It’s important for online furniture brands to bring in new customers, but never at the expense of retaining existing ones. Why? First, it costs five times as much to attract a new customer than to keep a current one. In other words, it’s inefficient to focus singularly on driving new traffic and generating first-time sales if it means neglecting your pool of established buyers. To that end, keep these five keys to customer retention in mind for your online furniture store to reap the benefits of maintaining an active, loyal customer base over time.
Responsive Customer Service Options
Customer service has a huge impact on shoppers’ overall experience. How your furniture company answers questions, responds to comments and handles criticism has the power to make or break sales. With the advent of responsive customer service options like live chat programs, customers expect you to be to reachable across different platforms at convenient times. This includes social media-based customer service. Consumers are increasingly using comments and direct messages on social media to get in touch, so make sure your furniture store prioritizes this mode of communication for optimal results. Sometimes customers don’t really want to talk and knowledge base software like Kayako can help them communicate with you without ever having to pick up a phone.
Quality Product Lineup and Pricing
In order to sell furniture online, you have to believe in your product lineup—and pass that belief along to your customers. Garnering customer loyalty is much easier when the quality and pricing of your products speak for themselves.
Engaging in competitor research and exploring vendor options will help you decide what to sell and for what price. It’s also smart to take customer feedback seriously. If customers continually claim to have issues with a certain chair or desk, conduct a quality assurance effort and fix the problem—or pull the product until the kinks have been ironed out.
Rewarding Loyalty Program
Creating a branded loyalty program is a great way to compel customers to stick around for the long haul. The key challenges are offering relevant rewards and making the program easy to understand at a glance. Sending out periodic customer surveys can help your brand figure out exactly what customers expect from an online furniture store’s loyalty club.
Fast, Flexible Fulfillment Options
Selling furniture over the internet is about much more than just which products you sell; it’s also about when and how you’ll get them to the customers’ doorsteps. They appreciate options when it comes to shipping and delivery, both in terms of price and timing. Millennials especially expect fast fulfillment options—even as speedy as next- or same-day delivery—and are willing to pay more for such immediacy. On the flip side, many customers will do almost anything to get free or cheap shipping, including agreeing to wait a few extra days or weeks for delivery. Offering a full lineup of options brings you closer to pleasing everyone.
Useful, Engaging Content for Customers
A solid content marketing strategy can actually increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) for your online furniture business. It’s true. When you’re offering customers genuinely valuable and interesting content, your brand has the opportunity to build a bond with its audience and establish a reputation as an authority within your industry. Stick to a regular posting schedule and try a variety of content to see what elicits the best response from your loyal base. Once you figure out what shoppers like to see, produce more of it over time.
Focusing on these five keys to customer retention for online furniture stores will help your website maximize its customer experience, boost CLV and keep customer acquisition costs low.
