In the Marketing literature, we usually talk about Customer Retention Rate (CRR). Customer retention rate is a measure of how long your customers stay customers. The rate you Increase Returning Visitors.
First, let’s start with reviewing how the return rate is measured. Then we can see what we should expect from an average website.
The importance of returning visitors
When I started my journey in the eCommerce world with WooCommerce, I only cared about attracting new customers in any way possible. While that was very beneficial to my business, and I was doing reasonably well, I ignored a crucial point. I didn’t do anything to make an existing customer return. I overlooked the fact that most of them don’t. No matter how satisfied they are with their previous purchases.
It wasn’t until many years later that I realized this fundamental fact. It’s much easier to make a profit from existing customers than prospects. And that needs some work. Of course, it required much more work to implement any marketing technique in Woocommerce back then. Plugins were minimal, and we had to code many things to work in Woocommerce. The story is entirely different now. The abundance of free and paid Woocommerce marketing plugins makes such tasks a breeze.
How is the Customer Return Rate Calculated?
Customer Retention Rate is an excellent measure of your business health. It shows how satisfied your customers are and how likely they will tell about your business to their friends.
Calculating your CRR is easy. You must know three things to calculate your CRR at any given period. The number of customers at the beginning and end of the period and the number of new customers acquired. Then CRR is defined as:
We usually multiply the fraction by one hundred to have it in percent.
Let’s say you have 100 customers at the start of the month. During the month, you acquire 15 new customers.
And finally, at the end of the month, you have 110 customers (you have lost some of your existing customers). Then your CRR would be (110-15/100) * 100, which is 95%. Of course, don’t expect to get anything like that. The average CRR for eCommerce stores is 30%.
I’m here to help you increase CRR above the average over time. Of course, it takes time and dedication, and you shouldn’t expect anything extraordinary.
In this article, I review five marketing strategies to Increase Returning Visitors to your eCommerce website. I then review my favorite Woocommerce plugins for each method. I introduce plugins that can implement each technique in the most effective way possible.
1) Turn Product Pages into Traps.
When a user is browsing the pages of your product on the site, he has almost decided to buy and wants to choose between you and others; you have a great opportunity on this page to find potential buyers with a very high probability of conversion to Become a customer.
To do this, you need to reduce the risk of buying and even reduce it to zero.
How? It’s very simple.
Smart Refund Guarantee
The longer it lasts, the less likely it is for the consumer to return. Our study shows that when users have little time to return and refund, they act quickly to avoid finishing but feel comfortable when they have a lot of time. And the probability of a refund is reduced.
You might say that such people may return in the future; you can write rules on the refund page that prevent misuse and, at the same time, create enough profit for users who sincerely intend to buy.
Put the Trap Buttons
You can add this feature to your product pages by adding a request Quote Button, Catalog Mode, or a Wishlist Button.
Interested users who are suspicious about the price, want to get a discount, or want to buy the product in the future will fall into the trap of this method and give you their information. You turn the user into a customer if you are smart with a proper user warm-up and a strong strategy.
Yith plugins for price quotes and catalog mode are strong in this regard. Still, I did not use them; the only plugin I used that was really useful; the plugin was the MC Woocommerce Wishlist; it is not bad to check it.
It increases returning visitors by Automating Email depending on the conditions you put for it and Increasing Sales after that. All you need to know is how to add wishlist button in woocommerce.
Give a video or tutorial as a gift.
Another trap for generating potential customers’ data interest is to create a comprehensive review video for your products with the highest profit margin for you and compare it with other products or an educational video. Give the training to the user for free just by giving their data.
To close only real potential customers, You can define a pop-up with the Convert Plus pop-up plugin or any other useful plugin displayed when the page is closed or when the user has been on the product page for more than 5 minutes and crawled more than 70% of it, then convert them with follow-up emails and professional calls.
2) Start a Customer Loyalty Program
Starting a Customer Loyalty Program is probably the best way to ensure your customers return. They return to earn, check, and redeem their points. That also increases customer sales, word of mouth, and customer loyalty on its own. What’s better than that?
I know you probably think that shouldn’t be easy. The good news is that the WooCommerce ecosystem is mature enough. Many awesome plugins exist to give a fully customized loyalty program without writing a single line of code.
SUMO Reward Points
SUMO Reward Points is my absolute favorite customer loyalty program plugin. This plugin sets up a Complete WooCommerce Loyalty Reward Points System with a few simple steps. With this plugin, you can create your point system. You can reward users for their actions, from signing up or making a purchase to advising your website to a friend. Unfortunately, this plugin does not have a free version, and you can’t test it before making a purchase.
Price: ($49)
Features:
- A complete loyalty program with various features
- Member Levels
- Reward users for various triggers, including Product Purchases, Signup, Writing Reviews, Referrals, Coupon Codes, Blog posts, etc.
