How to turn seasonal shoppers into loyal customers

With the American traditions of Black Friday and Cyber Monday’s popularity spreading through the UK, as well as Christmas countdown promotions, Boxing Day sales and January sales, this time of year is full of promotions and special offers. So how do you turn a purely seasonal (opportunistic) shopper into a loyal customer?

First, make sure you’re offering a quality service or product. It’s pretty simple really, give them what you tell them you’re giving them. Perhaps even try to exceed their expectations. Just because you’re offering them a deal or a discount, there shouldn’t be any difference from the full priced item. It’s a discount on price, not on what you’re offering. Reputation is everything and if you offer them high quality to start, they’re more likely to return in the future.

Get them to sign up to email communication! Perhaps you can offer them a discount code in December if they sign up to your newsletter – and then you can target them for future email marketing campaigns. If people purchase from you during a promotional campaign like Black Friday, capture their email addresses (not for spamming!) and send them a Thank You email the following week, perhaps include an offer for referring a friend if they were happy with what they received, or tell them some exclusive news about new products or offers coming up. Essentially, make them feel special.

Get them to share their experience. This can be done in a number of ways, but most effective is probably with reviews and sharing it on social media. There are a number of customer review platforms out there and you can encourage people to leave reviews during different stages of their purchasing experience – after check-out, on a confirmation email, in the delivery (if a product) or in a follow-up email. There are review options for Facebook business pages too. On social media, you could create a custom hashtag so you can capture people across a number of different platforms or maybe ask them to share images or comments with you as part of a competition. It’s proven that people are more likely to buy something if they have read an online review (a positive one anyway).

If you need help with data capture, email marketing campaigns, online review systems or setting up your social media for the holidays just drop us a message: hello@webfwd.co.uk