How to Promote Repeat Purchases with Survey Research
How to Promote Repeat Purchases with Survey Research
You’ll need to cultivate repeat purchases from your customers given the weight of customer retention. Even if you operate a B2C retail establishment, your business will greatly benefit from existing customers shopping from your business continuously.
90% of customers are more likely to purchase more, and 93% of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases at companies with excellent customer service.
61% of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat purchases of existing customers, rather than from new customers. These statistics demonstrate how clear the value of repeat purchases is.
However, despite these perceptible benefits, 96% of customers stop doing business with a company due to poor customer service. This damaging statistic proves that almost all customers will not simply make fewer purchases with a business, but abandon it entirely.
As such, brands must elevate their CX and understand their customers to retain customers.
This article explores the concept of repeat purchases, their implications, importance and how to foster it with survey research.
Understanding Repeat Purchases
A self-evident concept, repeat purchases refer to instances of customers purchasing more than once from the same business. This behavior is usually associated with buying from a business multiple times, instead of just twice.
As such, repeat purchases result from customer retention, which is the result of consumer loyalty. There are many building blocks of loyalty, including providing a great customer experience, reasonable prices, product satisfaction, brand equity, brand trust, satisfying all of your consumer preferences and more.
When strategizing how to stimulate repeat purchases, businesses can create various campaigns, from advertising to PR, social media and various others to facilitate repeat purchases through different purchasing methods. This means that although you may have customers who purchase in-store, you can still pique online or phone orders.
For example, assume you have a customer persona who prefers buying via the brick-and-mortar way. They can still be swayed to make an online purchase, should it be compelling enough. You can achieve this by offering a special online promotion, introducing an online rewards program, or appealing to this persona in some other way that makes it tempting for them to buy online.
At any rate, you can forge repeat purchases through omnichannel communications and various purchasing options.
The Importance of Repeat Purchases
Repeat purchases are important for several reasons.
First off, when customers buy from the same company, it is a sign of customer loyalty, which means that not only will your customers continue buying from you, but they will be less inclined to shop from your competitors.
As such, you’ll be drawing in a larger customer retention rate, and as you’ve read across multiple CX, marketing and eCommerce outlets, customer retention is more profitable than acquisition. Various figures prove this, such as the fact that acquiring new customers costs five times as much as keeping existing ones and that selling to existing customers has a success rate of 60-70%, while it is only 5-20% for new customers.
High levels of repeat purchases also point to a low customer churn rate, another necessity for keeping your business afloat, given the need to retain a stream of customers. In addition, once customers churn, it is going to be difficult to bring them back to your business, as they've already made up their minds — and not from hearsay but their experience from being your customers.
If your customers didn’t like your products, they wouldn’t buy them — unless it was due to utter necessity and no other choice. As such, when customers buy repeatedly from you, not only are you lowering your customer acquisition cost due to higher retention, but you’re also building trust around your brand. The more customers buy from you, the more reliable you are perceived to be.
Customers who make repeat purchases are also important given their higher expenditures, as repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers. This isn’t surprising, as retained customers know what to expect from their favorite brand(s), therefore being more liberal with their spending.
Customers who buy from you year after year are critical, as they signify a segment that has the potential or currently carries a high Customer Lifetime Value. This metric relays the worth of customers during their entire relationship with the company. It involves both purchases and the length of a relationship customers have with businesses.
Value also increases in reverse, meaning that a brand appears to be more valuable to customers who make continuous purchases. As such, these purchases exemplify high levels of customer value, which is the perception of what a product or service is worth to a customer versus its alternatives.
All in all, when customers make repeat purchases, they are easier to sell to, improve a brand’s reputation and generate higher overall value for a company.
7 Effective Ways to Increase Repeat Purchases
Businesses can try experimenting with different methods to increase and strengthen customers by making repeat purchases.
The following enumerates 7 methods you can use to increase repeat purchases:
- Offer perks via VIP programs.
- These programs grant elite status to customers who buy more, directly leading to repeat purchases.
- Create referral programs with incentives for current customers that bring in new ones.
- This will whet customers’ interest in staying customers, as they will be rewarded.
- Create discounts and seasonal campaigns to draw in continuous purchases for special occasions.
- This will entice customers to buy repeatedly by buying more than just one kind of product. For example, various Halloween candy or Christmas decor.
- Retarget customers via email marketing.
- Target your customers directly after they make their first purchase via email marketing.
- You can give them the option of subscribing to a mailing list or suggesting similar products now and then.
- Create exclusive deals for customers through rewards programs.
- While creating seasonal promotions is useful, you can extend your deals and discounts by creating rewards programs for customers.
- This directly leads to customers buying more.
- Appeal to customers with marketing personalization.
- No one likes to be marketed to, especially in generic ways.
- Creating personalization makes customers feel seen, heard and far more special than they would as recipients of non-personalized offers and messages.
- Ask for user-generated content.
- This involves content that your consumers produce via using your products and services, which you then feature across your website and other digital properties.
- This method creates bonds between brands and customers, which gives brands an edge in that customers view them as more than just another business.
How to Stimulate Repeat Purchases with Survey Research
Market research is the underlying mechanism for increasing repeat purchases. This is because, to appeal to your customers, you’ll need to understand them at a deeper level. This way, you can properly market to and serve them.
When you understand all of your customers’ desires, needs, aversions and perceptions, you’ll be able to create marketing campaigns that compel them to interact with your brand, as you push them further down the sales funnel until they convert.
There are various market research techniques that you can apply to better understand your customers; this involves gaining insights into customer behavior and your customer’s needs, along with their reactions to your current marketing campaigns.
Wheel secondary market research is a good starting point for learning about your customers, your best bet is to gain insights that are timely and unique to your target. You can achieve this by conducting survey research, a kind of primary research.
Surveys allow you to inquire into any topic, granting you full control over your market research study. You can create surveys for several purposes, as there are various surveys and different types of survey questions you can ask.
The following lists some of the key survey types to use to increase repeat customer spending:
- The customer service survey
- Bad service can deter customers from making any further purchases from you and this survey gauges your customer service.
- The customer retention survey
- Given that repeat purchases indicate retention, use this survey to help you determine your degree of customer retention.
- The CES survey (Customer Effort Score Survey)
- This survey measures customer effort, the degree or amount of effort that a customer puts into a certain interaction with a company.
- The longitudinal survey
- You can measure the opinions your customers have on your products and services by surveying them over longer periods with this kind of survey.
- The product satisfaction survey
- Especially useful for observing attitudes and opinions of your products, this survey allows you to get direct feedback on the products themselves.
- This helps you improve your product features and innovate new ones.
Fueling Your Business
You should always aim to encourage your target market to make repeat purchases. After all, these are the lifeblood of customer retention, yielding all of its benefits. To spur this shopping phenomenon, you’ll need to understand your customers at a deeper level.
You’ll need a strong market research platform to host your survey campaigns. Such a platform should run on random device engagement (RDE) sampling, so that you can reach customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures in the surveys and will cut back on survey bias.
You should also use a mobile-first platform, as mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not built for them.
The online survey platform you opt for should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, offer a broad range of survey and question types and disqualify low-quality data.
It should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.
This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.
With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to motivate your customers to make repeat purchases.