- Import/Export for Users and Points
WordPress quiz plugin
WordPress quiz plugin is one of the best tools to create quizzes, advanced exams, and tests easily and quickly. This plugin allows the creation of limitless quizzes with unlimited questions.
One of the finest techniques to increase Customer Retention Rates is listening to your customer’s needs. That’s where quizzes come in, which help you build personalized campaigns․ Creating quizzes is not complicated. Coding skills are not even needed.
WordPress quiz plugin offers both free and Pro versions
Features:
- Results sheet
- Question image and question bank
- Only for logged-in users option
- Styles for quizzes
- Randomizes questions and answers
- Showing correct answers
- Having a timer
- Text for both right and wrong answers
- Export or Import quizzes with one-click
- Result in the text according to result (according to percent) and also results with charts
- and so on
YITH WooCommerce Points and Rewards
WooCommerce Points and Rewards by YITH is another excellent plugin for starting a customer loyalty program. It gives you similar features to SUMO Reward Points. But it also gives you a free version that can give you a taste of what you will get in the pro version. This can be a good option if you want a free starting point. I like SUMO slightly more as it’s more robust and feature-rich.
Price: Free and Paid (€ 119,99/ year)
Features (Pro Version):
- Assign points to users when they register, order the first product, review a product, or on specific dates.
- Set an expiration date for points collected
- Send reminder emails some days before points expire
- Edit all labels and messages are shown to users
- A Widget showing users their current point credit
WooRewards – Loyalty and Reward System for WooCommerce
WooRewards is another excellent plugin for running your loyalty programs. It has less than the two loyalty reward plugins and gives you an easy-to-use dashboard interface. It also gives you an excellent free version to just try selected features.
Price: Paid (99,00€ / Year)
Features:
- Easy to use and, at the same time, very feature-rich
- Reward users with points for various triggers, including placing orders, Placing the first order, Buying from a category, User’s Birthday, social shares, and more
- Various shortcodes to use
- Various free and paid add-ons for extending functionality
MyCred
Last but not least, MyCred is an excellent free plugin. If you are willing to just start out without paying a penny, this plugin is something you want to check out. It allows you to set points, ranks, and badges for customers. You can set ranks within your leaderboards and reward your users when they reach a milestone. Badges are also great for building customer loyalty and customer retention. You can extend basic features with many paid plugins.
Price: Free
Features:
- A decent free version, almost better than others
- Points, ranks, and badges
- Multiple Point Types
- Leaderboards
- Users can redeem myCred points for money.
- Various addons
3) Showcase What’s New and Popular
Customers like to come back to see what’s new and hot. Creating a section on your homepage that shows new hot products increases the chance of customers returning when bored. This is an easy way to increase returning visitors to your website. The options here are a lot, and it depends on your preferences and what you are selling.
Product Slider and Carousel with Category for WooCommerce
Product Slider/Carousel for WooCommerce allows you to showcase your selected WooCommerce selected product or best-selling products in beautiful responsive sliders. You can then embed your sliders in your theme with shortcodes. You can use various filters and order the products displayed in sliders.
Price: Free and Paid ($149/ year or $199 lifetime for a bigger packaging containing it)
Features:
- Featured products slider
- 100% Mobile & Tablet Responsive
- Basic customizations for sliders
- 2 shortcodes with various parameters (pro version)
- 15 Designs (pro version)
Category Slider for WooCommerce
Category Slider for WooCommerce helps you display your products based on WooCommerce Categories in beautiful responsive sliders. You also get a shortcode generator with customization options to quickly generate shortcodes.
Price: Free and Paid ($39/ year)
Features:
- Responsive and mobile-ready.
- Shortcode Generator.
- Various customization settings
Tabbed Category Product Listing
This WooCommerce plugin allows you to display your products in different tabs based on category. It generates shortcodes that dynamically load your products. It also comes with a pro version with more features plus 10+ Responsive templates to choose from.
The pro version also offers Accordion and Product Slider modes.
Price: Free and Paid ($26/ year)
Features (Pro Version):
- Display Products in Carousel Mode and Accordion Mode
- 10+ Innovative Design Templates to Choose from
- Front End Product Filtering & Ordering
- various shortcodes
- AJAX Add to Cart
- Customer Conversion Reporting with Charts and Graph
4) Start Your Vip Club
Have you ever thought about the primary motivation behind amazon prime? It definitely earns Amazon an extra profit through subscription fees, but it’s much more than that.
Amazon Prime is considered a significant part of Amazon’s great success. The primary purpose of Amazon Prime is to Create Loyalty between Amazon and its Customers. By subscribing to Amazon Prime and paying 99 USD, customers can get free two-day shipping for many products. This means customers are inclined to buy more cause they already have paid the fee.
WooCommerce Memberships
Besides the price tag, WooCommerce Memberships by SkyVerge is my number one favorite plugin for creating a VIP subscription program, similar to Amazon Prime. The setup is straightforward and intuitive. You can then offer different benefits to your premium members free or cheaper shipping is just one of them.
