how to create these discounts for your customer loyalty promotion.

Get the word out about your customer loyalty promotion using the Email List feature in Auctiva Commerce. Or, if you have your own method for contacting customers, feel free to use those tools as well. Make sure you approach your most valuable customers with care. Let them know why you’re emailing them and honor their privacy. Give them the option to unsubscribe to your email list.

Some smaller stores or stores that have just recently opened may only have a handful of customers. If this is your case, you may want to consider holding off on the coupons and just send a customer appreciation message to your handful of valuable customers individually. You can express your appreciation for their business and check in to see if they’re satisfied with the service you’ve provided. This can go a long way in retaining customers without taking a bite out of your profit margins.   

As your store grows, continue to add your valuable customers to this group and continue to assess your opportunities to keep these customers coming back to your store. Your attention to these customers will have a direct effect on your future sales and an indirect effect as these grateful customers spread the word about your store.

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Store Tips Coupons, Customer Communication