The plugin also works seamlessly with the official subscription plugin for woo-commerce. by combining the two plugins, you can get even more features. Still, it’s just an option and isn’t necessary at all.
Price: Free and Paid ($199/ year)
Features:
- Sell or Assign Memberships
- Members-only content
- Reward Members with Special Discounts
- Member Area section with all the information needed
- Excellent compatibility with the WooCommerce Subscriptions Plugin
5) Use Push Notifications
Another strategy to increase returning visitors is Push Notifications. Push notifications are a relatively new marketing channel, but they have experienced rapid growth in usage.
They are messages displayed in a mobile APP or directly in your browser. The notable fact is that the push notifications click rate is 7 times greater than email marketing! They are a great Quick Reminder to your existing customers. The options here are a lot, and I can’t suggest one definite plugin. But I go over the list of my favorite push notification plugins.
OneSignal
OneSignal is probably the most popular push notification service in the world. With their WordPress plugin, you can send push notifications at predefined intervals or automatically by a trigger. Their free plan allows targeting up to 10,000 subscribers with push notifications. It also offers Real-Time Analytics and A/B Testing.
Features (some features may only be available in paid plans):
- Set up scheduled and automatic notifications for both online and offline users.
- Reminders to readers if they haven’t visited the website for a long time.
- Target visitors based on custom attributes such as language, the frequency of visits, etc.
- Opt-in customizations
- Real-time analytics
- A/B testing
- You can send unlimited push notifications.
Web Push Notifications
Web Push Notifications by WebPushr is another excellent push notifications service for WordPress. It has fewer users but is as good as OneSignal and has perfect integration with Woocomerce.
Webpushr’s free plan allows the same number of 10,000 as OneSignal.
It also offers dashboard views, subscriber logs, notification stats, and automatically triggered push notifications in the free plan.
Features:
- Excellent support for WooCommerce sites.
- You can send notifications for the price drop, new products, sales, abandoned carts, etc.
- User segmentation, customizable opt-in, advanced user analytics, and so.
Gravitec.net
Finally, If you are looking for an easy and intuitive plugin, Gravitec.net is the definite choice. The installation process is straightforward, and You can use all of their features right after installing their WordPress plugin.
The free plan similarly includes 10,000 subscribers and the basic features you expect from a push notification plugin.
Features (some features may only be available in paid plans):
- Very intuitive and easy to use
- You do need to signup for a Gravitec.net plan to use their plugin
- Get statistics on sends/deliveries/clicks for each sent campaign
- You can set up automation such as Drip Campaigns and RSS to Push.
Measure and Keep Improving
Any marketing effort should be precisely measured and improved. You improve the ones that give you excellent results and sometimes ditch ones that don’t offer any value.
Many of the plugins above have their own metrics. Using a centralized service to measure your website performance is a good idea. Particularly Customer Return Rate.
Cohorts in google analytics
Cohort analysis in google analytics allows you to easily calculate CRR in a given period.
A cohort is a group of users who share a common characteristic over a certain period. Cohort analysis is the study of the standard features of these users over a specific period. If you review the definition of CRR, you see how easy it is to measure it with cohorts. Of course, it’s not something I can cover in this article.
Still, I encourage you to learn about google analytics. It can be beneficial to understand customers’ behaviors and measure retention rates.
Integrating google analytics into your WordPress is straightforward. You have to create a free goo analytics account and load their javascript code in all f your pages. Still, if you want to measure different aspects of Woocomrce, you should use plugins.
WooCommerce Google Analytics Pro
This is probably the go-to choice for integrating Google Analytics with your WooCommerce store. It is explicitly made for WooComerce, whereas many other plugins only support Woocomerce to some extent. It will let you track and analyze your store’s traffic as well as different eCommerce events. It’s straightforward to set up and use this plugin.
Features:
- Easy to set up and interface
- Advanced eCommerce events tracking.
- Track different actions of customers such as signing in, adding a review, refunding requests, etc.
- Monitor customer shopping and checkout behavior
WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration
If you don’t want to pay for extra features, WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration is the best choice. This plugin is made by the Woocomerce team and gives you a great starting point completely free.
It will give you all the fundamental data to understand your customer’s behaviors and start optimizing your store.
Features:
- completely free
- enhanced eCommerce tracking with product views and cart actions
- supports Global Site Tag, Universal Analytics, eCommerce, and
MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is a popular and user-friendly analytics plugin for WordPress. It also supports Woocomerce to some extent. It helps you gain valuable insights into user behavior. One of the excellent features of this plugin is that you can access the information from your WordPress dashboard to measure everything without leaving the tour WordPress website.
Features:
- Easy to use and setup
- A great dashboard to view statistics right in your admin area
- Integration with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, or MemberPress
